Chapter Text
She goes to work the day after she watches Frank disappear up an elevator shaft.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Ellison asks.
She raises an eyebrow.
“I work here.” When he doesn’t say anything, she cocks her head, gives him a smile that she hopes looks more confident than she feels. “Right?”
He lets out a long sigh before dropping down into one of the chairs across from her desk.
“Yeah, you work here.” He flicks his eyes at the cuts her face. “But you didn’t need to come in today. Your story from yesterday went to print – big exclusive, sold a shitton. You’ve done enough.”
She shrugs.
“Nothing for me to do at home.”
Ellison furrows his brows at her.
“Rest? Recover?”
“I’m fine, Ellison. Really.”
He raises an eyebrow at her, his mouth set in a firm line. She can’t say she blames him – she doesn’t sound convincing, is too tired to even really try. And she knows that probably does need time to rest, to recover – just not from what Ellison thinks she does.
Because he looks at her – the sallowness of her skin, the haunted look in her eyes – and sees yet another hostage situation, she’s sure. Just another time when the shit has hit the fan and she’s been at the center of it.
But what she actually needs to recover from is this: a quiet moment of intimacy that smells like gunpowder, tenderness from hands stained with violence, a goodbye that cracks her chest open and crawls into her veins.
She’s not sure what amount of rest will help her recover from that. A part of her wonders if it’s even possible.
“Just – .” She rests her hand against her cheek and takes a deep breath in, looks down and runs her hands through her hair. She doesn’t say what she’s thinking, which is that right now home is just another place that reminds her of Frank. Because then she’d have to admit that the pot of flowers she keeps carefully watered and pruned is a reminder of him, would have to own up to the fact that the five minutes he’s spent standing in her apartment has somehow left an indelible impression in her mind – one that makes her stare at that spot in her living room and remember the feel of his arms around her.
And she’s trying so desperately not to remember what it feels like to be pressed up against him.
So she pushes her hair back from out of her face and looks back up at Ellison.
“I’d just really rather be here than at home.”
She means for it to sound nonchalent with an edge of firmness, but it comes out soft, wavering at the last sounds of home.
He gives her a long look and nods once before standing up. He pauses at the door to her office, hand resting on the doorknob.
“If you feel like heading home early today, just go. And if you wanna stay at home any time for the rest of the week, just do it. God knows you have the sick time for it.”
She gives him a half-hearted smile and nods.
“I’m fine, Ellison.”
He shakes his head at her, folds his arms across his chest and levels a look at her that she thinks might border on concerned.
“I think if you actually were, you wouldn’t feel the need to keep saying it.”
She dreams that night of Frank.
She’s wearing the same blue shirt and skirt from the last time she saw him. He’s wearing a bullet proof vest and black pants. But there’s no shrapnel sticking out from the side of his arm, no throbbing in her forehead from the twin set of cuts just below her hairline.
They’re not even in the elevator at all; instead, they’re standing in the middle of her apartment. There’s no pot of flowers in his hand, but there’s a gun with an empty clip in hers. She rests it gently on her kitchen table next to the spray of white flowers he’d given her.
There’s a ringing in the background that might the phantom noise of the emergency bell from the elevator, might be her alarm coming to pull her out of bed.
She looks at Frank, feels the corded muscle of his arm under her fingertips, sees the look of loss and loneliness written in his eyes.
She knows what she should say, what she needs to say, what she actually did say when it came to it.
But this is a dream. She knows it by the way he doesn’t smell like gunpowder, by the absence of goodbye in her burning eyes.
So instead she says what she knows she never would in her waking hours:
Stay. Please.
She wakes up and wraps her arms around her knees, hugs them to her chest. Counts down from ten until her breathing steadies out again.
Doesn’t really feel all that steady for the rest of the day.
She doesn’t hear anything from or about Frank for the next few days, which is a special kind of torture that leaves her both jittery and exhausted. She tries to convince herself that no news is good news, but there’s something about the silence that seems heavy, like the hush in the air before a clap of thunder shakes you out of sleep and leaves you gasping with wide-eyed shock and fear.
She’s still at the office when the news breaks.
She’s pacing around the length of her desk, trying to work out in her mind the connection between a murder by the docks and a scrap of information she dug up at the bottom of a police report, when Ellison comes in and just looks at her.
She drops the report she’s holding in her hand, grabs onto the edge of her desk and tries to keep the tremor from her voice.
“What happened?” She asks, a creeping tendril of dread crawling up the back of her throat. Because she knows that look in his eyes by now – the one that’s part suspicion, part curiousity, and part worry, all overlayed with something that looks seems protective if she looks at it from a certain angle. It’s the look he only gets now when he’s about to talk about Frank.
“Check the news,” he says, motioning to the remote on her desk.
She picks it up and presses the power button.
“Which channel?”
Ellison shrugs, though there’s a tightness to it.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s on all of them.”
She knows that Ellison is watching her reaction carefully, but she can’t find it in herself to care. She sucks in a sharp breath when she sees Frank’s name posted in bottom of the screen. Covers her mouth in shock as the cameras sweep over the wreckage of the carousel, feels her legs buckle and has to lean against her desk as they discuss bullet trajectories and hostage situations and the involvement of homeland security. The tendril of dread multiples, sharpens, turns to claws that wrap around and dig into her heart.
She feels a gentle tap on her elbow and sees that he’s turned the chair in front of her desk around so that it’s facing the tv.
She lets him guide her to the chair and inelegantly collapses into it, taking in every detail on the screen – the scrolling ticker at the bottom, the four squares of pundits discussing how little any of them really know.
She hears one phrase and latches onto it, repeats it over and over in her mind even as she starts cataloging all the information she sees on screen in her mind:
No bodies recovered at the scene of the crime.
It isn’t much, but it can be enough for now. Enough for her to grab a piece of paper and start writing down all the details she wants to look up later. Enough for her to spend the next two days nearly sleepless, almost fanatical in her pursuit of what happened.
Enough for her to hope.
“Hey, you’re coming to lunch with me.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Uh huh.” Ellison leans against her desk. “What was the last thing you ate?”
She opens her mouth to bite out an irritated retort, only she can’t actually remember what the last thing she ate was. She closes her mouth, pulling her lips between her teeth and shrugging.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He walks around and grabs her coat from the back of her chair. “C'mon. I can’t have you dropping dead from malnourishment. It’d drive up our insurance costs.”
She rolls her chair back and crosses her arms tightly in front of her.
“Ellison, I’m fine.”
“Karen,” he replies, mimicking her flat tone. “You’re really not.”
She stares at him, sullen and anxious and just so incredibly tired.
He folds his arms and raises an eyebrow.
“I’m raising twins, Karen. I can play this game a lot better than you can.”
She frowns, but he just keeps that same placid expression on his face until she literally throws her hands up and makes an angry sighing sound that seems ripped directly from her eleven year old self.
“Fine.”
She stands up and takes her coat from him, has to pretend not to wobble a bit from the sudden wave of lightheadedness as she does.
They walk out of the office, the cold November air particularly biting despite the cloudless sky. She won’t admit it out loud, but being away from her computer, from the ten or so tabs she has open about the incident at the carousel, does help.
In fact, lunch turns out to actually be a really good idea. She eats the majority of the two appetizers that Ellison orders, then practically inhales the burger and fries the moment they touch the table.
He watches her with an expression that’s just over the line of smug as she does, and she’s so very tempted to roll her eyes at him. Wants to say something like, “You know, I practically raised my brother. I can play the game pretty damn well, too, Ellison.“
She shakes her head; clenches her jaw tightly, as though she actually did come out and say it rather than just thinking about it. She must be more exhausted than she thought to even consider bringing up Kevin so casually. It’s been years since she’s even obliquely mentioned him, longer still since anyone’s known about her past well enough for his existence to be something that could be mentioned.
She take a long drink from her lemonade, almost draining the entire glass before setting it back down. She looks up and catches Ellison looking at her with a pensive expression.
"You know,” he starts, shifting in his chair before clearing his throat. “I’ve read basically everything that happened at the carousel and every reputable report has Frank Castle listed as officially being at large.” He tilts his head at her, his expression changing into something more inscrutable. “And every disreputable one says that everyone involved survived.”
She’s about to respond with a sharp retort about how she doesn’t have any exclusives about Frank because she hasn’t heard from him since the hotel, but stops when she leans forward and gets a better angle at the expression on his face.
It’s concerned and caring in a way that she might almost call parental, and it suddenly dawns on her that Ellison isn’t grilling her for an exclusive – he’s trying to reassure her that Frank’s alright.
Unbidden, she feels her eyes start to well up. Part of it has to do with the fact that she’s running on sheer will and caffeine at this point, has done nothing but stare at grainy videos and read endless amounts of reports and listened to the unending news cycle for the last 48 hours. Her emotions are running dangerously close to the surface, her control of them barely holding together at this point.
But part of it too is the utter relief at not having to pretend any more about what Frank means to her, at what he is to her. She doesn’t think that Ellison understands completely, and truthfully she doesn’t think she could explain it herself if he asked, but at the very least, what exists now between her and Frank is one less thing she has to hide from the person she suddenly realizes is the one she’s closest to in her life.
She lets out a sharp sound of laughter.
Ellison raises an eyebrow.
“What?”
She shakes her head and shrugs, tucks her hair behind her ear before she offers him a small, wry smile.
“Just trying to figure out how I feel about the fact that my boss is probably the person who knows me the best.”
His lip quirks in an almost-smile before he turns and motions towards their waitress for a check.
“Thanks for making me get lunch, Ellison.” She says, smiling at him. “You were right – I did need it.”
He nods at her.
“And what you need now is to go home and get some rest.” He holds up a hand in her direction, cuts her off before she can begin to protest. “Tell me honestly. Given everything we know, everything that you’ve researched, all the conclusions you’ve come to – do you think Frank Castle is alive?”
She nods once, decisive and without hesitation.
“I do.”
“You’re sure?”
She nods again.
“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath, exhales slowly as she feels the weight that’s been pressing against her chest for the past two days lessen somewhat – as if just saying the words out loud make them feel truer, more real somehow. “Yeah, I’m completely sure.”
He nods, gives her a look that she can only describe as kind.
“So let that be enough for now.”
She walks home with Ellison’s words ringing in her mind, her steps increasingly sluggish as two days without sleep seemingly catch up with her all at once.
She barely slips out of her heels before basically collapsing into bed and falling into a dreamless sleep, doesn’t wake up until she feels the bright rays of sun hitting from the window she never closed from the day before. She sits up and immediately checks her phone, scrolling through her various newsfeeds and checking her text messages only when she’s sure that nothing new has been released to the media.
Her only text is from Ellison, telling her to take the next few days off and that he’ll call her if anything big breaks. She must still be slightly disoriented because even just that causes her throat to get tight.
She swallows thickly a few times before realizing how dry her throat feels, swings her legs over the edge of the bed and heads to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
A glass she nearly drops in surprise when she catches a glimpse of yellow sitting on her windowsill out of the corner of her eye. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, sets the glass down on the kitchen table next to her.
Part of her wonders if she’s still dreaming, wonders if what she think she saw will disappear the moment she opens her eyes.
She turns towards the window and opens her eyes slowly, her visioning clearing, the image sharpening into focus rather than fading back into a dream or a wish or a hope.
A pot of yellow daffodils is sitting on her windowsill, almost exactly in the same spot where she’d placed his first gift of flowers all those weeks ago.
A sound escapes her that is halfway between a shout of laughter and sigh of exasperation. Either way, she thinks it’s the closest thing she’s felt to joyful in a long while.
She walks over and opens the window, looks down at the flower pot and sees a box of bullets nestled among the stems. Without looking, she knows they’ll be ones for a .380.
The whole thing makes her feel like laughing and rolling her eyes at the same time.
She settles for a long sigh.
She sits down at her kitchen table with the flowers in front of her, taps her fingers along the clay edges of the pot. She wonders when he dropped them off. As tired as she was when she got home yesterday, she’s pretty sure they weren’t there as she stumbled in half-asleep already.
She wonders if it was midday while he thought she was at work, or if he’d crept up in the cover of night to leave a bright splash of yellow on her windowsill for her to wake up to.
For a single moment, she lets herself imagine might’ve happened if she’d caught him. The look of surprise on his face as he looks at her through the glass of the window, the click of the window as she opens it, and then – what?
It doesn’t matter.
Because she didn’t catch him. She slept right through his clandestine drop and what she’s left with in the aftermath of it all are a box of bullets that mean stay safe and bright yellow flowers that she thinks means I’m ok and Don’t worry and maybe even I’m sorry.
She can let that be enough for now.