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“How did you know you were gay, Double D?” Peter asked around Valentine’s Day, when Matt was having an existential crisis over whether to get Foggy an apology/Valentine’s Day present or whether to get two separate presents. Did two presents come off as trying to buy him off or was it cheap and lazy to just get one present for all of the different emotions?
Matt’s gut reaction told him to get the fuck out of this question, that he was exactly the wrong person to be having this conversation with, but Peter was much better at describing gifts than shop attendants and he did kind of owe the kid for having to buy Foggy an apology present over hoping that someone would send him grief condolences.
“I’m not gay,” he clarified, tracing fingers over the leaves of a potted plant. He didn’t want to buy Foggy a plant because the man was too good at taking care of them in a supportive, but absentee father kind of way, and Matt’s apartment was currently full of plants which would not fucking die. It was starting to smell like a greenhouse.
Peter turned towards him confused.
“You’re not? But I thought you were with Foggy? And that thing with DP?”
Matt abandoned the plants and dragged Peter towards the sweets to make him read all the labels and describe all the packaging for him.
“Yeah, and before them was Karen and Elektra and Kristin and Caitlin and Megan. And Daniel and Kieren and Lawrence.”
Peter was stiff.
“That’s uh, a lot of people.”
Tell him about it.
“I have a problem,” he admitted.
Peter chewed on that while describing the absurd packaging of Valentine’s day chocolates. Matt wondered if Foggy wouldn’t want coffee instead.
“So does that mean you’re pan?” Peter asked, watching Matt smell all of the coffees in the aisle. Matt stopped and remembered that a new yuppie coffee shop had opened a few blocks from there; it had its artisan free-trade collection on sale if he remembered properly. Good thinking, Murdock.
In the meantime, what kind of thing did Foggy need? Trying to find something he wanted wasn’t working out because the things Foggy wanted were not tangible 90% of the time. He wanted Matt to come home safe. He wanted to win his cases. He wanted to make sure his family-family and his made-family were comfortable and stable. What Foggy needed was trash bags, however, he’d mentioned that last night. He said he needed staples for work and heavy whipping cream for some damn thing he was experimenting on in Matt’s kitchen. He needed a rolling pin, more than anything. He’d been using an empty wine bottle for months now, even though he’d been cursing the high heavens for days about how uneven his most recent confection had been.
Matt had offered to buy a rolling pin twice since then, but Foggy had become only more determined to make the wine bottle work and further discussion was asking for a fight Matt could not win with logic.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t win it with kindness.
He rerouted his mental plan and had Peter follow him out to the nearby grocery store.
“Not pan,” he said on the way, “Bi.”
“But Wade says that he’s pan and he’s got the same kind of history,” Peter said. He grabbed something off the shelf and put it in Matt’s arm. It was a box of trash bags, kid was a mindreader sometimes. Matt took them over to the dairy and tried to discreetly sniff out fat levels in the milk. Peter bypassed this and shoved a carton of cream into his arms with the bags so that Matt would answer his question. He was getting good at knowing how to get Matt to talk. Matt needed to do something about that.
“There’s a lot of overlap,” Matt explained, “But really it just depends on how well you think the label fits you or doesn’t. They don’t have to be as exclusive as people try to make them.”
Peter thought about this as Matt hunted down a rolling pin.
“So could you be both?” he asked.
“You could be both or either depending on the day or, hell, the minute if you wanted, I guess.”
“Why aren’t you both?”
Matt paused. He hadn’t thought about it. Bi had just felt better than pan when he was in college and he’d just kind of shrugged and said, okay, well, that’s me. No further discussion necessary. Foggy was the one who had a lot of feelings about labels.
“I guess I could be, might be. I dunno, I don’t think about it too much. Seems like something people might fight over.”
Peter hummed and saved him from picking a rolling pin he described as ‘the 3-d equivalent of a 1950s tablecloth.’ They debated the merits of handles or no handles and ultimately went with one with handles so it could be stacked on things for precision baking. Matt explained that Foggy was currently obsessed with the Great British Bake-off, hence the sudden diversion into cooking implements. Peter empathized as his aunt was also obsessed with the show and was similarly cluttering up the kitchen with semi-edible material.
“How do you know that you’re not straight, though?” He asked, trailing slightly behind Matt (and being a terrible guide, come on, kiddo, at least pretend) on the way to the check-out counter.
“That one’s easy. For you? You’re into boys. Romantically, sexually, whatever.”
Peter pouted like this wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
“Well, obviously, but like. How do you know?”
Matt truly didn’t know how to help this child.
“You ever had a crush?” he asked. Peter nodded.
“You know all those terrible feelings?” Peter nodded.
“Those, but for boys. And people who identify as boys, I guess. Anyone who’s not a girl.”
Peter held off on the interrogation through check-out and into the coffee shop, where Matt attempted to persuade the stuck-up dipshit at the counter to let him smell the twelve types of coffee they sold. The guy wasn’t helpful; his masculinity prevented him from acknowledging that Matt gave less than two shits about his fancy machinery and the correct way to drink espresso. Matt asked if he could speak with the girl behind him. She was much more helpful. He couldn’t decide between a handful of them, so he picked three.
After she had kindly dropped the three into a thick paper bag, Peter bought some coffee for his aunt and followed him out of the store to go get a gift bag and a card.
Matt thought their heart-to-heart was over, but quickly realized that he’d foolishly underestimated the depth of teenage curiosity.
“Okay, but what about if the girl wasn’t born a girl? Am I still straight if I like her?”
Oho, specificity. Now they were making headway.
“You got a crush, Spidey?”
“No,” he said too defensively, “It’s just a question.” Matt snorted.
“Okay, sure. Well if she’s a girl, she’s a girl. If you’re a guy and you only like girls, that’s you straight. Doesn’t mean she’s straight. Doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later about whether you are or were straight. Honestly, kid, I think you’re thinking too hard about this. It’s making it complicated.”
Peter was quiet even after they entered the stationary shop; Matt could practically hear the cogs in his head clacking against each other. He distracted him by having him help pick a color combination that wasn’t red and black. He did not need to remind Fogs of anything Daredevil-related while he was trying to make up and woo him.
“MJ says I’m not thinking about it enough,” Peter told him, “She said that there’s a lot of politics and discrimination and shit that needs to be addressed in this kind of thing and that I need to check my privilege.”
Ah. No wonder MJ and Foggy got on so well.
“Yeah, Fogs says the same thing, but again, it doesn’t have to be this hard. You don’t actually need a label if you don’t want one. Your sexuality doesn’t define your being. I mean, it can, I guess. But it doesn’t have to. The problem is that straight white men have their fingers all over everything, so MJ wants you to think about power dynamics.”
Peter went still. About ten seconds into his processing, Matt had to nudge him to bring him back to earth to tell him what color the damn bag with the weird rough shit on the outside of it was.
“It’s orangey-pink, like salmon at the top. Whole thing is covered in glitter. It turns hot pink at the bottom,” he explained, then said, “So it’s more about the power stuff. Like—”
“Like white gay men can be dickheads in the gay community to gay people of color. Being gay or bi or whatever doesn’t exclude you from being a racist piece of shit. Doesn’t actually exclude you from being a homophobic piece of shit either, believe it or not.”
Right, Justin from sophomore year? Where are you, Justin from sophomore year? Did you ever find the dumpster you truly belonged in?
He decided that Foggy would probably love the glitter. He took it off the shelf and sent in search of a blank card that would fit in his printer. Peter grabbed something else from the shelf and followed him.
“What happens,” he started, because he gathered information from people like he was conducting a survey for a science experiment, “If two people who aren’t straight but aren’t gay are in a relationship? What do you call it?”
What had Matt done to deserve this? Besides the falling off the roof thing. And that guy’s broken jaw. And the other guy’s broken nose. And the other guy’s fractured collarbone. Actually, no. He was seeing it, now; this was penance.
“I don’t know, kid. Fogs and I call it fucking gay. Other people might call it something else. Queer. Bi. Just a relationship. It doesn’t always need a name, you know? You can just be in a relationship, that’s it. No specification needed.”
They paid for their respective bags and cards and Matt turned to head back towards Hell’s Kitchen. He thanked Peter for going out with him for boring old people stuff and promised him he’d teach him how to roundhouse kick properly next time they went out. Peter was excited about that. He’d tried a couple times before being banned from it by Wade for having embarrassing form. Matt almost let him go, but then remembered what it had felt like being seventeen and desperate to understand why the fuck he was obsessing over Christian Mercado at school.
“Hey,” he said, “Whatever you decide you are or aren’t, just know: you’re alright. We’ve got you any way around. Just, don’t feel shitty or anything if things don’t happen the way you think they should. It’s all much more normal than people make it out to be.”
Peter’s heartbeat and heat said he was pleased with this.
“Thanks, Double D.”
“Although, for future reference, if you ever have any questions about this shit, ask Foggy. Do not ask me, I am a self-proclaimed slut with no answers.”
Peter laughed. He waved and bounced off towards Queens.
Matt went home and assembled a mismatched crow’s nest of affection for Foggy.