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1.
Karen wakes up every morning and unclenches her teeth, feels the way her jaw shifts back to a natural position, an odd kind of ache. Her dentist tells her that stress is up there with sugar as the reason for tooth and gum problems in the 21-st century. Karen grinds her teeth and imagines she can taste the dust; tries to let go of that constant anger. Stresses.
2.
Frank is divorced for four months, one week and five days. It feels like a slow rot. It doesn’t get better, or easier no matter what people or advice columns tell him. At around 6pm each day maggots start wiggling in his guts and he spends the next two hours fighting nausea to the accompanying sound of gentle keyboard taps. Not that he’s very gentle, but they build them this way now; slow and soothing like nobody’s trying to outrun their own thoughts here.
He lost weight, muscle mass. It gets a bit harder to wake up with each day. To want to.
Their relationship wasn’t abusive, per se, but it was bad.
Nobody told him that getting out would feel like the worst mistake he’d ever made.
She gets the kids. He tries, by god, but there’s not much he can say. She claims he’s unreliable, that his traumatic episodes scare the children, that he never quite left the violence abroad, that he’d missed so many years, so many firsts, that he doesn’t have the skill to raise their children.
All he can say is that he is beyond miserable, and hopeless and small in that house. He doesn’t want her next to him anymore (except he does,) and he doesn’t want her next to the kids. She gets them anyway because children need their mother. Don’t they?
He picks them up every second weekend and tries his best to teach them the right kind of love, the kind he never really knew.
3.
When Karen wakes up it’s to her mother’s exhausted face by her hospital bed. Nobody can really tell her the full story of what happened, only that while she was recovering after she actually flatlined, a story broke out about a man named Wilson Fisk and his criminal activities - and that had led to him being very publicly arrested. There’s no one to tell her how this happened or why, or the fact that the material she’d gathered ended up in the press and helped make the case.
She doesn’t know and doesn’t care about Matt Murdock’s guilt and how he went to her apartment and found the files, giving them to a reporter that seemed trustworthy and made everyone pay.
(The Man in the Mask had saved her from the second attack, in an alley into which she was dragged by the ends of a fabric tight around her throat, high heels scrambling against the sidewalk, low voice asking for forgiveness in her ear, hands scratching hands. He wasn’t there to save her the third time. He thinks about it every day once he finds out. She doesn’t.)
Her mother tries to make her talk, alone at first and then accompanied by a police officer. They want to know how she ended up in a hospital with a bullet in her head. They want to know why she had older injuries like the bruises on her throat that have now passed but were initially noted in her ICU file. She tells nothing to her mother, but when the officer asks she says that she had been attacked twice prior to the shooting. She makes it seem random; Hell’s Kitchen after all is not a safe place to be. She pretends she doesn’t remember who shot her. Her mother is horrified and sad, she’d have liked to know about this when it happened, but Karen left home a long time ago and had no intention to mix her past with her present. Her mother could stand to be ignorant of her hardships. It had been a kindness.
The police woman asks her if there was anything at all that might lead her to believe that someone might want to kill her. Says it carefully, so it doesn’t sound like she’s asking if it could be her fault. Karen is not angry about it, and finds it very easy to lie. She doesn’t want them knowing about Wesley, who was not mentioned in the article her mother let her read, who got tired of his people failing to kill her, who shot her point blank. Because if they know about him she might never get the chance to kill him. She was going to kill him.
-
Everything inside her is a hornet’s nest of rage. It isn’t hard to find James Wesley because he’s not hiding. Karen tails him for a few days, as much as her patience allows her, just to see where she can find him at his least protected. She comes to his home and she shoots him dead without hesitation. She shakes and shakes and shakes - the gun’s recoil tremors down to her bones. She goes home and showers and laughs for a minute straight. The horrible buzzing thing inside her quiets. She falls asleep crying.
She wasn’t too careful in covering her tracks so when she’s woken up by the shouting of ‘Police! Open up!’, she’s not entirely surprised.
-
(Her lawyers, whom she did not request; a blind guy and his overly enthusiastic friend, tell her she needs to write her own narrative. She needs to become a human interest story, she needs a sympathetic reading of this mess. Karen lets them make the decision.
The lawyers spend hours debating whether the journalist should be a man or a woman - a man might have more sympathy for her because she’s female. Yes, but she is too angry to be endearing, the kind that makes men fold and call women cunts. So she needs a woman who will understand her situation and feelings. Ah, but we have to be careful not to fall on one that feels she needs to prove she can be unbiased towards her gender so she won’t turn out to be the worst choice. In the end they decide to let the newspapers choose their representative and blindly trust fate.
Nelson said it like that, “Blindly Trust Fate”, and his partner pretended not to smile. All the while Karen stared listlessly into the wall, monitoring machines beeping her heartbeat.)
-
(Maybe in a different life she could have drowned in Matt’s smile, or enveloped Nelson until they fell asleep, or smiled at them with genuine lips, but in this one her heart ached with what they were offering, that quiet belief in her supposed good intentions and the possibility of friendship-
And anyway, the truth is since she shot a man her head had been an empty fish bowl; echoed and distorted. There’s no place in there for anything from the outside world.)
-
Frank gets to interview Karen Page. He didn’t really know why Ellison chose him. Yes, he wrote the now infamous article but enough time had passed and he wasn’t a very known name to handle this kind of story. What even to ask her? He’s in no place to take on someone else’s sob story when he feels every goddamn day like his edges are singeing.
Frank comes into the hospital room after the officer stationed outside it checked his credentials against a list of allowed visitors. He thought he felt eyes on the back of his neck, but when he turned around before entering there was only Paige’s lawyer sitting a few seats away, probably ready for her to call him in in case the interview goes south; and that one’s quite clearly blind. He thinks it might be just his PTSD rearing its head and tries his best to calm his breathing and think about the upcoming job.
The woman inside the room lays flat on her back, arms straight by her sides, head tilted upwards and eyes studying the ceiling. She is secured to the bed by straps but not, he thinks, to prevent her from running away because they’re made from velcro, but probably to keep her from moving and injuring herself. Coming closer and sitting in the chair next to her bed, he can see why.
“My name is Frank Castle, Ma’am.” he says calmly, introducing himself. He wonders if she read his article. She doesn’t answer, so he moves to sit more comfortably with an ankle balanced on his knee, and puts his notepad in the vee of his bent leg. The cover of it is hard cardboard with a very soft, blue-toned pattern of intricate flowers. The corners are frayed and most of the pages have been used. He likes it.
Frank thinks he can sit here for a while and not talk, it’s fine. There are some things he can write without her input, so he uses a fancy font he practiced for a title that’s just her name and an m-dash, adds a date with the month spelled out. Stops to look at it, then adds the day in full text as well.
Writes:
“Karen Page does not strike me as a woman who is capable of exposing a corrupt man one day, then killing another the next. But if we’ve learned anything these last few days is that appearances can be deceiving.
I am more connected to Page than she knows. I was the one to get the documents that helped me prove the corruption of Union Allied, that led this newspaper to dig further and uncover the criminal activities of Wilson Fisk, Parish Landman, Corbin, Turk Barrett and many others. Karen Page was the one to obtain those documents, and though we’ve never met - the resulting article was a team effort. It’s jarring to see her here and on the wrong side of the law.
She is a quilt of colours against her white pillow. Her hair clashes with her eyes clashes with her bruises clashes with her broken, crusted lips.
There were two bodies at the scene of the crime - One James Wesley, who seemed to have been the primary target as the kill is relatively clean and seemed to have been a surprise. The other is a man who appears to have been a bodyguard, who has several blunt force traumas and a single gunshot. It seems that he had heard the gun, surprised Page and she tried to fight him off. She has multiple fractured ribs, a broken wrist, extensive bruising on her face and torso and a twisted ankle. She seems to be taking it well."
Doesn’t write:
“Karen page wears her marks like a shawl. She is captivating, mesmerizing so much so that I can’t bring myself to look. I am half in love already just from listening to her breathe.”
He writes and writes and doesn’t say a word and when he lifts his head to crack his neck and rotate his stiff shoulders it is to find the object of his writing looking at him, as she probably had for a while now. She looks interested enough to engage him, so he goes straight for the hard question, “How did it feel to kill a human being?”
He’s not wearing his dog tags, he never does, so there’s no reason for her to say ‘Why don’t you tell me.’ - like he had imagined. Instead she looks at him a little longer in that perfect silence and then says, “Incredible. Like deflating. Like I could suddenly breathe.”
He feels uneasy, then immediately tries to brush it off. The police report says it was a crime of passion as evidenced by the unnecessary amount of bullets in Wesley’s corpse; Frank himself had killed because he was ordered to, so who’s worse out of the two of them, really? He’s not going to quote her on that.
“How long did you cry for?”
She smiles very lightly and he feels himself want to return it, “Oh, right up until they came for me, I think.” She moves her head back to stare at the ceiling, “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
He shouldn’t say it, because he doesn’t want questions from her, he doesn’t want to be honest, and he’s got an interview to conduct here, but he does, “It gets easier.”
Karen keeps looking up, something enchanting her in the patterns of the ceiling paint, and doesn’t ask him how he knows, or what he means, or how can he even say that, just sighs out a- “So I’ve been told.”
He really really wants her to ask.
Instead he tries to get the story he’s here for, “What happened?”
“I found out something that I shouldn’t have. It got me James Wesley’s attention. It didn’t end well for me. It ended even worse for him.”
“Succint.”
“I tried.” her eyes flicker to him then quickly go back to the ceiling, “There isn’t much to say.”
“You feel justified.”
“I do.”
“He deserved it, then, to be murdered?”
She turns her head properly like he meant her to, serious as stone, “Yes.”
“Ok, Ma’am.” - Placating, “Ok. I don’t.. I’m not qualified to judge. S’ppose you did what you had to. So what now?”
“My lawyers are working on getting me out of jail.”
“You don’t sound very interested in that outcome. Do you believe you need to be imprisoned?”
“Don’t you?” She doesn’t sound interested though, just weary.
He gives her the truth, again, helpless, “No.”
-
In court she doesn’t say what Murdock and Nelson told her to say, doesn’t rub at her eyes beforehand to make them seem red and doesn’t hunch in on herself. She holds a posture like her mother taught her when she was younger and growing taller than any other girl in school, looks the state lawyer in the eyes and says firmly, “I killed him because I wanted to. Because he shot me.”, then leans back against her chair and stares calmly into the opposite wall while chaos ensues around her. She catches Matt’s face as it seems to fall in distress and wishes just for a moment that she didn’t have to be the cause of this.
They send her to prison. She wonders if they’d let her continue the interview from there. She wonders if she still has lawyers. She wonders if Frank will come back.
-
She never thought of women’s prisons before. It just wasn’t something big on her radar. Maybe if it was she would have been less surprised at what she’d seen.
-
After a few days of plain walls and plain food and stories upon stories of lives ruined, another inmate tried to murder Karen. She’s sitting in her cell, lost in the trance of nothing when suddenly there is the sound of the cell locks disengaging. After a moment she hears a roaring “Page! Karen Page!” and slowly rises to look out into the corridor. The guards, having opened the cells, gather around and watch. Nobody comes out except her and the one sent to kill her. The other women know better.
The other woman looks tough, weathered and comfortable with a shiv. Karen doesn’t even know her name. She looks over her and says, “News travels fast, girl. Fisk gone and heard you killed his boy. He loved that boy, Page. Go figure. I got a nice deal out of it. Come on.”
They face each other and Karen knows she is going to die. The woman doesn’t looks angry or upset, just determined like she’s got a job to do but doesn’t care about it either way. Karen can feel her heart trying to leap out of her body; she’s lightheaded.
Suddenly from the left someone calls, “Page!”
She turns her head and she’s thrown a shiv of her own. Someone decided to help her, she doesn’t know who because she’s painfully aware that she has to move NOW before the surprise is not on her side. She lunges and slits the other woman’s throat, bottom left to top right, collarbone to ear. She closes her eyes to avoid the blood; instinctive, and feels the hot spray on her face, her neck, dripping down her hand. Slitting a throat is as easy as pulling a trigger, she finds. Her hands tremble.
The guards close back the cells and open their door in two pushes of a button - they’re coming for her and she’s dead dead dead.
She waits for them at the end of the hall, smoke bomb quickly filling the room. There won’t be much time. She feels like a bull- fuming, puffing, riling herself up for the charge. She is choking from the inside - the smoke that coils and rises inside of her is deadlier than the one spreading across the room. The mass of anger rolling inside of her body, pushes up on her esophagus with a scream, is black and acrid - burning plastic - things that were never really meant to burn. They run to her.
A baton hits her in the ribs and she manages to grab it as she folds with the pain. There is no fighting technique here. She shivs every eye she sees, crashes the baton into teeth, she is taking down everyone she can as her muscles begin to relax. She loses consciousness.
-
Her mother visits her in jail just before they decide to put her in solitary.
She talks about the case of that man who had a spike in his head and his whole personality changed. Karen wants to tell her that nothing changed. She’s just.. Unrestrained, now.
Nothing specific happened to her that led her to be covered in blood in a prison cell, entirely head to toe and not her own. Her parents are alive and raised her well enough. Well - her brother is dead in the ground but it was his damn fault.
It’s just that she’s always been angry. When she was a girl she was too ginger, too bug eyed. Puberty brought on the longness of her limbs, the awkwardness of her gait. She was fairy-like, and not in the good way, but the sour-the-milk, steal-your-children kind of way.
Men would always look at her and say something about feisty or bad tempered red-heads. Doesn’t her mother remember? Karen's memories of her home are always colored with the red of fury, felt hot enough for the whole world to see. Wasn’t it, mom, wasn’t it?
She was angry and tired and so done with everything. Her mother left the prison, then the city, then her life. So it goes.
-
Solitary is meant to be a bitch, a cruel punishment; something inhumane. Karen is so relieved she could cry. She feels like she hadn’t been alone for so long: assassins, doctors, mother, lawyers, prisoners; day after day people in her space and never enough time and quiet to just think about what happened, to process what she’d done. And maybe, just maybe Fisk can’t get her here. At least for a few days. She sleeps.
-
Karen doesn’t know how much time passed between the door locking for the first time and unlocking to let a woman in. She tells the guards to stand back and introduces herself as Madame Gao. She is going to let her out.
“I liked James. He was.. Loyal. I see the same stubbornness and potential in you. I think we could benefit each other. In this world of men, I found, we need to keep together like a fence.”
She sends Karen a benevolent smile, “Go on out, take a shower, sleep. Then I’ll find you.”
Karen takes this opportunity with both hands, walks out of the prison and plans, plans.
-
The police have confiscated all of the weapons from Wesley’s home, which is a real fucking bummer because Karen is exhausted and getting to his place was not easy. Thankfully, it appears that they haven’t dug deep into his connection to Fisk and left alone his other hangouts. This is where those days she trailed him come in handy. A warehouse, how fucking cliche is that. But it has a car and a stash of weapons. Not like she’d imagine, not like in the movie, but more than enough for one woman. She is tempted to stay there, but thinks better of it. She’ll find a place to sleep or stay in the car if she has to; there’s no way of knowing who knows about this place and might come back here any minute.
She falls asleep in a car parked near Wesley’s house and imagines the sound of a pen stroking paper and a comfortable silence.
-
Madame Gao was a criminal, so Karen really shouldn’t have been surprised at what she saw when she’s led through one of her operating bases. She thought... well, it doesn’t matter what she had thought.
Nobody expects her to start shooting so she manages to hit a surprising amount of people, but missed Gao before she has to start running. The car she came in starts smoothly and she pushes the pedal to the ground, getting the fuck out of there as fast as she could. If it gets out that it was her there is no way she will be afforded the element of surprise anymore, not next time.
There will be a next time, she’s sure. She thinks of the girls back in prison, controlled by their dealers and pimps, and Gao’s smile, the way her men tried to find the shooter from a whole different direction, not considering it might be her. It seems impossible to have gotten so many of them, but shooting is so easy. It’s the easiest thing she’d ever done. She was born for it. Her breathing starts to settle as she drives further away from the scene of her latest murders.
Frank was right, it does get easier. Perhaps someone should have also told her she might end up liking it.
-
Back in Wesley’s house Karen steps over the blood stains no one had bothered to clean, turns on the enormous TV and heads to the kitchen for something to eat. Judging by his apartment he was a man of good taste - she’s willing to bet there’s something interesting in his fridge. The news says her name exactly as she finds a fresh looking dragon fruit-
It appears that Madame Gao wasn’t happy with her - she took a chance in giving her name to the police. She is now both an escaped convict and a mass-murderer. The little black seeds crunched under her teeth, and soft sweet flesh slid down her throat. She felt like laughing. How quickly things change. She is reminded of high school, when they finished reading Catcher in the Rye, and the teacher told them the whole thing spanned across three days. This is how she feels now. Maybe this should end the same and she needs to be committed to some psych ward. Everything's happening so much.
A woman on the news in the right corner of the screen, perhaps a guest speaker, speculates about her motives,
“She doesn’t seem to be a regular Vigilante, at least, none like we’ve encountered before. She isn’t The Man in the Mask and won’t run around saving little old ladies from robbers on the streets.” She looks sure and fierce, Karen envies her a little for it, “She shot the man who tried to kill her. She killed an inmate who, some sources say, was sent to end her life, and now when she’s out she’s going after hard drug runners. She seems to me like some sort of punisher of the wicked, not a savior. This brings us back to that eternal question of what do we do, as a society with those people, and what does it say about us that the keep rising like-”
Karen turns off the TV. Punisher, huh? Might as well be.
-
She sits in the underground parking lot in the driver’s seat of Frank Castle’s car. There is a soft song on the radio. He comes in, sits, restless. Looks at her for a minute; she has on a tattered hat of an unknown color and her ponytail digs painfully into the back of her head where she rests it back on the headrest. He deliberately turns to look out of the windshield and says, “Maria loves that stupid song.” with such wistfulness and longing that she wonders is the woman’s dead.
Karen only talks when the song finishes.
-
They drink coffee in a diner, her bruises bright out there for the world to see, beacons. Karen knows Gao will hunt her for her spectacular betrayal of her misplaced trust. So she will draw her people out and kill as many of them as she can instead of hiding. It doesn't occur to her to be afraid. Not anymore.
“That lawyer kid, you should have come to him, not me. I saw the way he acted around you - I think he would have moved the world. And I saw the way you looked at him,” Frank sometimes starts conversations as if they've been speaking for hours. She wonders what she tells him in his head.
“He was..cute, but I doubt it would have worked, Frank.”
“Why? Is it because he’s blind?”
“Ha, no. Just, he wore a cross, you know. And he was.. Good.. In a very purposeful way of people who believe good has to be forcefully done. I mean, he looked like he believed in purgatory.”
“And you’ve killed a fuckton of people.”
She laughs, “I’m not even halfway through.”
“And you think he won’t forgive that.” He’s quiet for a minute, then says,
“If it were me and my ex,” closes his mouth, shifts his eyes so as not to look at her, “I would have been following her burying the bodies.” she lets out a mall laugh, and he smiles a bit.
“My old lady, she didn't just break my heart. She- She'd rip it out, she'd tear it apart, she'd step on that shit, feed it to a dog. I mean, she was ruthless. She brought the pain. But she'll never hurt me again, no matter how much I want it. You see, I'll never feel that. And I think that if you feel that way, even just the beginning of that love, you should hold on tight and not let go.”
The smile slips from her lips. Karen thinks about love. Thinks about pain. Knows for the first time in her life that the two should never go hand in hand.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Frank, but I’m glad you’re divorced. For your sake.”
“You don’t-”
In the corner of her eye she finally sees what she was waiting for. She takes a deep breath,
“I’m sorry.”
“What?-”
“Get the staff to the back, go!-”
And hell breaks loose.
-
Frank didn’t see them coming. He can’t quite get over this as he’s sitting in the kitchen of the diner, the other people crouching and mumbling in panic to the sounds of cursing and gunshots.
Karen Page lives to surprise him.
She doesn’t know, he thinks, that he could rid her of the threat. That he can probably shoot all these men in the front before they got close enough to breathe on her. She thinks he’s a simple, good man without a killcount. That he should be kept safe.
And he didn’t know they were coming - was not hypervigilant for the first time in forever. His brain didn’t send him too many signals from all of his senses, but stayed focused on Karen’s hands around a tea mug, at her lips forming a smile, her hunched shoulders, the faint red lines under her fingernails. He taps nervously the rhythm of a lullaby with his ring finger on his palm, soundlessly forms the words with his lips. Penny and Dime.
He want to rush out and tackle her - protect her with his body - get her the fuck away from the men and the bullets. He stays still. Watches a waitress call the police.
This isn’t a good time for love. Not specifically here, in the diner, but here in this time in his life. He’s not ready, and she’s not Maria, and anyway if she keeps at it she is going to die.
Love happens to him anyway.
-
She makes a shirt with a crude reimagining of what her x-ray looked like and a can of spray paint left by some kids near a painted wall. She feels like she’s playing dress-up.
-
The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen sends some sort of nunchuck through her gun and it’s flung from her hands to the gravel covering the roof they’re on. He approaches her, saying something she can’t hear over the pulsing of blood in her ears, livid, the only coherent thought in her mind is ‘Men, men, men, always men,’
As he comes closer she gets to see him for the first time, mask and all. She is forced out of her anger by the sheer wave of her frustration - will this man keep following her until she dies? Can’t he leave her alone? Isn’t he done? She can't believe she liked him.
She interrupts his speech, “Stop, Murdock. Just stop. I didn’t hear what you said and I couldn’t care less if I did. Either arrest me or get the hell out because I have things to do.”
She turns away from his shocked face. He tries to say something, “You,- I..”
She’s reaching for her gun and feels her back stretch and click and pulse with residual pain, “I’ve spent many hours looking at your face. You have a very nice jaw, but maybe you should invest in a full-face mask if you’re going to keep at it.”
He doesn't fight her. She imagines the snarl sliding off her face but isn't sure that she quite manages it. She stalks towards him and perhaps he doesn't see her as a threat, his hindbrain doesn't sniff out her intent, perhaps he thinks her weak enough or fond enough of him. Whatever the reason she still gets to knock him out with the butt of her gun.
She takes a look at where her target has been, but the trucks were loaded and getting ready to move. She sighs. She’ll have to find him again somehow, and fuck if she knows how.
-
How incredible the lies Matt tells himself. There’s a bitter taste in her mouth when she remembers thinking about loving him. They are so unlike one another they might as well be on different planets. The thing is she remembers him fighting, that time in the alley. How noble he must have felt as he didn’t break her attacker’s neck. How superior. Except he broke both his kneecaps and hit the man’s head so hard against the wall of a building that she’s sure he’ll never be alright again. She doesn’t pity her attacker, or mind the violence itself. She minds that Matt genuinely believes he’s somehow better. Better than her. For this - this awful kind of mercy.
-
Karen is sitting on the hood of the car she stole from Wesley, exhausted, the stench of the docks around her. When she hears another car approaching she doesn’t have anything inside her that’s capable of moving a muscle. She is bruised and hurt and bleeding; half asleep where she is, doesn’t even feel the gun that’s clutched in her hand.
Someone walks towards her. Heavy, wide step, probably a man. She takes a breath. On the exhale she opens her eyes to Frank Castle - clean, whole, well-dressed. She can’t help but break into a smile and her eyes are probably softer than she intends. He smiles back. He probably slept through the night; had his three meals. At this late hour he even smells nice, still.
“What are you doing here, Frank?”
He ducks his head shyly - an incredible gesture from a man like him that hits her right in the sternum, “I think.. I’m here to bury the bodies.”
He looks at her unwavering for the minute it takes her fogged brain to recall their conversation, and sees her eyes widen as she gets what he means.
“Oh.”
He takes his hands out of his pockets and straightens his shoulders, “Well, yes. And I’ve got a medkit in my car. And a huge fucking sandwich for you.”
Karen lets out a long, painful laugh, head thrown back, “Lead with that next time.”