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“I swear to God, there was an eel! Karen, tell him! He doesn’t believe me...”
Foggy drags out the end of his sentence, voice whiny while he leans heavily - drunkenly - on her shoulder. David’s doing that almost-silent, eyes-closed, exaggerated slow-laugh, and Karen chuckles quietly, throwing back the last of her third beer.
“An eel..... oh my God, you - you drank an eel? What the hell...”
“It’s true,” Karen says, nodding. “He’s not lying! You know, Foggy, I think that was the night that we officially became friends. We were up until like... four o’clock in the morning, just walking around the Kitchen.” She smiles at the memory. “You kept insisting that we were going to that fish market as soon as it opened, but we did not make it that long.” She remembers their jubilant yells echoing through the nearly-empty streets - feels them echoing in her head now, though that’s probably just an effect of the beer.
Foggy’s nodding emphatically beside her. “I remember, my friend. I remember indeed... the fish, and the eel... and I also remember... I remember Matt being a total downer on our epic friendship party.”
Her eyebrows scrunch up at this - “Foggy, Matt wasn’t with us that night. Matt didn’t partake in the drinking of the eel.”
“Yes! Exactly!” Foggy sits up straight, gesturing wildly between them. “We went to his apartment to bring him into our circle of, of love, and he wasn’t even there? How uncool is that?! We try to include him in our night of super awesome friendship building, and he can’t even be bothered show up? At his own house? How lame is that?”
“The lamest... the lamest.” The words come mumbling from David’s mouth, which is now distorted by his hand, upon which his face is heavily resting, while his elbow slides inch by inch away from him across the bar. He looks more than half asleep, which is when Karen decides that it’s probably to time to wrap this shindig up.
“Man, I think it’s time to get David home, Foggy. Look at him, he has two kids, he can’t keep up with the eel gang.”
“He - he he” - a hiccup - “the Eel Gang. Tha’ssa good one, Karen. Always knew you were funny.” Foggy’s swaying at this point, and looking at him makes Karen feel a little unsteady as well - she’d come out intending to be relatively responsible on this Thursday night, and she feels like she’s straddling that line - so yeah, it’s time to get going. She’d really rather not end the night by prying Foggy up off of Josie’s floor, if the stickiness of Josie’s bar is anything to go by.
She makes sure the bottles along the back wall all look vertical - they do - before she turns her gaze back in David’s direction. David’s head is now fully at rest on the bar, a thin line of drool connecting the corner of his mouth to the filth of the wooden countertop.
Large hands suddenly clap gently over David’s shoulders from behind her, and David’s head jerks up dazedly. Karen follows the hands up to the arms, the shoulders, the neck, the hoodie. She’d know those hands and that hoodie anywhere, she thinks to herself.
“Frank!” she exclaims. Maybe too loudly. Her filter’s pretty thin at this point, she realizes, even if she is the least drunk of the trio.
“Yeah, that’s me. Alright, come on, asshole,” Frank says gruffly, gripping David’s shoulders, “let’s get you home to your wife while you can still stand.”
David is mumbling Sarah’s name when Frank practically pushes him out the door. Karen watches them go, pleased and a little confused. Something small and warm is resting in her chest.
“Hey, Foggy, did you know that-“
She turns to find Foggy facedown on the bar as well. She groans and hops gingerly off her barstool, testing her balance in her heels (why had the women of the world ever invented heels?) and adjusting the strap of her purse on her shoulder before lifting one of Foggy’s arms and fitting her shoulder beneath it. He’s giggling quietly and she hears the word “eel” again when he slips out of his seat.
“I know, yeah... the eel gang’s all headed home though, now, Foggy, we gotta - OOF - we gotta go...” She tries to direct him towards the door, but he’s stumbling and his weight is throwing off her balance. She’s looking down at her shoes, willing them to stay upright, when Frank’s boots enter her line of sight.
“The eel gang, is it? Yeah, you’re livin up to the name, don’t worry. Goddamn mess, both of you.” She can hear the judgment in his voice, but there’s a hint of something else too. Frank’s arm covers hers across Foggy’s back - it’s warm, she thinks - and Foggy’s weight on her right side is slightly relieved as they walk out the door.
The winter breeze is brisk on Karen’s face when they dump Foggy into the back seat of the first cab along the curb. She gives the cabbie Marci’s address while Frank pushes Foggy’s foot back into the car repeatedly, Foggy shoving it back out again and again, laughing absently. Frank finally closes the door as Karen stands up and steps back onto the curb. She chuckles and waves to Foggy when the cab pulls away, then sends a quick text to Marci that he’s on his way; she can feel Frank’s hulking presence beside her as she slips her phone back into her pocket. She turns to consider him. Here he is, yet again, at her side - and once again, no bullets are flying, and no bombs are exploding, and no one is threatening her life. These quiet moments in his company have become more frequent, but in some capacity, she knows that he always remains the Punisher, no matter how long it’s been.
“Frank," she muses aloud, "do you ever wear any colors? Like, y’know, real colors?” He’s scoffing the question away, looking down the street, but she presses on, an intense curiosity suddenly burning in her mind. “I mean, colorful colors. Not black.”
“How many drinks’ve you had, Karen?”
“Come on, I’m serious!" She’s talking over him now, laughing - he’s shaking his head and swearing under his breath. "I’ve known you for... what, a year and a half now, and I swear, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in anything but black.” She waits for an answer to her (very legitimate, in her opinion) question, but he’s just looking at her, eyebrows raised and eyes narrowed, in that way that he does. That way that makes her squirm a little bit.
She’s never, not once, felt unsafe with Frank, but she’s felt her share of uncomfortable. She’d been glad to see him a few minutes ago - she hadn’t expected him to show up at Josie’s, of all places - but now her stomach is churning under his scrutiny.
She huffs in annoyance. Rubs her shoulders over her pea coat. Her breath floats up in front of her on the chilly air.
“Why are you even here, Frank? You said you wouldn’t keep tabs on me anymore, once this was... once everything was over. We agreed on that.”
“Come on, Karen, I’m not followin you around. I told you I wouldn’t do that shit any more, so I’m not doin it.”
He looks across the street, briefly, scans the block as he replies. He shuffles a little on his feet, restless.
“David, he... he called me earlier, probably a couple drinks ago now. Said he was comin here with you guys. Wanted me to join you.”
Karen raises an eyebrow. “And you actually came?” she wonders, disbelieving.
“Come on, don’t be stupid, I didn’t come to sit around and gossip with you guys about... about eels, or whatever. That seem like somethin I would do? Sit out at a public bar and get drunk off my ass?”
“Well, no, obviously not - thus the question.”
He meets her gaze now, and hesitates for a moment. He shifts again when he says,
“I got the feeling from his phone call that David might need some help gettin home.”
Understanding - and maybe a fair bit of drunkenness, yet - has Karen lean in and bump his elbow with her own at this confession.
“Oh, so you came to be our designated driver? Or, well.. designated.... deliverer? I guess?” His eyebrows crinkle at this, and he makes a ‘pfft’ noise that Karen thinks shouldn’t be quite so endearing.
“Don’t make it sound like a damn sorority outing, Karen, come on...” She finds him swaying towards her slightly in response to her elbow bump. He’s warm, and she’s chilly - she wraps her hands around his forearm where his hand is tucked into his coat pocket, absentmindedly trying to warm her fingers, burrowing them into the space between his sleeve and his torso.
“Hey, first off,” she begins with a laugh, “we are the Eel Gang, so don’t squash our dreams of becoming an official organization. Second, you definitely did come all the way out here to get us into our respective cabs and send us safely to our respective homes, so the designated driver thing isn’t totally off.” That warmth in she’d felt in her chest earlier has grown, fed by his warmth beside her, and by something else. They’ve begun to meander down the sidewalk in the direction of her apartment, which is only about two blocks south.
She thinks the breath he lets out might be a laugh, and he replies,
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get you all this far just to have you crack your skulls on the sidewalk after one too many shots.”
“Hmm. Fair.”
They walk in silence for a few minutes. Karen feels herself sober up slightly as the cold wind bites at her face, but she continues to lean into Frank’s side. Walking arm in arm like this is... well, it’s nice, and it’s been happening more and more frequently. On late nights after hours when Karen works too hard and Frank appears outside the Bulletin to walk her home; the occasional Sunday morning after they meet for breakfast at some shitty diner. She isn’t sure what it says about her that the Punisher is her preferred coffee date and escort around Hell’s Kitchen. She isn’t sure what it should mean to her, either... let alone what it might mean to him.
They turn the corner of her street and their pace slows, ever so slightly. Frank speaks softly, nudging Karen out of her thoughts:
“Hey, can I, uh... can I ask you somethin?”
He’s eyeing her keenly beneath his black beanie and hood, as though hoping to see the answer to whatever his question is before he has to ask it. Puzzled, and still a little stuck in her previous train of thought, Karen replies,
“Sure, Frank. Of course.”
Their pace slows even further, and Karen thinks she can feel a twitch in his arm.
“What did - what did you like about him? Murdock?”
Karen stops, stands stock still at this. Her hands quietly slip out from his warm bubble, and she shoves them into her coat pockets before they can catch a chill. Frank turns to face her. He’s still searching her eyes.
“I...”
He holds her gaze. She clears her throat and tosses her hair out of her eyes, looks down the street, searching for a sign of movement, a car, someone else on the sidewalk, anything else to distract from this moment. Nothing comes. It takes her a minute to formulate an answer to his question. She’s never lied to him - lies of omission notwithstanding - and she doesn’t want to start, no matter the strangeness of the question or the sick feeling creeping up into her gut. This part of her heart has... stiffened, recently, and prying it open feels like testing her luck: she might crack it. But she tries.
“I guess I... I liked that he always wanted what was absolutely best for his clients. People he hardly even knew, he... he always wanted to do the right thing by them. And he always had a clear idea of what the right thing was.”
He was also handsome and mysterious, she thinks, but that doesn’t seem worth saying, because Frank’s not a fourteen-year-old girl - and neither is she.
Frank had given a small nod at her reply, and now seems to be inspecting his shoes. He glances up at her, up at the nearby street light, across the street as he says,
“Did you uh... did you always agree with him? About what the right thing was?”
Karen’s heart is thumping a drumline in her chest now. She isn’t sure why. She’s talked about Matt since he’d died, with Foggy, plenty of times, but never with such effect. She shakes her head a little bit to clear out what seems to be a small swarm of quietly buzzing flies in her brain, and the movement allows the gentle breeze to blow her hair across her face. She takes the opportunity to move it aside, a habitual nervous gesture, and she scrubs her face lightly.
“No. No, I didn’t always agree with him,” she says. Honest. Elena - a whisper in her head, a pang in her gut - Frank, too. She’s seeing red.
She waits for his response, but none seems forthcoming, nothing after another short nod. She thinks about the last time he’d mentioned Matt, in that diner, right before - right before he’d shoved her away with all the force he could muster, none of it physical. That had been a wild turn in conversation, a very different conversation, a different context, as well. She isn’t sure of the position Matt seems to hold in Frank’s thoughts, why he thrusts Matt unexpectedly into conversations like this, like an ice bucket poured over her head just when she starts to feel warm. She can’t understand the gravity she feels when Frank brings up Matt’s name. Sure, Matt had been her - her something - her almost... but only for a moment. So it isn’t Matt’s death that weighs on her now, nor could it have been back then, in that booth, over coffee, before. She feels a sharp twang of frustration at the memory.
“You were wrong, you know? Back then,” she starts, not fully sure she intends to go with it. His eyes snap back to hers in an instant. “I wasn’t in love with Matt Murdock the last time you brought him up, and I’m not now. To be honest, I - I hardly even knew him.” She laughs bitterly at this profound truth for a brief moment, then drags in a deep breath and pushes it back out forcefully. She imagines that when it hits Frank in front of her it will make him see the truth in her words, make him accept it. God knows why he hasn’t yet.
He still seems to be searching her face for something, and she raises her eyebrows, lost for anything else to say. The situation really is that simple. She’d liked Matt - a lot. He was a good person. He’s gone now. She doesn’t plan to explain this to Frank, she shouldn’t need to - but it comes out anyway, in another form, angrily -
“You’re not a bad person, Frank. Do you know that?” He blinks rapidly. “Are you aware of that?”
His confusion is clear in the way his brows draw together and he looks away again, opens his mouth to argue.
“No, come on, Frank, look at me.” She feels like stamping her foot. I am not a fourteen-year-old.
“You are not a bad person,” she repeats, locking her gaze onto his. “You are not just the people you’ve killed, you’re not just the family you’ve lost, and Matt wasn’t just the clients he helped or - or the pedestal that I put him on.” She had not intended to confront this beast tonight, but she’s rolling now, and she can’t stop the flow of thoughts, can’t stop them from flowing right out of her mouth and into the air between them. “I’m not- I’m not just the good things you and Foggy see in me, either, or the bad shit that’s happened to me. You’re not a bad person, Frank. I know that you’ve - crossed lines that you can’t uncross, but - God, you’re not just those lines, either.”
Her words hang in the chill air, float up on her breath but linger just above where she and Frank stand, a haze around the nearby lamppost so that everything seems a shade darker. She can feel her pulse in her head and realizes that her hands are balled into fists in her pockets. The look on Frank’s face is almost angry. She heaves a sigh and knows that she’s being dramatic, but hey, she’s had three beers, and her filter is still waning.
“Frank, can you just accept, or pretend to accept, for the next - the next two minutes, that you are a decent person? That I think that you’re a good goddamn person?”
Through her exasperation she is struck by the almost physical ache she feels, the ache for him to believe what she’s saying. The frown remains planted on his face, and a part of her - the still-drunk part - wants to try to punch it off, but then he opens his mouth and says, very quietly:
“Okay.”
Her breath catches slightly. She needs confirmation - she hesitates, repeats:
“Okay?”
His chin dips down in a short nod. He holds his elbow out to her - an olive branch. A white flag. She winds a hand around it, slowly, even though they're only ten steps from her building’s front door.
On the doorstep she turns to face him once more, fingertips trailing on his sleeve. She shakes a few hairs out of her face again, biting her lips as she tries to read his thoughts in his eyes, or in the set of his mouth, or in the telltale twitching of his arm that traces down to his trigger finger.
“Do you believe me?” she asks, knowing the answer to be a steadfast no, but knowing that he’ll lie through his teeth to satisfy her and get her inside.
To his credit, she sees nothing of a lie as he says, “Two minutes ain’t up yet.”