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She wakes up with blood on her hands.
(This is not the last time that will be the case.)
Breathe, Karen, she tells herself, because her heart is spilling out onto the floor and her head is whirling and she has to keep it together. But there is a dead man at her feet and his blood on her hands and her body will not comply.
.
The world keeps spinning, she almost finds it funny when she's not crying. The world always keeps spinning. Someone tried to kill her last night and the world is still spinning. She can't quite believe it.
(If she were religious she would think that this was punishment for his sins, but she's not and she doesn't know what to think.)
Matthew Murdock walks into the room and it’s like he causes time to stop, causes her heart to falter, causes her focus to narrow to the movement of his lips.
“We’re going to take care of you,” he says, and she doesn't know why (or maybe she does) but she believes him.
.
His home is bare with long sloping lines and dimly lit corners. She supposes it doesn't matter what it looks like, but she thinks it's beautiful. She think he's beautiful. (It's something in the shade to his smile and the cadence of his voice, the way he laughs with his head back, the way that somehow, miraculously, unexpectedly, inexplicably he already feels like home.)
When she wakes in the middle of the night with a start, she is surprised by the unfamiliar walls, the darkened palette so different from her own pastel, pristine apartment.
She pads across the floor, the concrete cold on the soles of her feet. Matt is asleep in the next room, glasses off and face softened with sleep. He looks innocent and young and far too good for her.
She leaves.
(And he follows, but she doesn’t know that yet.)
.
She thinks a lot about that night, even months after it happens. She remembers the way Matt had stilled when she took off her shirt, the cadence of his breathing quickening, the way the rain soaked straight through to her skin, her heart thudding in her ears, the silhouette of the man in the mask, the slope to his shoulders, the curl of his lips.
She thinks a lot about that night.
.
She fits in at Nelson and Murdock better than she could have ever imagined. She’s always been a bit of a roamer, floating amidst people who always seem to leave her, one way or another. But Matt and Foggy, they feel like an extension of herself, as easy as breathing.
Foggy can make her laugh so hard that her chest hurts, a gut wrenching, light headed kind of happiness.
(Matt causes her chest to hurt in an entirely different way, but she doesn’t talk about that.)
.
When Karen was young, she wanted to be an artist. She saw the world in shades of color, splotches of paint and crisp lines. She hasn’t touched her brushes in years, but she looks at Matt and her fingers itch.
(If she could, she would paint him with bruises blossoming like flowers, kindness spreading like water stains across his skin, coloring the quirk to his lips and the tilt to to his head. She thinks, vaguely, indefinitely, fiercely that she could spend an eternity cataloging every inch of his skin.)
.
Sometimes, Karen closes her eyes, raises her hands to her face, feels the movement of bone and the pull of skin, the shape to her lips and the arch of her brow bone, traces fingers across the entire surface. She doesn’t know why she does it.
(Except she does, of course she does)
.
“What do you miss most?” she asks Matt one time.
He pauses, lips half cocked, contemplating. He always considers everything, Matt does.
“Forgetting,” he says, eventually.
His lips turn up then, as if he’d said something funny. After a moment, she laughs too, awkward and a beat too late. She doesn’t get the joke.
(Later though, she discovers that she knows exactly what he means. There are some things you can’t come back from.)
.
She is not stupid. There’s more to Matthew Murdock than meets the eye. There’s a quiet power to him, a danger, a stillness. She’d noticed it the first moment that she had seen him. He had been a twenty-eight year old blind lawyer, fresh out of law school, and he’d told her he would protect her and she’d believed him. She is not stupid.
.
They are both a little drunk when she turns to him, mouth too loose for safety.
"I killed a man," she tells him, just like that. It's not what she thought she was going to say. "I shot him, right in the chest."
Matt stares at her for a long moment. She can see herself reflected in his dark glasses and she finds herself staring at that instead of his face.
(She can't bring herself to look at him and see her own judgment staring back at her. )
"Karen," he says, "I'm so sorry."
It's only then that she realizes she's crying.
His shirt is soft against the skin of her cheek and he smells like drugstore cologne and the rust of fresh blood. She wraps her arms around him, burying her face in the muscle of his shoulder.
(He's still the only thing that really makes her feel safe.)
.
Things do not stay calm for long, if there’s one thing Karen’s learned it’s that. It seems like one minute, they are drinking wine, laughing, arms slung over each others shoulders, and the next the world is falling down around them.
(And Daredevil is there in the middle of it, saving them all, but at this point no one is surprised, least of all Karen.)
In the aftermath, Karen goes to find Matt. She stands outside the door to his apartment--pausing for a moment on the threshold, pressing her hand against the cool wood-- and then pushes it open.
“Matt?” she calls, the word echoing through the empty space.
He enters the doorway of the bedrom and she’s running towards him before she’s even really seen him, wrapping her arms so tightly around him that he lets out an exhale of pain
“Sorry, sorry,” she says, releasing him.
He looks terrible (well as terrible as Matt can look) a study in white and red and purple.
“Karen,” he says, face melting, in shame she thinks, though she can hardly imagine why.
“I know,” she says, cupping his face in her hand.
“What?” he breathes, like he can’t believe she’d have figured it out.
“God, Matt,” she says. “It’s not like you were that subtle.”
.
He kisses her like he’s been waiting a long time to do it.
(Lord knows she’s been waiting long enough.)
.
She wakes up with blood on her hands.
(This is not the first time.)
“Matt,” she whispers.
He groans in his sleep, hair flopping adorably over his left eye.
“Matt,” she says again. “Your stitches have opened up.”
He wraps an arm around her, pulls her into his chest.
“No they haven’t,” he murmurs against her neck.
(He’s lying, but she lets him stay, lets him press kisses against her pulse, lets him, lets him, lets him.)