Chapter Text
On the first day at his new school, four weeks after his dad’s job uproots, relocates, and, in Ned’s opinion, pretty much completely screws over the entire Leeds family, Ned fakes sick for the first time in his nine short years of life.
“I think it’s a subarachnoid hemorrhage,” he informs Ms. Belnap, with a cough into his elbow and as pitifully as he can manage.
Ms. Belnap tilts her head to the left and squints at him. Then she tilts it to the right. Then she checks her roll, as if there might be some instructions printed there next to the name Edward Leeds regarding what to do in the event that one of your twenty-eight third graders sidles up to your desk and politely claims they’re having a brain aneurysm.
Ms. Belnap is young. It’s probably her first year teaching, if the way she fumbles for a response to his obvious lie and wrings her hands in concern is any indication. Does Ned think he can make it to the end of the day? It would really make her so very happy if Ned could stick it out until the bell rings. Ned wouldn’t want to miss centers, would he?
No, Ned supposes he wouldn’t.
So as a favor to Ms. Belnap, he eats his lunch. He goes to recess. He finds the area of every rectangle on his assignment before most of the kids around him have gotten past number two and when it’s time to go home, he waves goodbye to his teacher and takes his mother’s hand, and then he gets up and does it all again the next day.
Doesn’t remember which center he ends up choosing, though.
Funny, isn’t it?
How some memories just kind of fade away.
---
“Absolutely not.” Foggy Nelson shakes his head so violently it looks painful. He stops, turning towards his partner, who’s regarding Ned much more pensively. “Look at me, Matt. Look into my eyes, I don’t care if you can see them. I can see your little mind-gears turning, and I need them to come to an immediate stop, hear me? Absolutely. Not.”
Ned’s barely even given them his name.
“Did these men threaten you?” Matt Murdock asks Ned, calmly. His hands are folded neatly one on top of the other, glasses perched halfway down his nose. “Physically or otherwise?”
“Is what we would ask,” Foggy cuts in, “If we were able to help. Unfortunately, we’re booked out for the foreseeable future. Millions of morons blowing their neighbors’ thumbs off with fireworks this time of year. Small claims suits coming out our--”
“Excuse him,” Matt raises his voice a fraction of a decibel. “He’s forgotten that Nelson and Murdock promise a fifteen minute legal consultation, free of charge, before we even--” he elbows Foggy in the ribs. It’s not subtle. “-- consider accepting or rejecting a potential client.”
“He didn’t forget,” Foggy hisses, immediately. “He just values his damn life, Murdock. And if we’re going to talk selective memory, there are still spiderwebs in our ceiling fan-- ”
“They’ll dissolve--”
“They goddamn better--”
“Does this count?” Ned wonders, aloud. Both men fall silent. “Like, as part of my fifteen minutes?”
Matt clears his throat. Foggy looks mildly abashed. But they both shut up, which is good, because Ned is starting to have some serious doubts about MJ’s “guy who helped her out with a protest thing once.”
Ned didn’t ask about the protest thing. When MJ smiles all fondly like that, he’s never quite sure he wants to know.
Matt inclines his head, slightly. “Our apologies, Mr. Leeds,” And, “Why don’t you walk us through it? From the top.”
The top.
Right.
If only Ned had any idea where the fuck that was.
---
He thinks the whole thing starts like this:
Ned Leeds, soon-to-be-junior at MIT, is friends with some of the smartest people in the fucking world.
Which-- it’s awesome, right? It’s everything Ned has ever wanted, it’s a generous helping of humble pie on a near-daily basis, it’s all these people with dreams of changing the world and the type of minds that give them a snowball’s chance of actually doing so.
Ned likes to think he’s an approachable guy. He must be, because friends of friends tend to mosey up to him and without so much as a hello say shit like, “ Leeds, check out this iPad that runs on banana peels,” or “ they’re saying Williams’ arc reactor might actually fucking work,” or “biochem needs a scraper for a new project, we gave them your name.”
They say it, and Ned hears it, and none of it matters in the grand scheme of things because for every MIT start-up that makes it to Forbes Thirty Under Thirty there are sixty that fail, and fruit-powered electronics are small potatoes in a world where men are made of iron and artificially intelligent robots can all but level small nations if you just poke them hard enough.
Talk, that’s all any of it is. Ned knows it. Ned lives it.
Except.
Except sometimes, sometimes they knock on his door at eleven p.m., hoods over their heads and fingers tapping nervous rhythms against their arms.
Sometimes, they say something like, “sixteen hospitalizations this year,” or “twelve of them are kids, Ned,” or, “three brand-new carcinogens and they’re, they’re not going to even fucking acknowledge it, much less shut the damn thing down--”
Sometimes, those smart fucking friends have the type of brains that are more of a curse than a blessing.
“I don’t know what else to do,” they whisper, eyes on his and drooping with the type of shadows that take months to nurture. “They’re never going to do a damn thing, otherwise. They don’t care. Not until it’s fucking-- economical. Right?”
And Ned says, honestly, “I don’t know.”
And the person chokes on a sob, and they bury their face in his shoulder, and they say in a voice that breaks like glass on asphalt, “people are going to die. ”
They say, “I can’t just sit on this, Ned.”
They say, “I don’t know what to fucking do, Ned.”
And Ned holds them up because their legs are too weak for it, because that’s what he’s good at, because that’s what he does. Others do the grunt work. Ned picks up their pieces.
Pieces that need picking up because sometimes, big corporations make big, hellishly expensive mistakes, and leave their communities holding the bag.
Sometimes good, hard-working folks are getting sick, and doctors can’t make heads or tails of why.
Sometimes, it’s all going down only twenty minutes from home, and no one can do a damn thing about it.
Except, Ned suddenly realizes, arms full of the broken glass that is one of those smart fucking friends, maybe someone could.
Except, Ned realizes, maybe someone can.
And somehow, he ends up with a hard drive in his hand.
---
“So,” Foggy says, “this girl.”
“Ina,” Ned corrects, quickly. Foggy waves him off.
“Her research turns up something-- bad--”
Matt snorts, darkly. “They’re poisoning kids, buddy.”
“Allegedly,” Foggy says, already sounding tired. “They are allegedly-- ”
“Causing cancer,” Ned nods. “For, like, a lot of the residents. Not just kids.” He glances at Foggy, then tacks on, “Allegedly. But, uh-- it’s good research? She’s very-- um. Good. At what she does. Super-- smart.”
For some god-forsaken reason, Matt and Foggy choose this moment to go dead silent. Devastatingly, Ned can feel his cheeks heating up. He can practically hear MJ cackling at him from 200 miles away, because her uncanny ability to lovingly kick him while he’s down transcends both space and time. He clears his throat.
“Ina’s advisor is the one who started the project, right?” he explains. “His neighbors have this niece who gets sick, they swear up and down something’s up, so he goes and runs some tests around the girl’s house. Numbers come back and they’re,” he shrugs,”...weird.”
“So he does some more digging,” Matt supplies. “Brings his lab assistant along.”
Ned nods. “She gets in deep. They both do.”
“And the advisor didn’t want his name on the report?” Matt sounds skeptical. “Is that common?”
Ned swallows. “The advisor’s dead, man.”
The atmosphere in the tiny office grows somber.
Yeah. That had been a shit funeral. More expensive people in one room than Ned had ever seen in his life. One of Ina’s hands in his, the other in MJ’s. Ned wishes she would look at him. He wishes she would look at anything.
“Naturalish causes,” he tacks on, when he remembers himself. “He was old, got really sick. Not cancer. Pneumonia, or something.”
“Please tell me,” Foggy begs like he’s kneeling before the judgment seat, eyes closed and heels of his hands pressed into them, “that this corporation is practically unheard of. That they’re private. Small. Preferably teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. One breath away from the whole card tower falling over.”
Oh, buddy. Ned scratches his nose. “Not…quite?”
“It’s Viastone,” Matt answers for him, brow furrowed. “Correct?”
Round peg, round hole.
Ned blinks. The sound Foggy bleats out is reminiscent of a dead man re-animated. Ned has to believe he’s a better salesman of his craft to other clients, because these guys have like, 4.75 stars on Yelp.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, exactly, that’s— how did you…?”
Matt just frowns, seemingly lost in thought. “The water treatment facility.”
That’s. What?
“Yes?” Ned frowns. “Did you read the report? It’s feeling like you read the report.”
“I will.” Matt readjusts his posture, giving Ned a small smile. “So. Viastone’s a big name. Ina’s a small one, without her advisor.”
“They’ve got pull at school,” Ned says, the tiniest bit desperately. He needs them to get it. That this wasn’t just some half-assed decision by a couple of kids suffering from a bad case of self-diagnosed altruism. “They could’ve got her scholarship cut. Blacklisted her from getting hired after graduation. We had to be smart about it.”
“This research was secret.”
“Only Ina and Professor Prashad had any idea. This isn’t just, poor air quality, or something. It’s new shit. All over that neighborhood, pumped straight from the treatment center. Water, food, their fucking gardens-- and it’s spreading. Too fast. I only found out…”
After.
Broken glass in his arms.
“…a few weeks ago.”
Matt leans back in his chair, considering. Foggy’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling, like he’s about to start praying out loud and isn’t expecting an answer.
“So Miss Carbrera’s name can’t be attached,” Matt sums up, “but you need a byline for credibility. So you just-- what, slap the dead guy’s name on it and dump everything online?”
The way Matt says it, you’d think Ned wrapped this one up in a single lunch break. Yeah, whatever, I’ll leak a couple of highly classified documents concerning a multi-million dollar corporation’s singular effect on childhood cancer rates in the state of New York this weekend. Don’t even worry about asking next time, honestly.
You’d think it didn’t take weeks of preparation, a million proxy servers and hours upon hours of encryption work. That there weren’t late nights turned to early mornings spent perched in cramped bars, cafes, and every 24-hour diner located within an hour of Cambridge, all in the name of public Wi-Fi and untraceable links. Like his back doesn’t still ache with the tension of entire weekends spent camped on that same damn chair in the comp lab.
The way Matt says it, it’s like Ned had a choice. But he’s only got six minutes left. So—
“I mean,” he shrugs, “pretty much.”
---
“ There are people on our couch,” MJ’s voice is flat through the phone. “I don’t like dudes in our house, Ned.”
“I’m a dude,” Ned argues.
“Not really,” MJ dismisses, with no further explanation. “They look expensive.”
His heart does a little off-beat. “Expensive?”
“Suits. Briefcases. Wolf of Wall Street wannabes.”
“You hate that movie.”
“My opinion on a fucking ass movie doesn’t remove the Rolexes from their wrists, girlfriend.”
“Why’d you let them in?” Ned hisses. He has this terrible, terrible feeling in his stomach. But there’s… there’s no way, right?
Ned’s good. One of the best. And that’s not even grandstanding-- it’s, like, a verifiable fact? Check his class rank, or his recruiting offers. An insane amount of luck would be required for that leak to be tracked to him, plus some pretty damn good social engineering, and Ned doesn’t leave his logins lying around on sticky notes or saved in password protectors. He’s-- careful. Careful enough to not get caught.
And it’s not like Ina’s report is illegal, besides. It’s just. Convincingly incriminating and unreplicated research claiming Viastone’s direct culpability in the slow and painful deaths of eleven innocent New York citizens over the last six years.
Ned can’t imagine any possible reason why Viastone would have a problem with that.
“I thought they were from the school,” MJ hisses right back. “I thought you got some sort of award. I was going to get you flowers.”
“There’s still time,” Ned says, only half listening. God, he’s going to go to prison, isn’t he? Maybe through some gift from God, his Lola won’t find out and he’ll actually live to see his sentence through. “Hey, MJ?”
“ Babe?”
“You think they let me bring my moisturizer to the clink?”
MJ thinks about it. “I’ll bake it into a cake for you. Sneak it past security.”
“Thanks,” Ned croaks, through a throat drier than the Sahara in August. His front door has never looked more like a portal to hell. He stops in front of it. “Promise you’ll wait for me?”
“You’ll find a hotter prison wife and break my heart. I’ve been burned by your kind before, Edward.”
“Baby, don’t be like that.”
MJ snorts. Her voice drops, slightly. Takes on an infinitesimally serious note. “Hey. You know it’s me and you, Leeds. Till the end of the fucking world, right?”
They’ve already been there. Done that. Did a shoddy job stitching themselves back together because there was never quite enough thread to go around, in the months and years after.
Still isn’t, if Ned’s honest with himself.
“Right,” he exhales. “Till the end of the fucking world.”
MJ will check on his parents. On his Lola. She’s the real type of loyal, the Han and Chewbacca kind of loyal, the I’ve got two tickets to Mexico and absolutely zero questions kind of loyal, right up until the situation pertains even adjacently to his failure of a love life, at which point she immediately becomes an enemy of the state. Consider her armed and dangerous.
Neither of them remember how it started, but anyone on campus can tell you that Jones and Leeds are ride or die. Till the end of the fucking world.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
MJ says it like a mantra. Like it changes anything.
“Right,” Ned repeats, hand on the knob, heart in his knees.
His tongue feels a little heavy with the weight of the lie.
---
Matt immediately asks for his phone. Warily, Ned surrenders it. This is the guy who helped MJ with that protest thing, after all. And if you can’t trust that guy, who can you trust?
“Foggy’s going to delete that call from your history,” Matt explains, which doesn’t really explain anything at all.
“That’s what I would do,” Foggy says, “if I didn’t care about keeping my job. And maybe,” he stresses, “if we were taking this case. Which,” he emphasizes even more emphatically with his hands, “we are not doing.”
Why the fuck is Ned here, then?
“Deleting a call log isn’t illegal,” Matt expertly dodges around half Foggy’s rebuttal. He taps the notepad in front of him. “Write your passcode.”
Ned should not do that. But does. See previous comments about protest-guy.
“It’s also… still accessible?” he says, weakly, setting down the pen. “Even if it gets deleted. There are still records.”
Matt smiles, ruefully. “No reason to make it easier for Viastone’s sharks. Attorneys are shit with technology.”
“I resent that remark,” Foggy mutters, actively trying and failing to type the passcode into the phone twice before successfully entering the sequence. “It’s not my fault all our shit was already outdated by ‘98. Technology is shit with me. ”
“What did they tell you?” Matt asks. “The Viastone reps.”
Ned starts, then hesitates.
Because isn’t that the fucking question.
---
MJ slams her phone down on the table between them all, red recording symbol glaring up more obviously than a bloodstain on a stark white shirt.
“Go ahead,” she invites the suit-clad agents, sweet as sugar.
And what follows is… absolutely nothing.
---
The Viastone lawyers say it’s good to meet him.
They say that Viastone has a vested interest in this school, that they regularly check in on MIT’s best and brightest, all while MJ sits next to him with lips pursed and scholarships practically falling out of her ears.
So. Complete bullshit, basically.
They say that they were sorry to hear about the passing of Dr. Prashad. They say it like Ned knew him. They say it like he had a reason to.
They say, “What a bright future,” with lips that curl like the vocalization of the praise is painful.
They say, “Have a good break,” and then shake his hand so hard that the grip of it leaves visible bruises on his forearm.
They say, “We’ll be in touch,” and Ned gets the message loud and clear.
---
“Oh, thank God.” Foggy practically collapses back into his chair. He’s giddy. “This isn’t a case. This is so much less than a case. Not even you can pull a demonstration of unwelcome conduct from this, Matty boy.”
Ouch. Ned thinks. He only understood about thirty percent of those words in that order.
Foggy turns to Ned, attempting a sober expression. It’s undercut by the relief etched into his features. “We’re sorry for what you’ve been through, Mr. Leeds. This all sounds very-- taxing. Mentally.”
Ned hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since he got back to the city for the summer. His Lola heard him puttering around in the kitchen last night and thought he was a ghost. She almost hit him with a flower pot. He’s still got soil in his hair.
It was about then, staring down a mouthful of Marigolds, that Ned decided it might be time to consult a professional.
Although, if he’s being honest, he’s still not quite sure if these guys count.
“You said it was Edward Leeds,” Matt says, after a moment of thought and seemingly out of the blue. “But you go by Ned. Scholarship at MIT. Moved to Queens what, nine years ago?”
“Uh-- ten,” Ned says, slowly. “I think.”
“High school?”
“Midtown. It’s a tech school. Is this… relevant?”
For some reason, Foggy looks pained again. All at once, Matt stands, dragging Foggy with him by the elbow.
“We’ll have to-- consult,” Matt says. “Hang tight.”
“We don’t need to consult,” Foggy is already hissing, following Matt more than leading him from the room. “There’s no true threat here, Matt. An acknowledgement might be taken as an admission of guilt, not to mention the fact that he will kill us--”
The rest of the words are swallowed by the door to the adjoining office slamming shut.
Huh.
Ned thought he’d been rather civil, all things considered.
---
Matt and Foggy converse (read: argue loud enough that the tail ends of heated sentences slip their way through the cracks in the door) for longer than Ned would’ve predicted necessary. When they finally emerge, Foggy is the one with a smooth brow, and Matt’s lips are pursed.
In other words, things aren’t looking good for Team Leeds.
They sit. Foggy clears his throat.
“There’s nothing we can do here,” Matt admits after an elbow to the bicep, face twisting like he’d rather take a hole to the head than admit one iota of past incorrectness. “We apologize, Mr. Leeds.”
Ned’s heart falls.
Because it wasn’t like he expected there to be a real case, obviously. A couple of suits knocking down his door with a handshake that felt like a threat, only to squint at him a little funny and take their leave was never going to be the kind of issue that could be litigated, and Ned’s not-- nor has he ever been-- dumb enough to think otherwise.
But he can admit that he hoped there would be something. Some form or another of legal protection against future retaliation for himself or Ina, now that it was clear Viastone was less onto them and more hiding under their beds . Enough that he could get a little more sleep, maybe. Stop worrying about taking a terracotta planter of flowers to the cranium at 3 a.m.
“Was that painful?” Foggy asks Matt. Then, catching sight of Ned’s expression, “Sorry.” He clears his throat again. “We’re sympathetic to the position you’re in,” he says, face shifting into a professional mask that aligns Ned’s perception of him a little better with those 4.75 stars. “And I’m serious, Mr. Leeds. If Viastone reaches out again, feel free to forward any communications and we’ll see what we can do. It was smart of your friend to record. Keep that habit.”
“So that’s it?” Ned asks, voice flat. “Nothing you can do? We just have to wait until one of us ends up in a ditch?”
Foggy winces. Matt’s face is impassive. “Yes,” he says bluntly. “Consider giving all ditches and other trenches a wide berth for the next few months.” He reaches across the table and feels for the small holder of business cards before handing two to Ned. “One for Miss Cabrera.”
Ned hesitates for a moment before taking it, just for the principle of the thing.
“There’s one more thing,” Matt calls, after Ned has shouldered his backpack and shuffled his way back towards the door. What a monumental waste of his time. He should’ve gotten his Lola’s car cleaned, like he told her he was going to. He should’ve thrown that hard drive in the garbage can the second Ina put it in his hand.
“Yes, counselor?”
“Viastone. This neighborhood. The-- contamination.”
Find it, dude. You got this.
Ned nods, slowly.
“There’s another option.”
“You just said there were no options,” Ned frowns. “Like, just barely.” His eyes find Foggy. “He said there were no options, right?”
“This idea is very bad,” Foggy says, helpfully. “It barely counts as an option.”
“We could go on offense,” Matt cuts in, cuts Foggy off. “We’d need Miss Cabrera’s help, obviously, but--”
Ned raises a hand. He’s annoyed he already put his backpack on. He has so many books in here. “Offense?” he asks.
Foggy sighs. “He means sue Viastone. On behalf of the residents.”
Ned blinks once. Twice. “That sounds like. A really bad idea.”
“Congrats, kid,” Foggy grumbles. “You’re now one of the two sane people in this office.”
“It’s a terrible idea,” Matt agrees. “Little to no chance of success. Ditches for all of us, if things go awry.”
“He loves the idea,” Foggy says to Ned, seriously. “He gets off on the thought of a target painted on his back.”
“It’s been a slow month,” admits Matt, not denying it.
Ned rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and tries to grapple with the concept of this.
He imagines taking Viastone to court. Little baby Jenny, or Jackie, or whatever the fuck that girl’s name had been getting up on the stand, oxygen tube in her nose and tiny fingers trembling. The Viastone lawyer taking them, squeezing them hard enough they crack.
Ina, jaw set like a glass broken and superglued together again. MJ, egging him on as always, but with a storm in her eyes.
Ned knows the neighborhood where Dr. Prashad’s research had been. MJ’s family was from close to there, back in the day. They can’t afford lawyers. They can barely afford their car payments.
His Lola’s heart is weak. Ned went to the principal’s office once for some reason he can’t remember back in tenth grade and she’d clutched at her chest the whole time, joked that you’ll give me a real attack one day, crazy child.
Yeah, Ned can’t do that.
“Thank God,” Foggy says, again. He’s cursing under his breath at the desktop on the table next to him, something about we actually paid the damn internet bill, act like it. Again, Ned can’t help but wonder about those 4.75 stars.
“I could-- uh, ask a few of the residents, though?” he offers, as an afterthought. Because this really isn’t his fight, at the end of the day. His kid doesn’t have a fucking oxygen tube up her nose. “Let you know?”
“We’d appreciate that,” Matt says, quickly.
“Thing’s broken,” Foggy announces to the room at large, smacking a hand on the desk next to the desktop. “Where’s Karen when you need her?”
“Doing her real job. That pays her real money.”
“We paid her real money.”
“Her Christmas bonus was a pound of ham.”
“That was prime Spanish,” Foggy grumbles. “Aged fourteen months.”
Ned really doesn’t understand lawyers. And he also definitely knows what’s up with that computer, based on the shiny new router buzzing on top of the filing cabinet. But his fifteen minutes are up, and he’s just leaving, so why would he--
“Here,” he sighs, gently nudging Foggy out of the way of the computer. “Give me that, you probably just…need…”
Device manager, network adapters, where--
Ah.
“Yeah. You’ve gotta update your network driver,” he says, taking a step back. “Probably for everything. Looks like it’s been…a while.”
Matt snorts.
“He goes to MIT,” Foggy says, defensively. “You realize that, right? MI-fuckin’-T. ”
Ned’s Lola has never needed help updating her network driver. He elects not to mention this.
“Maybe you can write me an instruction booklet,” Foggy says, helplessly, exactly seven minutes and zero updated drivers later. Ned has never seen a man right click the mouse and hit the power button at the same time. It would be impressive, if it wasn’t so sad.
“Or,” Matt says, face inexpressive, “better yet, join the team.”
What.
“What,” says Foggy, flatly.
Matt shrugs. “You said yourself that it’s an outdated system. Real security hazard, I’m guessing. We could use some updates.”
“You could,” Ned says, immediately, because this place looks like how he imagines the eighties probably did, minus the neon. “This can’t be legal for a law firm. Your password is the same as your username.” Which is written on a sticky note, which is barely clinging to the desk. And, “I already have a job.”
It’s true. Matt cocks his head.
“It’s a good job,” Ned says, defensively.
Also true.
“I like my job.”
Heartbreakingly false. Matt smirks, for some reason.
“Matthew,” Foggy says, in a carefully controlled voice, “a word?”
Not this again. Ned raises his eyes heavenward. His hand is on the doorknob.
“Feel free to poke around a little bit,” Matt offers.
“For the love of God,” Foggy implores, “do not touch anything.”
Ned says, again, because it feels relevant, “I don’t need a new job.”
Then the office door slams shut and, for some reason, his stupid hand still doesn’t twist the knob.
---
Matt’s office is not nearly as soundproof as he and Foggy seem to think it is. Ned knows this because Foggy calls Matt a dumbass three different times throughout their twelve minutes spent discussing his apparent crime of an offer. Then he loudly announces he needs a drink, Jesus Christ.
4.75 stars, these guys. Make it make sense.
Ned catches the term Doctor Phil at least three times. Have a heart, Fogs, twice. Stupid fucking idea right before the door swings back open, this time revealing a triumphant Matt Murdock and pale-looking Foggy Nelson.
They immediately offer him the job. For real, this time. Money and weekends and the whole enchilada. They promise he’ll be making a difference. They promise they’re closed on all major holidays.
Ned thinks, a little traitorously, that maybe he’s a little tired of making a difference. He spent a month prepping for that Viastone file to be dropped, and look where it got him. Sitting in a law consultation scared silly, with any evidence of the research that was the reason for this whole damn season all but scrubbed from the ‘net. Took Viastone fewer than two days to erase every last trace. Took Ned sixty bucks just to fill his gas tank up and get back to the city.
But these guys helped MJ out with that protest thing, that one time. And Matt clearly went to bat for him, for reasons that Ned has chalked up to lawyers being weird.
And the truth is, Ned didn’t choose MI-fuckin’-T just to fuck off to Fifth Avenue come graduation.
He chose MIT to pay it forward. He chose it so he could come back home.
When we help someone, we help everyone.
Nelson and Murdock help a lot of someones, as it turns out. Ned knows. He read the Yelp reviews.
4.75 stars.
So he says, as he turns the doorknob. “I’ll think about it. No promises.”
“Take your time,” Matt says. “We’ll be here.”
Foggy crosses himself, when he thinks Ned’s back is fully turned. Matt shakes his head like he sees it.
---
“How did it go?” MJ asks, face illuminated through the phone screen. She’s still in Boston, has an internship there that’ll pay a hell of a lot more than a tech support gig in an incredibly dysfunctional law firm.
She’ll be back, Ned is privately certain. Kids like them don’t ever seem to find it in themselves to quit this place. Not completely, at least.
He pauses to consider for a moment.
“Weird,” he finally settles on. “It went…really fucking weird.”
He doesn’t tell her about the offer. He doesn’t know why.
Maybe because he’s thinking about it.
No promises.