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Frank Castle was terrifying. Frank Castle was a softie. Frank Castle was a different man to every person that met him. To some, he was a man who needed his revenge, a man who needed to kill his enemies and watch the life fade out of them. To others, he was someone who needed to fill the holes in his heart. Holes for those who had betrayed him. Holes for his wife, his son and his baby girl. Holes formed by loneliness.
Most men fear war, fear death, fear bloodshed, but not Frank Castle. No, Frank Castle fears the time after war, after death, after bloodshed. He doesn’t fear the sound of bullets bouncing of walls; he fears the silence that follows.
“I have no idea why Frank Castle does anything.”
Frank scoffs. As if. He may smash faces against mirrors, but every action he takes has motivation and thought. Take a good look at him, and everything he does suddenly makes sense.
The holes in his heart become spaces to fill with anger. To fill with the feeling of his fist against a concrete wall and the sound of his bones cracking. But when he’s tired himself out, he accompanies his loneliness with self-hate.
He’s disgusting. He’s almost got a new person for every person he lost.
David for Billy, a man he could trust.
Leo for his baby girl, so sweet and so smart.
Zack for his son, judging and rude, but still a kid.
Karen for Maria. Jesus. He wants to throw up.
Maria was white dresses with blue flowers. Soft skin and bright smiles. She was a place in his mind where he could escape to. A picture in his pocket that made the blood-stained floor disappear. Maria was the morning sky that made him want to lie down in the grass and laugh.
Karen is electric. Every time she opens her mouth, it’s a surprise. She’ll be soft and kind. She’ll be the slow raindrops on windows, but within a blink of an eye she becomes thunder and lightning, with cuts on her forehead that make him forget about his own broken ribs. She’s the adrenaline running through his veins, forcing him to move and never stop.
Beaten bloody and standing together, foreheads pressed against one another. He wants to kiss her. But it feels wrong.
Guilt.
He needed revenge for Maria and he couldn’t do anything until he dealt with it. But it’s all over now…
Is it betrayal to move on immediately after getting revenge? He shakes his head, then drops it on David’s old keyboard in the basement shithole.
He runs his hands through his cropped hair.
“–and now back, we have a clip of Hell’s Kitchen’s new vigilante falling off a building in the absence of Daredevil. It’s been three months since the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was last seen.”
Frank looks up at the TV.
“Red would have a smartass thing to say about this,” he mumbles to himself. “Tell me something stupid about happiness and shit.”
He looks at the screen again, just in time to see some blond kid tumble off the edge of a building and land in a dumpster.
Frank shakes his head. “Jesus.”
Looking away from the screen playing the news, Frank stares at the blank computer screen, before taking a deep breath and turning it on. His fingers are slower than David’s.
“God, what a stupid name,” he mutters before typing ‘Daredevil’ into the search bar.
The first result is a New York Bulletin article written by Karen Page.
“Can’t escape you, can I?” A half smile flits across Frank’s face before he clicks on the link.
A picture of the masked idiot takes up half the page. Frank rolls his eyes before skimming the article.
Last seen three months ago at Midland Circle, just before the building collapsed.
“Died doing something stupid. Jesus, Red.”
Frank turns the computer screen off. There’s another missing space in his life. Not that he would ever admit it to anyone, but the stupid Daredevil guy had some sort of impact on his life. He kind of relaxed when seeing the dumbass devil horns on the news. Knowing there was someone who–whatever. It didn’t matter.
Frank stands up and tugs his jacket on. He slides his hat on and pulls his hood over it. Reaching under the desk, he pulls out his gun and tucks it in the back of his pants.
His hand goes back to the gun as he considers. He’s visiting Karen… she has a gun. He doesn’t need one too. He takes the gun out and considers it for a moment before sliding it back and tucking it in.
Before going to Karen’s, Frank stops at the diner. The lady takes one look at him and calls out his order.
He raises an eyebrow.
“I told you. We don’t get hipsters very often.” She stalks off before Frank can make a sarcastic remark.
He rolls his eyes and sits down at the corner table.
Frank scarfs down his eggs and sourdough toast before throwing a couple bills on the table without looking at them.
When he gets to Karen’s apartment he hears voices inside. He gets closer to the door.
“Seriously if you don’t get out, I will shoot you.” He hears Karen say.
Before he can kick open the door, Frank hears the other person respond.
“I’m bulletproof.”
Karen groans. “No. You’re not.”
“Ugh. Fine.”
The door opens. Frank takes a step back. A dark haired girl walks out and Frank takes a couple more steps back because she smells like a distillery. Frank tells her as much and she sticks her middle finger up before lifting a camera that Frank hadn’t noticed and snapping a picture of him.
Just before he can say something, she’s already started walking away and calls out, “If you try something, I will throw you down the hallway.”
“She can actually do that.”
Frank looks back at Karen’s apartment to where Karen herself stands.
He wants to say something along the lines of ‘How are you?’ or even something as insane as ‘I’ve missed you,’ but instead he just asks “What?”
Karen invites him in as she explains, “She can actually pick you up and throw you.”
Frank stares at her and she laughs.
“Yeah. World’s actually got people weirder than you.”
Frank grumbles as he follows her into her kitchen. “No it doesn’t.”
Karen laughs again.
“So. How’s the life of Pete Castiglione going?”
“He’s fine.”
Karen pulls out two beers from her fridge as she asks, “And Frank Castle?”
“He’s okay.”
She pops open the lids to both bottles and slides one over to him. “Gonna have to be more specific than that.”
Frank sighs. “It’s strange. Going back to life. When I came back from the Marines, I had Maria and the kids. Not really difficult to return to normal life when you have a family.”
They sit in silence for a few moments.
“So where did Red go?”
He already knows. He wants to hear her say the masked idiot died. Not just write an article where she says he disappeared.
Karen tilts her head. “Red?”
Frank waves his hand in the air. “Daredevil, Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, whatever.”
Karen looks down. Her hand runs through her hair and she sighs. “Ma–Daredevil died. He, um, he had a building collapse on him.”
Frank raises an eyebrow. “You knew him? Personally.”
“Yeah. I hated it. He used to show up with bruises on his face and give me stupid excuses as to why he had them.”
Frank raises his other eye brow too. “You don’t seem to have too much problem to random bruises on my face.”
Karen runs her hand through her hair again. “Yeah but you don’t–” she stops speaking quietly. “You don’t lie about it. Matt, he lied. For a man who always knew when people were lying, he lied a lot.”
“Murdock?” Frank asks incredulously.
Karen exhales. “Shit. Yeah.” She starts to explain before he asks. “He was blind but his other scenes were better so he could hear people’s heartbeats and movements.” She rambles on, “He took a break from it and told me he didn’t miss it, next time I saw him, he was there to put me in police protection because a group of people he was fighting was really powerful and wanted to make him miserable. Their building was the building that collapsed on him. God, if only he had meant not missing it.”
Franks runs his hand over his face. “Jesus.”
Karen pushes the beer bottles away and jumps up onto her kitchen counter so her feet are dangling next to Frank.
“He would show up to work and say he got a busted lip from running into a wall.”
Frank doesn’t hear. “So the asshole got me arrested as Daredevil, then tried to keep me out of jail as a lawyer.” He isn’t sure if he meant to say a statement or ask a question. He asks a different question to avoid the conversation about the illegality of his presence. “Why are you involved with all of this?”
“I always get involved in everything. Vigilantes. Wilson Fisk. Secret ninja groups.”
Frank leans against the counter. “Still got that .380?”
Karen purses her lips. “You don’t have to ask every time you see me.”
“Yeah. I do.”
Karen rolls her eyes then pats at the counter. Frank gives her an odd glance before sitting on the counter next to her. They grab their beers and sip at them in the silence of a loud city.
“So… secret ninja groups?”
Karen’s about to answer seriously but she notices that he’s silently laughing at her.
She shoves at his shoulder and tries to keep a straight face but lands up smiling. “Shut up.”
Frank morphs his face into mock seriousness and nods. “Yes, ma’am. This is a serious conversation. You dealt with secret ninja groups.”
Karen nods back with mock seriousness. “Super secret ninja groups.”
“Wait, wait. If they were super secret ninja groups, how did you know about them?”
“Matt’s ex-girlfriend was involved with them apparently.”
Frank turns completely to face her.
“His ex-girlfriend was involved with super secret ninja groups?”
Karen puts her hands behind her and leans back. “Yeah. It sounds so stupid. But, um, the girl who was here earlier–”
“The one who smells like a distillery.”
“Yeah, she was involved with the whole thing. Matt’s death messed her up a bunch.”
“Clearly. She’s been drinking a lot.”
Karen lets out a small laugh. “No, actually. She was like that before too.”
Frank shakes his head. “Jesus. What kind of people did Murdock get involved with? A super secret ninja group, an alcoholic, a reporter who throws herself into danger–”
Karen shoves him.
“So where did you fit into the whole Murdock thing? I know you worked with him but…” Frank trails off, hoping she’ll finish the thought.
She does. “I started working with Matt and Foggy after I was their first client.”
He side-eyes her. “You needed a defense attorney?”
“I used to work for a company that was influenced by Fisk. Stuff happened. I was framed for murder.”
“Murder?” Frank’s expression is inscrutable.
Karen gives a sarcastic laugh. “They found me in my apartment with my coworker’s dead body that had been stabbed repeatedly. I was holding the knife.”
“Jesus. How did you get out of the whole thing?”
She shrugs. “Matt and Foggy.”
Shaking his head, Frank repeats, “Jesus.”
Going over Karen’s recent history makes Frank realize that shit, this woman goes through nonsense even when he’s not involved.
Their beers are finished. They get off the counter and move to her living room sofa. Falling back onto the sofa, Karen lands half on top of him and scrambles to the side. He gets a whiff of vanilla and his head spins.
Maria wore vanilla.
--
He’s in the basement shithole again. Hard not to be if that’s where he lives. It’s the worst place to live. It smells like blood that’s been washed off hands but never washed out of memory. There’s no color. His skin is the only thing in the room that’s not a shade of gray. He wants color.
He wants to wrap blonde hair arounds his fingers. He wants to drown in ocean eyes. He wants to feel the water rushing over his skin. He wants vanilla.
Vanilla.
Frank stands up and picks up the chair he was sitting on only throw it back on the floor. He kicks the fallen down chair.
He needs to hear the sound of bones crack. Someone else’s or his. The sound of blood fills his ears and red tinges his vision. There’s no one left with bones to crack.
Frank turns to the wall and punches it. His shoulders twist and he leans into it. This punch would have broken a person’s nose.
His knuckles crack.
What is he doing?
What would Maria have wanted for him?
She’s dead. He doesn’t know what she would have wanted for him. Frank takes his other fist and punches the wall.
He screams. His voice sounds like gravel.
He punches the wall again. It hurts. So much.
There’s no blood, just broken bones and bright red bruises.
He’s so tired. So, so tired. He falls asleep on the ground.
--
His hands are useless when wrapped tightly in bandages. He’s useless.
He wakes up, looks in the mirror and wants to die. He wants to die. Maybe if Billy Russo felt like this, Frank wouldn’t. But now there’s just another person who looks in the mirror every morning and feels like he does.
He can’t cook. His hands are too slow.
Frank goes to the diner again. He eats his stupid eggs and sourdough toast slowly. He blames it on his useless hands.
He can’t open the door to get back into the basement shithole because he broke his stupid hands. His head slams against the door and he groans. It starts raining. He groans again.
When Karen opens her door, he’s soaking wet.
“Frank! Oh my god, come in.”
The second he moves to stand on her welcome mat, she’s moving around, grabbing a towel, a spare pair of sweatpants and a shirt. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and Karen drops everything on the wood floor, reaching forward to his wrapped up hands. He flinches, when she holds them cautiously, as if his hands were a child’s.
She looks him in the eye and his heart stops. Piercing blue. She can see straight through him. He wants to scream. His wife and kids are dead and he was trying his hardest to be closed off. Reserved. But she reads him like an open book. He wants to be back to his basement shithole so he can make himself hurt more, but Karen fucking Page is in his way and she’s still holding his broken hands.
Her voice is quiet. “Frank.”
He tears his eyes away from hers and stares at the ground.
Karen’s quiet is her angry. “Frank Castle, look at me.”
He glances at her face quickly before turning away, trying to pull his hands away from her, but she instead grips at his forearms.
The soft rain becomes thunderous. “Frank. What did you do?”
He never backs down from a challenge. He looks at her straight in the eye again and starts yelling. “I’m getting attached!”
Their faces are close together again, like they were that night at the shore. When he was yelling that he couldn’t lose her too. When will she learn? He will always have to keep her at an arm’s length because when she dies, like they all do, he’s not going to be able to recover.
He’ll never be able to go back to that diner, because it will hurt too much to go there and not come by her apartment right after.
He’ll never be able to stand in the rain and not crumble to the ground, because everytime the sky opens up and pours down on him, it will remind him what her gaze felt like.
He’ll never be able to patch himself up, because he’ll remember the softness of her hands and how she could always do it better.
Frank stumbles back, dragging Karen with him. He’s already too attached.
--
The basement shithole has color now. Karen has stopped by once a day to check on him because she doesn’t think he’ll ever come back on his own free will.
The first day, she came with a thermos of soup. He told her he didn’t need it, but she told him that she wasn’t leaving until he drank the whole thing. He chugged it.
“Wow,” she had said sarcastically. “Way to make a girl feel special.”
She changed his bandages and left.
She didn’t come the second day until late in the evening. At 5:00 PM, when she still hadn’t shown up, regardless of her threat to show up everyday, Frank had leaned back in David’s computer chair and let out a brief humorless laugh. Getting rid of her had been easier than he thought. She showed up four hours later and he rolled his eyes and hid a smile.
She saw it.