coprime_writes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
coprime_writes) wrote2025-06-08 05:02 pm
coprime_writes) wrote2025-06-08 05:02 pm
Entry tags:
Daredevil (TV): Against the Clock (Matt)
Title: Against the Clock
Author:coprime
Fandom: Daredevil
Character: Matt Murdock
Rating / Word Count: G / 2,785 words
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Daredevil belongs to Netflix, Marvel, and/or Disney.
Summary: An automaton waits, alone, abandoned.
Notes: Inspired by a piece of art by Alex Maleev.
Please right click and choose "Save As".
Length: 18:26
~Against the Clock~
He waits.
The person who built him was long gone. Dead, he thought, because what other reason could there be to explain his maker's absence.
He didn't have life on his own, needed another's hands to reach inside him, wind his heart and power his gears, his pulleys, his brain.
Power him.
His maker had taken such care of him, powerful hands gentle as they tuned him. Each patient wind of his springs brought him energy, brought him life. His maker loved him, gifted him special books of raised dots so he could learn all there was to learn in the world.
After his maker left for the last time, he gradually slowed. Wondered where his maker was, what reason there was for taking so long to return. Worried about what was happening to him as his thoughts turned sluggish.
He slowed, his joints going stiff and his limbs difficult to command. He slowed until the day he stopped.
And then he waited.
Another man found him, yanked at his clockwork innards until he jerked awake. The man put a sword in his hands, taught him how to use it and told him he must use it then set him against those the man called enemies.
Gone was his maker's tenderness: the new man cared only for what he could do. Pushed him to his limits and then beyond. His maker had never let him wind down fully, not until the day his maker left, but the new man didn't care. Didn't care how frightening it was for him to feel himself slow and know he could not stop it, wouldn't know what was happening to him until someone wound him back up. This man didn't care if delicate gears broke under rough handling so long as he could still stand, still fight.
The man didn't care, didn't care, didn't care, and all he could do was wait until the man gave him life again.
The man tired of the way he left enemies alive, told him he needed to kill those he faced, that doing so would keep the world safe. But he remembered the gentle love of his maker, whose hands brought life and who would not wish him to use that life to bring death, and he could not.
And so the man left again, this time in disgust, this time for the last time.
As he wound down, not knowing if someone would find him again, he listened to the blood drip from his sword and wondered if his maker would be proud of him.
A woman found him next, light hands a deft touch as they repaired the damage the man had done inside him. The woman coaxed things from his mechanics he had not known possible, and he followed the woman gladly.
He was alive again, vitality making him quick and strong. The woman would not leave him like his maker and the man had.
Together, he and the woman were unstoppable, and he had never felt more energized.
The woman broke rules, he knew, but the woman's coaxing laughter was an enticement he didn't want to resist. Anything to earn the woman's praise, keep the woman's interest.
He couldn't risk being left to wind down again, and...he found he liked the woman's schemes. He liked the danger and the intrigue and the devilry. The woman was fun in a way he'd never experienced before.
Until the day it all came crashing down. The woman brought him to a stranger tied to a chair, told him the stranger had killed his maker and that's why his maker had never returned. How dare this stranger have taken his maker from him! He attacked the man with his fists: he knew where and how to hit to cause the most pain. His sword stayed at his side. He wanted, needed to feel the stranger's blood as it dripped over his fist and down into his mechanics. That blood would be his, payment for what the stranger had taken from him. He danced up to the line of fatal force, kept his gears from turning those last ticks that would turn his blows deadly against a normal human.
The woman cheered him, clapping and laughing like it was a show he was putting on just for the woman's amusement. For the first time, the woman's euphoric laughter grated. This was not a joke; he was not amusement. He paused, still as a statue, one arm holding the stranger's chair off-balance on two legs and the other pulled back in anticipation of yet another punch.
The woman pouted and asked him to finish what he started.
He refused.
He had abandoned much of what his maker had taught him, but this line he would not cross.
Instead, he ran. Away from the woman and the chaos that followed in the woman's wake, away from the clangor of violence that called to his clanking gears.
The woman didn't follow. Of course. He had failed, as he had failed the man. As he had failed his maker.
He was tired, his energy already near depleted when he made his escape. Perhaps this was better; he couldn't disappoint anyone if he was nothing more than an immobile statue. No one could leave him if he was already alone to start.
He didn't have much time, his world shrinking as his mind's processes slowed. He had run to the city where he had spent his days with his maker, the city a memory of happier times as well as an admonishing reminder of the earliest lessons that had been imparted to him. He found a small park, and in that small park a smaller corner with tall trees and overgrown shrubs.
Here was a good spot. Hidden.
With a series of controlled jerks, with the last turns of his gears, he posed himself as a silent sentinel, his back straight and his face uncaring. One last click of the teeth of his gears, and the tip of his sword touched the ground. And then, as the last of the stranger's blood dripped from the finger joints of his hands down his sword, he was still.
And so he waits.
He does not know he waits, but it is the nature of lost things to one day be found.
~
~
The trees and shrubs continue to grow, the park abandoned by an uncaring city. A family moves into one of the small buildings that neighbors the park, turning the ground floor into a hardware store and living themselves on the second. The family's children are warned against playing in the park, their parents citing how unsafe it might be with no one looking after its upkeep.
But the youngest child is a curious scamp, and curiosity overrides care for parental precaution. He sneaks into the park, wearing pants and long sleeves to keep from being scratched by thorns. He wiggles under bushes and swings around trees and imagines himself a swashbuckling pirate or a dashing knight or a sneaky ninja. He works his way to the very back of the park where he finds the old statue, covered in dirt and leaves. He draws his name in the dirt on the statue then co-opts the statue for his adventures, pretending it is a dragon to be fought or the buried treasure he's looking for or a damsel awaiting his daring rescue.
As the child grows older, into a youth, he recognizes the statue as an automaton. People come to his parents' shop looking for parts to repair their small, household automatons, but the youth has never seen an automaton as stately as this one. He cleans off the automaton as best he can, erasing all the many words he's written in its dirt, and trims the branches around the automaton using a set of clippers borrowed from the store.
He works the delicate catch on the automaton's chest, opening its inner workings to his inquisitive eyes. Inside is more complex than anything he's ever seen, levers and pulleys and springs and gears of all sizes, some so tiny he wasn't aware they could be manufactured that small. But everything he can see is so...broken. Twisted and bent and rusted, nothing like the clean workings of a newly manufactured automaton.
He's afraid to reach inside, to touch any of the delicate parts lest he break the automaton further.
He closes the automaton's front panel carefully. This is more complex than anything he's seen before, and he thinks it must be beyond even his dad's abilities to repair. This automaton is unique in the world and abandoned by whoever owned it before, but it has caught the youth's imagination.
It seems lonely, and sad. Frozen in time as it waits, guarding nothing in particular.
The youth decides he wants to fix the automaton.
He returns home and asks his dad to teach him what he knows. He learns the basics of how automatons work, some tricks and secrets to repairing them, but his eagerness soon outstrips his father's expertise. The youth changes to a teen then grows to a young man, adulthood settling on his sturdy shoulders.
He learns from books and videos and classes, eventually going to school to be formally taught and trained. He enters the little park and sits next to his automaton as he studies. The automaton is not his in the sense that he has any authority or formal claim to it, but it is his in the sense that he is the only person in the world now who cares for it. He talks through problems to the automaton and rigs a plastic canopy over their heads to keep them safe from rain.
It takes many years before the young man who used to be a child playing pretend feels confident enough to work on the automaton that was his childhood friend.
He clears a larger space in the park, brings his tools and reference books with him. He needs to move the automaton to his workspace, a side room in his parents' shop where he offers repairs for customers, but before he can do that he needs to make sure that moving his automaton won't damage it further.
He opens panels and takes apart casing and does his best to secure the tiny gears and delicate springs so nothing gets lost in the transfer to a better workspace. As he sticks parts with temporary fixings and pads spaces as best he can, he learns. His automaton is not put together according to the standards he is used to, but the shape of how all these parts work together begins to coalesce in his mind.
When he has done all he can, he clears a table in his small corner of the shop, wheels a dolly into the abandoned park, and brings his automaton home.
Then he can truly get to work.
It takes time. He learns more about automatons and their workings than he'd ever conceived trying to piece together how his automaton works. The totality of everything is difficult to hold in his head, but he understands the smaller components which make up the whole.
What he'd first thought were bent springs and broken wheels turn out to be purposeful adjustments made after construction. He can see how they'd help the automaton, let it move faster and with better precision, but those adjustments are not sustainable. They would have failed at some point, perhaps catastrophically, if the automaton had continued on.
He tries to turn them into safer adjustments, buying parts better designed to fit, and falls back on the original design when he cannot make things work in a way which satisfies him.
Eventually, he is ready. Everything has been fixed and cleaned and lubricated that he can find issue with. The automaton's sword lays on another table, shiny now that he has removed what coated it before.
The only thing left to do is wind the giant mainspring at the heart of the automaton. He reaches with the love of innumerable hours spent on this still figure into its chest.
~
~
Insensible to the world as he was, the automaton remained unaware of the changes around and to him until the power of his rewound mainspring worked its way through all his parts and he blinked open his eyes. He could not see, but that was expected for him.
He was, however, indoors, which was unexpected.
He could hear the buzzing of a single electric light above him and taste the atoms of a hundred different metals and their alloys on his tongue. He could feel the cold of the surface on which he laid and the slight warming in one spot where something aside from him rested.
Outside of the walls of the room he found himself in, he could hear cars and birds and machines and people talking. It was chaotic, and a chaos he'd thought past his graces to hear again.
Beside him stood a person, their hand on the table causing the slight warmth he sensed.
He turned his head towards the person to acknowledge them. He didn't know if they were friend or foe; the man and the woman from before, Stick and Elektra, had had many enemies.
"Hello," the person said. "My name's Foggy. What's yours?"
Foggy. He revised the little he knew about this person—merely bodily statistics and theories at this point—to include a name.
"Matthew," he replied.
"Nice to meet you, Matthew. I'm the one who fixed you up. In my free time, so—"
"Matt," he amended. No one had asked his name in a long time.
"Matt, then!" Foggy said with forced cheer.
"Are you an enemy of The Chaste?" Matt asked. Foggy seemed too soft, too affable, to be dangerous, but The Hand delighted in trickery.
Foggy's heart rate sped up—was his unassuming front actually a front?
"I...what? I can't say I'm particularly chaste myself," he bumbled, "but I wouldn't call myself an enemy of those who are."
Nervous sweat prickled the outline of Foggy in Matt's senses. In his head, Matt re-ran the question he'd asked.
Ah. If Foggy were a civilian oblivious to The Chaste and The Hand and their centuries-long war, then Matt's question became more risqué.
Matt's brows drew in. All the data he could glean from Foggy spoke to his reaction being genuine. "Never mind, I misspoke. Thank you for repairing me, Foggy. What do I owe you in repayment? I have no money, but I can offer you my sword."
Foggy's heart had calmed as Matt had talked. "Matt," he sighed. "You don't owe me anything. You didn't ask me to fix you, I did that on my own."
Matt cocked his head. He was an automaton: after the death of his maker, Jack, his maintenance had always come with a price, the cost paid by his doing what Stick or Elektra asked of him.
Foggy continued. "I thought maybe we could be friends, though? If you decide to stick around Hell's Kitchen for a bit."
Friends. Matt rolled the word around in his head. Perhaps it was fitting to start his life again back in Hell's Kitchen, back where his clockwork existence had originated. Things had gone...wrong when he'd left, and he'd lost his way. Jack would have been disappointed had he lived to see Matt leave with Stick. (Though if he'd lived—if he hadn't left Matt alone and purposeless—Matt would never have needed Stick.)
Jack would have liked Foggy, Matt thought.
Matt hadn't had a friend before, but he could learn. Some of his earliest memories were of pouring over the specialty books Jack had acquired for him, learning everything he could about the world. He had been built, originally, to learn.
Foggy waited on Matt's answer.
"Friends," Matt agreed. "Yes, Foggy, I would enjoy being your friend." How did one acknowledge the start of a new friendship? Matt stuck his hand out, palm flat, in an invitation for a handshake. The traditional gesture for two people coming to an agreement. "Shake on it?"
Foggy shook his head. "Oh no," he said, and Matt wondered what was his misstep.
"No?"
"Nope. For a new friendship, that's gotta be a hug. C'mere, buddy." And he wrapped his warm arms around Matt, his soft body giving way where it pressed against the metal plates of Matt's.
Matt raised his arms and circled them around Foggy's middle. He looked forward to having a friend, to being Foggy's friend. He could make better choices this time, starting with this one. And maybe this time he wouldn't be left alone.
Author:
coprimeFandom: Daredevil
Character: Matt Murdock
Rating / Word Count: G / 2,785 words
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Daredevil belongs to Netflix, Marvel, and/or Disney.
Summary: An automaton waits, alone, abandoned.
Notes: Inspired by a piece of art by Alex Maleev.
Click to see the inspiring art
Click here for podfic version.
Download: MP3 (17.7MB) | (Alternate DL)Please right click and choose "Save As".
Length: 18:26
~Against the Clock~
He waits.
The person who built him was long gone. Dead, he thought, because what other reason could there be to explain his maker's absence.
He didn't have life on his own, needed another's hands to reach inside him, wind his heart and power his gears, his pulleys, his brain.
Power him.
His maker had taken such care of him, powerful hands gentle as they tuned him. Each patient wind of his springs brought him energy, brought him life. His maker loved him, gifted him special books of raised dots so he could learn all there was to learn in the world.
After his maker left for the last time, he gradually slowed. Wondered where his maker was, what reason there was for taking so long to return. Worried about what was happening to him as his thoughts turned sluggish.
He slowed, his joints going stiff and his limbs difficult to command. He slowed until the day he stopped.
And then he waited.
Another man found him, yanked at his clockwork innards until he jerked awake. The man put a sword in his hands, taught him how to use it and told him he must use it then set him against those the man called enemies.
Gone was his maker's tenderness: the new man cared only for what he could do. Pushed him to his limits and then beyond. His maker had never let him wind down fully, not until the day his maker left, but the new man didn't care. Didn't care how frightening it was for him to feel himself slow and know he could not stop it, wouldn't know what was happening to him until someone wound him back up. This man didn't care if delicate gears broke under rough handling so long as he could still stand, still fight.
The man didn't care, didn't care, didn't care, and all he could do was wait until the man gave him life again.
The man tired of the way he left enemies alive, told him he needed to kill those he faced, that doing so would keep the world safe. But he remembered the gentle love of his maker, whose hands brought life and who would not wish him to use that life to bring death, and he could not.
And so the man left again, this time in disgust, this time for the last time.
As he wound down, not knowing if someone would find him again, he listened to the blood drip from his sword and wondered if his maker would be proud of him.
A woman found him next, light hands a deft touch as they repaired the damage the man had done inside him. The woman coaxed things from his mechanics he had not known possible, and he followed the woman gladly.
He was alive again, vitality making him quick and strong. The woman would not leave him like his maker and the man had.
Together, he and the woman were unstoppable, and he had never felt more energized.
The woman broke rules, he knew, but the woman's coaxing laughter was an enticement he didn't want to resist. Anything to earn the woman's praise, keep the woman's interest.
He couldn't risk being left to wind down again, and...he found he liked the woman's schemes. He liked the danger and the intrigue and the devilry. The woman was fun in a way he'd never experienced before.
Until the day it all came crashing down. The woman brought him to a stranger tied to a chair, told him the stranger had killed his maker and that's why his maker had never returned. How dare this stranger have taken his maker from him! He attacked the man with his fists: he knew where and how to hit to cause the most pain. His sword stayed at his side. He wanted, needed to feel the stranger's blood as it dripped over his fist and down into his mechanics. That blood would be his, payment for what the stranger had taken from him. He danced up to the line of fatal force, kept his gears from turning those last ticks that would turn his blows deadly against a normal human.
The woman cheered him, clapping and laughing like it was a show he was putting on just for the woman's amusement. For the first time, the woman's euphoric laughter grated. This was not a joke; he was not amusement. He paused, still as a statue, one arm holding the stranger's chair off-balance on two legs and the other pulled back in anticipation of yet another punch.
The woman pouted and asked him to finish what he started.
He refused.
He had abandoned much of what his maker had taught him, but this line he would not cross.
Instead, he ran. Away from the woman and the chaos that followed in the woman's wake, away from the clangor of violence that called to his clanking gears.
The woman didn't follow. Of course. He had failed, as he had failed the man. As he had failed his maker.
He was tired, his energy already near depleted when he made his escape. Perhaps this was better; he couldn't disappoint anyone if he was nothing more than an immobile statue. No one could leave him if he was already alone to start.
He didn't have much time, his world shrinking as his mind's processes slowed. He had run to the city where he had spent his days with his maker, the city a memory of happier times as well as an admonishing reminder of the earliest lessons that had been imparted to him. He found a small park, and in that small park a smaller corner with tall trees and overgrown shrubs.
Here was a good spot. Hidden.
With a series of controlled jerks, with the last turns of his gears, he posed himself as a silent sentinel, his back straight and his face uncaring. One last click of the teeth of his gears, and the tip of his sword touched the ground. And then, as the last of the stranger's blood dripped from the finger joints of his hands down his sword, he was still.
And so he waits.
He does not know he waits, but it is the nature of lost things to one day be found.
The trees and shrubs continue to grow, the park abandoned by an uncaring city. A family moves into one of the small buildings that neighbors the park, turning the ground floor into a hardware store and living themselves on the second. The family's children are warned against playing in the park, their parents citing how unsafe it might be with no one looking after its upkeep.
But the youngest child is a curious scamp, and curiosity overrides care for parental precaution. He sneaks into the park, wearing pants and long sleeves to keep from being scratched by thorns. He wiggles under bushes and swings around trees and imagines himself a swashbuckling pirate or a dashing knight or a sneaky ninja. He works his way to the very back of the park where he finds the old statue, covered in dirt and leaves. He draws his name in the dirt on the statue then co-opts the statue for his adventures, pretending it is a dragon to be fought or the buried treasure he's looking for or a damsel awaiting his daring rescue.
As the child grows older, into a youth, he recognizes the statue as an automaton. People come to his parents' shop looking for parts to repair their small, household automatons, but the youth has never seen an automaton as stately as this one. He cleans off the automaton as best he can, erasing all the many words he's written in its dirt, and trims the branches around the automaton using a set of clippers borrowed from the store.
He works the delicate catch on the automaton's chest, opening its inner workings to his inquisitive eyes. Inside is more complex than anything he's ever seen, levers and pulleys and springs and gears of all sizes, some so tiny he wasn't aware they could be manufactured that small. But everything he can see is so...broken. Twisted and bent and rusted, nothing like the clean workings of a newly manufactured automaton.
He's afraid to reach inside, to touch any of the delicate parts lest he break the automaton further.
He closes the automaton's front panel carefully. This is more complex than anything he's seen before, and he thinks it must be beyond even his dad's abilities to repair. This automaton is unique in the world and abandoned by whoever owned it before, but it has caught the youth's imagination.
It seems lonely, and sad. Frozen in time as it waits, guarding nothing in particular.
The youth decides he wants to fix the automaton.
He returns home and asks his dad to teach him what he knows. He learns the basics of how automatons work, some tricks and secrets to repairing them, but his eagerness soon outstrips his father's expertise. The youth changes to a teen then grows to a young man, adulthood settling on his sturdy shoulders.
He learns from books and videos and classes, eventually going to school to be formally taught and trained. He enters the little park and sits next to his automaton as he studies. The automaton is not his in the sense that he has any authority or formal claim to it, but it is his in the sense that he is the only person in the world now who cares for it. He talks through problems to the automaton and rigs a plastic canopy over their heads to keep them safe from rain.
It takes many years before the young man who used to be a child playing pretend feels confident enough to work on the automaton that was his childhood friend.
He clears a larger space in the park, brings his tools and reference books with him. He needs to move the automaton to his workspace, a side room in his parents' shop where he offers repairs for customers, but before he can do that he needs to make sure that moving his automaton won't damage it further.
He opens panels and takes apart casing and does his best to secure the tiny gears and delicate springs so nothing gets lost in the transfer to a better workspace. As he sticks parts with temporary fixings and pads spaces as best he can, he learns. His automaton is not put together according to the standards he is used to, but the shape of how all these parts work together begins to coalesce in his mind.
When he has done all he can, he clears a table in his small corner of the shop, wheels a dolly into the abandoned park, and brings his automaton home.
Then he can truly get to work.
It takes time. He learns more about automatons and their workings than he'd ever conceived trying to piece together how his automaton works. The totality of everything is difficult to hold in his head, but he understands the smaller components which make up the whole.
What he'd first thought were bent springs and broken wheels turn out to be purposeful adjustments made after construction. He can see how they'd help the automaton, let it move faster and with better precision, but those adjustments are not sustainable. They would have failed at some point, perhaps catastrophically, if the automaton had continued on.
He tries to turn them into safer adjustments, buying parts better designed to fit, and falls back on the original design when he cannot make things work in a way which satisfies him.
Eventually, he is ready. Everything has been fixed and cleaned and lubricated that he can find issue with. The automaton's sword lays on another table, shiny now that he has removed what coated it before.
The only thing left to do is wind the giant mainspring at the heart of the automaton. He reaches with the love of innumerable hours spent on this still figure into its chest.
Insensible to the world as he was, the automaton remained unaware of the changes around and to him until the power of his rewound mainspring worked its way through all his parts and he blinked open his eyes. He could not see, but that was expected for him.
He was, however, indoors, which was unexpected.
He could hear the buzzing of a single electric light above him and taste the atoms of a hundred different metals and their alloys on his tongue. He could feel the cold of the surface on which he laid and the slight warming in one spot where something aside from him rested.
Outside of the walls of the room he found himself in, he could hear cars and birds and machines and people talking. It was chaotic, and a chaos he'd thought past his graces to hear again.
Beside him stood a person, their hand on the table causing the slight warmth he sensed.
He turned his head towards the person to acknowledge them. He didn't know if they were friend or foe; the man and the woman from before, Stick and Elektra, had had many enemies.
"Hello," the person said. "My name's Foggy. What's yours?"
Foggy. He revised the little he knew about this person—merely bodily statistics and theories at this point—to include a name.
"Matthew," he replied.
"Nice to meet you, Matthew. I'm the one who fixed you up. In my free time, so—"
"Matt," he amended. No one had asked his name in a long time.
"Matt, then!" Foggy said with forced cheer.
"Are you an enemy of The Chaste?" Matt asked. Foggy seemed too soft, too affable, to be dangerous, but The Hand delighted in trickery.
Foggy's heart rate sped up—was his unassuming front actually a front?
"I...what? I can't say I'm particularly chaste myself," he bumbled, "but I wouldn't call myself an enemy of those who are."
Nervous sweat prickled the outline of Foggy in Matt's senses. In his head, Matt re-ran the question he'd asked.
Ah. If Foggy were a civilian oblivious to The Chaste and The Hand and their centuries-long war, then Matt's question became more risqué.
Matt's brows drew in. All the data he could glean from Foggy spoke to his reaction being genuine. "Never mind, I misspoke. Thank you for repairing me, Foggy. What do I owe you in repayment? I have no money, but I can offer you my sword."
Foggy's heart had calmed as Matt had talked. "Matt," he sighed. "You don't owe me anything. You didn't ask me to fix you, I did that on my own."
Matt cocked his head. He was an automaton: after the death of his maker, Jack, his maintenance had always come with a price, the cost paid by his doing what Stick or Elektra asked of him.
Foggy continued. "I thought maybe we could be friends, though? If you decide to stick around Hell's Kitchen for a bit."
Friends. Matt rolled the word around in his head. Perhaps it was fitting to start his life again back in Hell's Kitchen, back where his clockwork existence had originated. Things had gone...wrong when he'd left, and he'd lost his way. Jack would have been disappointed had he lived to see Matt leave with Stick. (Though if he'd lived—if he hadn't left Matt alone and purposeless—Matt would never have needed Stick.)
Jack would have liked Foggy, Matt thought.
Matt hadn't had a friend before, but he could learn. Some of his earliest memories were of pouring over the specialty books Jack had acquired for him, learning everything he could about the world. He had been built, originally, to learn.
Foggy waited on Matt's answer.
"Friends," Matt agreed. "Yes, Foggy, I would enjoy being your friend." How did one acknowledge the start of a new friendship? Matt stuck his hand out, palm flat, in an invitation for a handshake. The traditional gesture for two people coming to an agreement. "Shake on it?"
Foggy shook his head. "Oh no," he said, and Matt wondered what was his misstep.
"No?"
"Nope. For a new friendship, that's gotta be a hug. C'mere, buddy." And he wrapped his warm arms around Matt, his soft body giving way where it pressed against the metal plates of Matt's.
Matt raised his arms and circled them around Foggy's middle. He looked forward to having a friend, to being Foggy's friend. He could make better choices this time, starting with this one. And maybe this time he wouldn't be left alone.