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these hands could hold the world
Her hand is on the door handle when Matt’s gaze catches for a beat. It’s just a small flicker – a lurch of confusion. Realisation too, maybe.
‘Who’s coat is that?’ He asks. Her heart trills in her chest and she almost swears because she knows he can hear it.
Instead, she clears her throat.
‘What are you talking about? It’s mine,’ she tells him. ‘I have to go –’
‘Karen,’ he breaks in, and there’s gentleness there but an underlying current of irritation and it has her turning from the doorway entirely. Her hands retreat into the sleeves, feeling for where she’s turned over the cuffs. ‘Karen, I know you’re –’ and he breaks off, because he doesn’t want to say it, but something bitter in the back of her head finishes it for him anyway. I know you’re lying to me.
She hates that. Maybe more than any of the rest of it. Even with how much he’d hidden from them, her and Foggy and everyone else – it’s how she’d been denied all the little white lies across the years without her even knowing. That’s what rankles. Her shoulders hike up around her ears as Matt tells her quietly, almost embarrassed;
‘It doesn’t smell right.’
It had smelled of him, when she’d pulled it on. A bitter hit of gunpowder. Sweat and blood and salt underneath. It had fit her okay – except just round the collar, where it had sloped off her shoulders. The hoodie bulks it out; the one with the holes in the stomach, and as she slips a finger through she wonders if it was chewed up by a dog or caught on a nail or if they’re bullet holes, if he’d bled out in this hoodie then carefully, after being stitched up and put together, washed it clean with warm water and soap. Unable, somehow, to let it go.
‘It’s no one’s, Matt,’ she tells him, and it’s almost true.
He thinks, on reflection, as he presses his foot on the gas and lurches a little faster down the highway, that anything would have been better than this.
He would have put up with a barely-decipherable email to decode from David. A crackly report on the radio. Hell, even a phone call from Murdock.
Anything other than being sat in some middle-of-nowhere Philly diner, idly watching over a stranger’s shoulder as the news mingles with static on a portable TV set barely three-inches wide.
Anything other than seeing some lanky girl facing off half a dozen news mics and realising, even on a tiny screen with shitty signal, even hidden under a hoodie and red-rimmed eyes, that he would recognise that slash of blonde hair and long, pale face anywhere.
Anything would have been better than snatching the remote from the diner counter, slamming through channels until he can confirm he’s not having fucking visions, can confirm it’s really her. Can see the conviction in the set of her mouth and the jut of her chin.
Anything would have been better than looking down at the sharp starburst of pain across his palm and realising the water glass he was holding is spilling in shards across the counter. Anything would have been better than staring down at the blood diluting across the surface in front of him and knowing that people are staring, muttering behind their hands and none of it matters because he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe – because Karen Page just told twenty fuckin’ news reporters and the world and him, him
(and he wonders, briefly, if she’s thinking about him, if she wanted to call him, if she was reaching out silently with something secret and quiet in the core of her chest the way he has been this whole time. Wonders if she felt it, felt him trying to call out to her through sheer force of will as he journeyed, felt the sun of LA and the cold snap of the Canadian border along with him. Wonders if all the time that she’s been staring out at these reporters, wearing his coat and his hoodie, he’s been on her mind. Wonders if she knows he’d die for her, wonders if –)
told all of them that Wilson Fisk tried to have me killed.
Anything would have been better than streaming down the highway, screaming at the traffic, the radio, at the damn engine on his shitty rental, wondering if Karen Page will still be alive by the time he gets to New York.
‘You did good, kid,’ Ellison tells her in the brief pause before shit hits the fan. In the tiny relief of seconds where they think they might have won.
‘My voice didn’t even shake,’ she says, all in one breath. She had thought, at least, that she might have sounded scared. But her voice is playing back to them – from phones and screens, tinny digital replays all around them, and it sounds strong.
The coat is heavy on her shoulders. Weighing her down and anchoring her in place all at once.
Ellison gives her a look, head quirked to one side – but lets it go. Nods. She’s grateful for that.
‘It sure didn’t.’ One last beat. He reaches out and sticks a finger through the hole in her hoodie, jabs at her bare stomach beneath it. ‘You look like crap,’ he tells her. She opens her mouth to retort.
And then everything goes to shit.
‘I’m gonna fucking kill you, Murdock, you fucking jackass. You think you’re gonna survive this time round? Good fuckin’ luck, I will fucking bury you if you don’t pick up your god damn phone –
‘Who keeps calling you?’ Karen hisses as they struggle through the crowd, pulling the hood up around her ears and getting such an overwhelming flood of Frank Frank Frank, the usual reek of blood mingled with fabric softener and old-fashioned bar soap, that she stops short for a second and Ellison has to wrench on her elbow to keep her going.
He pulls his phone out of his pocket, shaking his head, scrawling through the litany of missed calls and voicemails.
‘Other than just about every journalist in the city?’ He asks, eyebrow raised, and pulls her into a cab.
‘You don’t know me, Ellison, but believe me, I know you, and if Karen’s off doing stupid shit on national fucking news I know you’re involved somehow. So you get her on the phone right now and get her to call me, alright? Call me.’
The door to Fogwell’s slams shut behind Matt and Karen is ready to disintegrate, to break herself apart and let each disparate part float away from her, just the bare core of her left behind.
The traffic inches along the New Jersey Turnpike and he rests his forehead against the wheel, hands wrapped up so tight his knuckles are white, eyes wrenched shut as he screams and screams.
Her phone keeps buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and finally she rips it out of her pocket, throws it down on the table, hard enough that the screen cracks and Foggy has his arms wrapped round her shoulders as she howls into his shirt.
‘Nelson? Pick up. It’s – you know who it is. Just… just let me know she’s okay. Alright? Call me.’
He tries her apartment and she’s not there. He tries the Bulletin and the office full of journalists who all stare at him with eyes so wide they forget to be hungry as he quietly leans across the front desk and asks the receptionist if Ms. Page is in today. He keeps his voice soft, desperately willing all of them to forget – or just ignore, just for a minute – the fact that he is the Punisher. Just a few more moments –
‘You mean Karen?’ The girl asks, mouth twisted up in a funny wobble. ‘I don’t think she works here any more. I haven’t seen her since the attack.’
‘The attack?’
In the lift down from the Bulletin’s offices his knees give out. He crumples downwards and gives himself the twelve floors down to dissolve into Karen’s voice mail box.
When the doors open again his eyes are wet but he’s standing and he’s still going.
She’s wrapped up in the hoodie, still, late at night when she can’t sleep. She buries her nose in the soft cotton, trying to heave in the smell that’s been superseded by Ellison’s knish and the cigarette the cab driver was smoking and the quiet reek of her own terror.
Her phone wouldn’t stop going off. Endless texts and emails, requests for interviews or comments or appearances on morning talk shows, distorted by splintered glass. She scoffs at them all and finally switches her phone off entirely, leaves it on the gym floor with her jeans and her shoes.
Foggy’s back at his apartment – he wanted to shower and see Marci, change his clothes and steel himself against the next day. Matt has slunk into Daredevil and into the night.
The gym is awfully big and awfully cold without the two of them.
Eventually, she crawls off of her makeshift bed on some dusty, low-slung sofa and searches through cupboards and storage closets until she finds an ancient radio. She can barely tune into a channel but she keeps running through the stations until she hits something she likes. Something distant and familiar, the deluge of melancholic Britpop and nineties almost-rock that she and Kevin would yell along to in the car, bursting out all their sadness and teen angst to the crisp Vermont air. The sort of stuff that sticks in her throat and lulls her to sleep all at once.
He finds Murdock almost by accident.
He’s not a hard man to track down. There aren’t many people darting around Hell’s Kitchen dressed as a ninja dangling people off of rooftops.
His trigger finger taps like a typewriter key against his thigh and he wants, desperately, to shoot whatever bastard Murdock has on the end of that rope. He waits, instead, waits for Murdock to pull him back up onto the roof – because of course he does – and lurches out with a well-aimed kick that puts the guy straight to sleep.
Even with the mask Frank can still feel that prissy stare on him.
‘Where is she, Murdock?’
There’s a small moment as the man in the mask pauses, considering. Then his shoulders drop and he sighs a touch, crouches down to his now-unconscious victim and starts tying his hands together.
‘Thought you’d be after Fisk,’ Matt tells him, absently pulling off the mask. He supposes there’s no point for it now; they both know each other. No secrets.
‘I don’t give a shit about Fisk. Where’s Karen?’
Alright. Maybe some secrets.
Matt’s head tilts; regarding him. Frank wonders if he can tell that he’s just sand in an egg timer at this point. Wearing away to bare bones and nothing.
‘I’m going to go kill Fisk. Are you coming?’
Frank stares at him and the darkness stretches between the two of them as Matt pulls off his gloves and flexes his fingers. In. Out. In. Out. His knuckles are bruised, mottled in red and blue, and when Frank looks down to consider his own hands he realises they’re clear. There’s the scars, of course, and the callouses from years of handling guns and knives, and if he looks closely there’s maybe the shadowy remains of bruises – but, altogether, its just pink, battle-worn skin and he finds himself asking, surprising even himself;
‘You doin’ alright Murdock?’
The man on the floor begins to stir. Matt kicks him in the head. He stills again.
‘She’s at Fogwell’s Gym.’
Frank nods.
‘Thanks. I – thank you.’
He’s turning away when Matt calls after him;
‘She can look after herself, you know.’ He glances back, over his shoulder. ‘She doesn’t need you. Or me. Not any more.’
There’s a long, long silence, where Frank finds himself staring up to the sky, down at the floor – trying, desperately, to contain his frustration. Eventually, he laughs.
‘Yeah, I, uh – I don’t think she ever needed us, Murdock.’ And then, throwing over his shoulder, trying to soothe the sting as he pulls the rooftop door open and steps into the gloomy blue light of the stairwell that will lead him down to the street, to his beaten-up truck and eventually, finally, to Karen; ‘see you around, Red.’
There’s a pounding on the door to the gym and she erupts into waking, all the air torn from her chest as she sits, bolt upright, on the sofa. The radio is still playing, late-night talk radio, and her mind pulls into static bursts. Foggy has a key. Matt has a key. Nadeem is dead. Mahoney would call first. No one else knows –
Her hand reaches for the gun she has slept with under her pillow.
In the ringing silence that comes after she has pulled the trigger, the knocking has stopped. She waits, heart hammering, and it’s only when she hears the small voice calling through to her that she allows her shoulders to unhinge, allows her elbows to unlock and her body to flood free of adrenaline.
When she pulls away from him the first time, she feels his arms tighten round her waist and she stays, for just a few seconds more. Dust rains around them from the warning shots she had put into the ceiling.
When she pulls away the second time, he says to her, I thought you would be dead before I get to you and she realises he’s crying.
‘Hey,’ she tells him, her hands shaking as she holds his face, swipes away the tears with her thumb and she opens her mouth to tell him – to tell him that it’s alright, that she’s alright, she’s just fine and she’s not going anywhere. But he’s interrupting her, voice thick and tight;
‘I can’t lose you, Karen. Not you too.’
Later, as the sky outside begins to lighten and the day comes across them, as grey and miserable as the last, Karen’s tea turning cool and then cold in her hands, she looks up at him.
‘Matt’s going to kill Fisk.’
He nods, scooping his head down low. They are sat opposite one another on the sofa, he with his legs crossed, her with her knees pulled up to her chin – but her toes are pressed up against his calf. Constant contact. He watches her as she carefully leans down, places her mug on the floor. Picks at a hole in the sweats she’d pulled on in the moments after they’d both realised she was only in a hoodie – his hoodie, and he hadn’t mentioned it but she’d caught his eye as he’d spotted the familiar bullet-holes, the well-worn sleeves pushed up to her elbow because they were too big on her. He wonders if she’d recognised the expression on his face. If it was obvious how in love with her he was, how big his heart sat in his chest and how much it ached for her when he saw her wrapped up in his too-big clothes like this. The sort of thing lovers do.
‘I can’t let him.’ She tucks her chin against her knees and tells him, quietly, ‘I think I have to do it. It’s Matt’s fight but – it’s mine too. I don’t want him to – to lose that part of himself. The part you lose when you kill someone,’ she explains, holding her clenched fingers up to her chest as if trying to locate that missing part somewhere in her sternum.
She looks to him then, quick. He’s not sure what she expects to find in him – horror, maybe. Confusion. And he expects there’s a story there, the story of how Karen learned to use a gun and lose that part of herself, and maybe, many years ago, there was a Frank Castle out there who might have been horrified.
For now, though, he just nods, and asks her;
‘Alright. What’s the plan?’
After – after, when Fisk is dead and they’re in the truck, paused at a red light and she’s thanking him for driving her out of the city – after all that, stopped at a gas station, she switches her phone back on as Frank goes to get coffee.
She’s deleting voicemails when she finds his.
Frank comes back to the truck. The coffee cups are burning his fingertips and he’s struggling to open the door, swearing a little as the drink spills over onto his jacket, scalding his hand. He’s stood holding the door open with his knee, the smell of gas pricking irritably at his nostrils, covered in coffee, when Karen Page looks up at him from her phone, face wet with tears, and tells him she loves him too.