Work Text:
“So.”
Karen’s hands still on her keyboard but she doesn’t look up from her screen. She waits. Raises her eyebrows at the silence that follows. Then -
“The Punisher’s back.”
Her throat closes up for a moment.
Foggy is sitting at his desk off to her left, baseball in hand, twirling it in his hands while his feet stretch out in front of him. His ankles are crossed. Damn him for pretending to be so relaxed about this, honestly, when the mere mention of it sets her heart pounding. But she sighs - it’s obvious in Foggy’s eyes that he takes no part of this conversation lightly. Of course he doesn’t. He’s too smart for that. He’s too good a friend. He’s just trying to make her comfortable.
She works to corral her emotions, then closes her laptop.
“Yeah,” she says. It’s been almost a month since the Punisher came roaring back into the city like one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Foggy’s clearly been building up to this conversation. Over the last few weeks, as his silence on the subject stretched on, Karen couldn’t decide whether she was hoping he would bring it up or not. On the one hand, it’s none of his business. On the other hand, he’s her best friend, and she hasn’t been able to talk about that day to anyone since she walked out of that hospital room.
“So…” Foggy sets the baseball down beside his desk lamp and leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, brows furrowed, something akin to concern in his eyes. “Have you heard from him?”
She breathes deeply.
“No.” It’s honest, but it doesn’t feel that way, so she continues before Foggy can stop her. “But I went to see him. That day that the police had him in custody. When he was in the hospital.”
Foggy looks a little surprised now, but seemingly not alarmed. Karen thinks he knows her too well.
“I, uh, pulled the lawyer card to get the cop on duty to let me in. Some newbie from the 15th.”
This is not the heart of the matter that Foggy is so gently trying to get to, bless him. She goes on.
“He was asleep when I got there. He was - he was in bad shape.” Her throat constricts again at the memory. There were so many cuts on his face. Their laughs .
“They had him for the murder of three women, Foggy, and I knew - you know - that that’s not him. I had to find out what happened.”
The chair creaks as Foggy leans back in it, passing through the dim ring of light from the lamp. Somehow, the darkness in the office this late at night makes her feel safer telling him this stuff. Maybe because this - this time of night - this is Frank’s. This is when he operates, not only out there, on the streets, but in her head, in the back, in dark corners, where she’s able to ignore the thoughts just enough to pretend that they don’t affect her.
“I pulled a favor with the ME on call, and saw the bodies of the women. Me and a Homeland agent concerned with the case. He - he wans’t the one who killed them, and when we told him, he tried to bust out of there, guns blazing, and I tried to -“
She pauses, agitated, heart racing as it had then. What had she tried to do?
She’d tried to stop him. Stop him from leaving the room.
Stop him from leaving her.
Again.
She’d tried to stop him from being the Punisher .
A fool’s errand, maybe.
She glances up at Foggy’s small nod.
“He’s Frank,” he says. “Guns blazing is how he operates. Literally.”
Karen scoffs gently at that.
“Yeah,” she whispers.
Foggy’s still frowning.
“Hey, Karen, come on. What aren’t you telling me?”
God, who knows? It feels like she still hasn’t told herself everything. Being in that hospital room was the closest she’d come to being honest about it all, and that was only because it was Frank in front of her. Because she never lied to him, like he never lied to her.
He never lied to her - that might be what hurts the most now.
I don’t want to.
She runs a hand through her hair.
“You know my brother.”
He knows what she means, and though he looks confused, Foggy nods.
“And Wesley.” His name comes out as a whisper.
Foggy nods again.
“There are -“ she gets stuck, clears her throat. Tries again.
“There are reasons that I always empathized with Frank, you know? I always sort of… saw pieces of myself in him. And maybe at first I was projecting, maybe I was trying to prove that I could be saved, that I was still a good person, not him.”
She fiddles with the seam of her sleeve, looking down at her lap.
“But I dunno, Foggy, I - I still don’t agree with him, I don’t think that he has to be - who he is. I think that he believes in what he’s doing for the right reasons, if there are any, and I even understand his reasons. But I guess that…”
She sighs.
“I guess that I thought - since I told you and Matt about Kevin, and about Wesley, I’ve sort of been able to come out the other side of all of it, you know? And being around you guys again, having you treat me the way you always have, even though you know everything now, it - it helps, so much. It changes so much. Not everything, but really, so much.
“I thought - I thought that maybe I could be that, for him. For Frank.”
Her eyes are prickling now. Foggy asks quietly from his desk,
“So you… you offered?”
She swings her hair away from her face and looks him in the eye, grimacing.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I offered.”
He looks sad - “And?”
She laughs bitterly, lifting her hands and letting them fall back into her lap. She feels a tear making its way slowly but surely out of her left eye, and she swipes at it angrily.
“What do you think, Foggy? I offered the Punisher a life of non-crime, non-violence. How do you think he took it?”
“Well, it’s not like you asked him to run away with you into the sunset, right then and there.”
“I -“ she stutters - not in so many words - “I mean -“
“Oh, Karen.”
“I didn’t! Not - not exactly! I just tried to get him to consider life beyond the Punisher.”
“A life with you, you mean.”
“Yes, fine! A life with me. Is that crazy?”
“Well…”
“Oh, damn it.” She slams her hand onto her desk and stands up, pacing now, rolling her chair away, hands on her head. “Foggy, I know. I know it was a stupid thing to offer, I know it was a stupid thing to imagine, I know it was probably reckless and dangerous, considering he was in the custody of the police at the time, and we’d just gotten him out of a pair of handcuffs , but I - he needed to know that he had that option, that it was possible! That it’s possible for someone to love him, even now!”
She takes one more step, and then she freezes.
Her stomach drops.
The office is silent for a beat.
Foggy exhales sharply from behind her. “Whoa.”
Karen bites her lips.
This is… this is new.
She turns around and grabs her chair again, falling down into it with a thud. She’s shaking a little, staring at the floor.
“Um,” she starts. She doesn’t go on. She doesn’t know how she would have.
Foggy mutters a Jesus , and she nods. Indeed, what would Jesus think of her loving a serial killer? What would Matt?
She finds she couldn’t care less.
It’s true. She loves him. She loves Frank Castle. She loves the Punisher. She loves him even as she sits here, angry with herself for loving him, embarrassed to admit it to her best friend, trying her best to convince herself otherwise, because it shouldn’t be true, but it is.
She’s not sure exactly how she loves him, but she does.
There was never any thought beyond helping him, really. Not until that day in the hospital. Not until she was faced with his scars, with his bullet wounds, with his blood, for the umpteenth time. Not until he had cried while she held his hand, until he had made it clear that for her he would break down. For her he would be honest.
She had thought that maybe these were good things. Maybe he would want her help as much as she wanted to give it.
But then he had tried to leave her again, and she’d found that she couldn’t bear that.
When she’d woken up that morning, she hadn’t given much thought to how the day would end. She was so singularly focused on getting herself to the hospital and seeing him.
He’d left her so many times already. In the diner, the woods, the hotel elevator.
This time, she’d said whatever she could to get him to stay. To understand why she couldn’t handle this again. She’d said things which, like now, she hadn’t even realized she’d thought about, but which rang true, which she felt with every fiber of her being.
She hadn’t given much thought to how that day would end, or what would happen the next day. And then suddenly the concept of the next day, another day after another goodbye, was completely fucking unacceptable.
Apparently she still hasn’t accepted it. Because he’s still here. Frank’s still here, he’s out there right now, and she’s not with him. He’s not with her. He had the audacity to say goodbye to a woman who loves him and then to - apparently - move on with his life. And she’s here. Saying these things. Having these life-changing realizations.
Jesus.
Karen lifts a hand and lays it hesitantly on her laptop, staring at the warm metal. She opens her mouth, reeling.
“I, uh… I have to think about this,” she says, brows furrowed. Foggy remains in his seat as she packs her bag up slowly, not daring to look him in the eye. Not yet.
When she finishes, he speaks.
“Karen… you know it’s okay, right?”
She stares at her bag for another second, then looks up.
“I mean,” Foggy says, “it kind of makes sense, you know? You’re right, you and Frank have some shit in common, some real messed up shit. He saw that the first day we met him, you remember? He only wanted to talk to you.”
Oh, she remembers.
“I would argue that there are some differences in your specific situations- and I mean, some big ones - but still. It makes sense that you connected, and maybe you are just projecting, maybe you aren’t, but frankly, it makes some cosmic sense that you two… found each other. I get it.” He pauses, looking a little frazzled, but earnest as ever. “I mean, I don’t get it, but….” he shrugs. “I get it.”
This makes Karen close her eyes for a moment. She wills her thudding heart to slow down. How did she end up with this, the absolute best of all friends, out of the whole universe of possible best friends? A smile makes its way unbidden to her face and she shakes her head when she stands up and grabs Foggy’s hand, squeezes. He squeezes back and returns her smile.
“Thanks, Foggy.” The anvil now sitting in her gut seems the tiniest bit lighter.
“I mean it, you know,” he replies. “The only reason I invoked the Good Lord’s name was because… well, it’s kind of a big thing. And it seems like maybe you didn’t know about it, before.”
She shakes her head again. “I didn’t.” The anvil swings.
He nods and wiggles her hand around a little bit. “Well, I’m here, if and when you need to talk more about it.”
She nods and gives his hand one last squeeze. “I know.” She thinks that maybe this is the point, this is why she realized it now . We’ve all got an anvil, and when it gets heavy, there are people to help hold it up. Foggy is one of those people.
She walks home that night thinking that Frank is another, no matter how much she’s subconsciously avoided admitting it; no matter that sometimes he feels like an extra weight on top of the ones she’s already carrying…. or maybe he’s both. He’s already a walking contradiction, so maybe he holds her up even as he weighs down upon her from whatever distance now exists between them.
What she knows for sure is that Frank’s gotten under her skin, and he’s not leaving any time soon. She loves him.
She doesn’t know what to do about it.