Work Text:
She has been working for the Bulletin for two months when she stumbles upon the first hints of corruption in the District 3 (she only stumbles because she has been looking into something else entirely). Corruption in the city council office is not a new story (in fact, she thinks greasing the local politician’s hand must be covered in the first few pages of the criminal handbook). However it is a new chapter considering that the council had been flushed out when Wilson Fisk went down.
She sits on the information for a few days, mulling it over in her head. Perhaps she has been a bit naïve in thinking that those who made the political decisions that affected Hell’s Kitchen would learn from watching their predecessors being hauled off to jail. Perhaps this was inevitable --- a return to the way things normally work.
She should leave it be.
(she can’t; she is not built like that)
Karen stares at the walls that still proudly bear Ben Urich’s headlines (she will never take them down). She knows what he would say. It is entirely different than what he would do. She takes a deep breath and nods. Alright Ben (he is giving her a stern look from the great beyond, she knows it).
She tells Ellison that she is putting her current story on hold for something that may turn out to be a wild goose chase (her gut tells her it’s not). She doesn’t give him details, instead leaving just enough breadcrumbs to justify throwing away at least a week’s worth of work. He doesn’t look convinced. In fact he looks like he is considering assigning her something light and fluffy so she doesn’t wind up doing what she is about to do. She smiles and reminds him why he took a chance on her in the first place.
Then she starts digging.
X
As it turns out it’s not as hard to connect A to B as she thought. Though to be fair, Karen gets a little help from a rather abrasive PI who like her has been working on something else entirely. When they come face to face (having been led to the crossroads independently) they eye one another almost territorially. Then realize they can help each other (a much more acceptable form of greasing one’s palms).
The private eye (Jessica) looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks and she reeks of cheap booze (Karen takes a moment to wonder if she is teetering on the edge of something similar). “Council boy’s wife wanted me to tail her husband. Thought he was sticking it in his secretary. Turns out he is sticking his hand in the Italians’ pockets instead.” A photo is pulled from the top drawer of the scarred desk that separates them. Karen reaches for it and sure enough, photographic evidence of the government and organized crime getting chummy with one another.
(it’s inevitable)
Karen gets to keep a copy of the photo. Jessica has deemed it unhelpful to her case. Karen raises her eyebrows.
“Trust me; she doesn’t care if he sinks low enough to accept bribes from some power hungry gang looking to muscle into Hell’s Kitchen. She only wants to know if the secretary is on her knees under his desk,” Jessica retorts. “I told her he is a good little husband. Or at least her version of good.”
Karen wonders how many versions of good there can be before the word becomes meaningless. She thanks Jessica for her help and offers to buy her a drink at Josie’s some time. Jessica scoffs. “Why the fuck would I want to drink that piss?”
Good question.
X
The photo is tucked in her purse to be added to her growing file.
A day later it is still tucked in her purse when the two men descend upon her.
In retrospect, she has seen this coming. In the moment though, she is caught by surprise. She has a split second to try to decide what to do before one of them wraps his beefy hand around the bottom half of her face. He smells like cigarettes and stale sweat. When he lifts her from the ground she kicks out, desperately trying to dig her heel into the soft muscle of his leg.
For her troubles, the other man (he’s shorter, there are tufts of blonde hair sticking out from underneath a Yankees cap) buries his fist in her stomach.
She expels what is left of the air in her lungs. She is desperate to take in more but at the moments her lungs won’t cooperate. Instead they burn and she lets out a pitiful croak.
“Poor thing.” It is the one behind her that speaks (she notes no discernible accent). His voice is hot against her ear and she arches her back in an attempt to put space between them. “Can’t take the pain.”
He’s wrong. She can take pain. She is not afraid of pain. Still, it hurts like hell when the next blow lands in the middle of her ribs. She feels a few of them give way and she knows she’ll be nursing that for a while.
(if she makes it through the next ten minutes that is)
“You probably should have kept your nose out of it. Wrote about kittens and puppies.” He muses, his tone flat. Almost like they are discussing the weather as his partner continues to ensure she’ll wear proof of this encounter on her skin. “See I never got this whole intrepid female reporter thing. A woman like you should stick to something simple. Waitressing maybe? You’d make good tips with a face like that. Hmmm? Got something more lofty in mind? Maybe teaching little apple cheeked kids if you’re that ambitious…”
She can’t take it anymore.
Karen bites the meaty flesh of his palm (he tastes like cigarettes and stale sweat). He rips his hand away she thinks she tastes blood. She gets called a bitch for her troubles. As the same hand she just left teeth marks in slams the side of her face, she thinks it is worth it.
(maybe)
X
When she wakes, her head is fuzzy and everything is white. It takes her a minute to understand she is lying in a hospital bed. There isn’t a part of her that doesn’t ache. She stifles a groan as she shifts ever so slightly.
“Karen! Oh thank God.” Foggy’s voice filters through everything and she turns her head toward it.
She can’t quite see him. He looks rough around the edges. Like someone couldn’t stay inside the lines. She realizes her eye is swollen shut. Despite that, she can make out the pain on her friend’s face. “Foggy…”
“You’re okay,” he says. When he repeats the words Karen knows he is trying to convince himself more than he is trying to assure her.
She manages to reach out to curl her fingers around his arm. “I’m okay.” She watches him deflate a little and then take a deep breath. “What…”
“They found you in a heap a few blocks from your apartment,” he tells her. “They think it was a mugging since your purse is gone…”
“It wasn’t,” Karen interrupts.
“I know,” Foggy answers. He runs his hand through his hair (it just flops back down over his brow). “If I point out you should know better you’ll just give me one of those Karen speeches. Full of awe inspiring words and rousing sentiment. The doctors say you need rest. So I’ll shut for now.”
He does (she loves him for it) and she drifts off.
She wakes to find Matt hunched over the bed rail. He has caught the fingers of her left hand between his palms. “I should have been there,” he says (and she realizes by the amount of pain evident in his voice that he thinks she is still asleep). “I should have been there…”
She doesn’t know what to say to him. Doesn’t know how to appease his never ending guilt. So she keeps her eyes closed. If he and his uncanny senses knows she is faking he doesn’t call her on it. Instead he sits, her hand still tangled with his. When a nurse comes to shuffle him out, Karen feels the brush of his lips (he needs a shave) against her palm.
She hates how complicated things have become between them.
X
The doctors won’t let her leave for a few days (despite her protests).
Her time is filled by a never ending parade of visitors. Detective Mahoney takes a detailed statement. Ellison arrives to give her hell and to tell her that she needs to consider new investigative techniques (ones that won’t usher in a heart attack; he reasons he is still too young for that). Matt comes back and she can’t pretend she is asleep this time. Their conversation is stifled. He tries to lecture her at one point about the dangers of poking into things but she pins him with a look (pretty impressive considering her eye is still firmly shut). Foggy’s arrival helps (if only because it shifts the awkwardness from her and Matt to the former partners).
She is relieved when the nurse dims the lights on her second night. She is exhausted (the opposite of what her doctor wants she is sure).
X
Her body jerks awake in the middle of the night. For a moment she lies there listening to the quite hum of the hospital and wonders why she has been pulled out of a deep sleep. Then a cold sort of dread washes over her and she forces herself to shift her gaze to the right.
“Frank…”
He is sitting in chair with his black coat spilling over the arms (he has forgone the white skull that has become synonymous with him in the last few months). A ball cap is pulled down over his face and he has his hands folded in his lap.
Her hand comes out to wrap around the bed rail and she uses it to pull herself up and to the side, ignoring the way her ribs scream at her for doing so. She thinks he looks pained at her attempt to put distance between them but given her inability to see properly she can’t be sure.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She hasn’t heard his voice since that night in the woods (I’m already dead). It sounds rough, almost as if it is hasn’t been used in a while. She stares at him for a moment too long, wondering if she is truly seeing him or if her head got knocked harder than she first thought.
“Answer the damn question, Karen.” He leans forward a little, his head dipping so she can see his eyes better. There is something about them that stifles any defiance rising in her.
“My job.”
(well, not all of her defiance)
He laughs. It’s bitter, harsh and her fingers tighten around the rail. “Bullshit. What the hell are you doing?”
Her head falls and hair spills over her shoulders, temporarily blocking him from view. “What I always do…”
“Sounds about right,” Frank states. She hears the scrape of the chair being dragged closer to her. She practically sandwiches herself against the opposite side of the bed. He sighs. “Don’t do that.”
Her head turns and he’s right there, one hand pressed to the fabric of her blanket. Her eyes move to it and he is quick to pull it back. “Do what?”
“Act afraid of me,” he tells her.
She tries to smile and finds that this too is painful. “I am not afraid of you, Frank,” she says. She is not trying to give him any measure of peace. Instead her tone is clipped. “I told you. I’m done.”
He gives a simple nod of his head. “Fair enough.” His eyes wander the room, taking in the gifts her friends have left. He furrows his brows. “Lie there and hate me all you want. You’re not going anywhere. Neither am I.”
She’d like to tell him that one press of the call button could change that but it would be an empty threat. So she does just what he says. She lies there. Quietly. Trying her best to let her anger (she had fought so hard for him, fought and failed) grow until it become palpable. She wants him to feel it.
Maybe he shifts uncomfortably; maybe she is projecting.
In the end, she can’t feel that white hot rage she is so desperate to let consume her. She watches him out of her good eye, noting that for the first time since they met he looks better than her. There is a touch of a bruise on his cheek but other than that, he looks almost normal. She has no idea what she looks like. She refuses to look in a mirror, refuses to have that memory burned into her brain. “Why did you come, Frank?” She finally asks.
The corner of his lip quirks up and she wonders if he thinks he’s won something over her. She’s talking to him and she’s not calling him an asshole. “I had to see,” he answers.
His words are vague enough that she has to ask. “What? See what?”
“This,” he says simply, and his head jerks back. She gets it now: the hospital room, the dying flowers, and the deflating balloon in the corner --- her in the center of it all with splotchy skin and a swollen face. She meets his gaze and his mouth goes tight. “Jesus Christ, Karen.”
She can feel it; he is dancing around the same words that Matt had used earlier in the day. She steels herself, her counter argument already forming on the tip of her tongue.
“What happened?” He asks and his voice is so soft she thinks she has misheard him for a moment.
The fight in her dies (she hates that he disarmed her so easily). Instead her bottom lip trembles but she doesn’t give in (she can’t give in). She finally lets go of the railing and leans back in her bed. The whole story tumbles out. Or at least the part of it that involves a fist to the stomach and her tasting another man’s blood. He never interrupts, never takes his eyes off of her. He seems to listen with a sort of detachment.
Or so she thinks until she notices the way one hand curls and uncurls by his side.
She swallows her next sentence. He realizes he is caught and splays his fingers out on his thigh. “Where was the gun?”
“Buried in the bottom of my purse,” she answers.
He curses under his breath. “Stupid, Karen. That was stupid.”
She wants to tell him she is not the type that could just gun someone down on the street. She can’t because she doesn’t know. If she had the time to curl her fingers around the butt of her gun before she was grabbed what would she have done?
(she might not want to know the answer)
Frank’s got his jaw clenched again and he is staring a hole into the floor. “I thought I told you…”
She furrows her brows and there is an edge to her voice. She thinks he is going to lecture her now (like Matt, he is going to sound like Matt). “What, Frank? You thought you told me what?”
He raises his head and it’s like he is looking right into her. She shifts uncomfortably in the bed and winces when the movement sets off a fresh round of pain. “To get away from this,” he answers.
He did.
Of course at the time she had been too busy finding patterns in the brain matter he had splattered across the floor.
“To get away and to stay away,” he repeats.
She actually feels guilty. It is momentary and when it passes she takes a deep breath. “It’s who I am.” There is an air of finality to her words and she almost dares him to argue against it (she needs to; she needs to be able to bite back like she did with Matt).
He doesn’t concede but he also doesn’t keep going. Instead, he tilts his head and then leans back in his chair. “Then I have question for you.”
She almost laughs because he has already asked her more than he has any right to. Still, she gives a quick nod of her head.
“Do you want to die?”
It isn’t the question she expects. Her mouth falls open but no sound comes out. That cold feeling (the same one she had felt soon after waking) settles in again. He lets out a short breath through his nose and she thinks he already has the answer he was looking for.
Does she want to die?
She feels the need to push back, the fight against the idea (not him). “What the hell kind of question is that?”
“An obvious one,” he counters. “Because I am sittin’ here looking at you torn up and hurting knowing damn well the moment they let you out of here you’re going to dive right back in. Like those bruises mean nothing. You might want to call it doing the right thing but there’s more to it than that. It’s not as simple as you want it be and you know it. You keep trying though. Keep telling yourself that each and every time you step in the shit it’s really about justice and the truth coming out. Maybe one day you’ll actually believe it.”
“Shut up,” she says and it’s loud enough to echo through the room. Fingers move to press against her lips and her gaze shifts to the door, worried that someone heard her and they are about to come in to find a wanted criminal cozied up to her bedside. Frank doesn’t seem worried. In fact, he is still looking at her in a way that almost makes her want to strike out at him. When she speaks again her voice is barely above a whisper. “Shut up.”
“What happened to you?” He clearly isn’t going to listen and she has nothing to hold over him. “Before this, before you ever thought about trying to kick my demons out --- what happened?”
She wonders how long he has waited to ask her that question. She wonders how long he has been looking at her like he wants to take her apart and figure out what makes her tick. Since the trial? Since that night in the dinner? Since the beginning? She shakes a little, her fingers clenching the bed sheets tightly. She thinks of Ben and how she had pulled him down into something he didn’t deserve. She thinks of James Wesley and the way his lifeless eyes seemed to follow her from the room as she fled. She thinks of her brother…
An anguished cry catches in her throat.
He lurches forward a little and she holds up a hand, a silent warning for him to stay away. Tears burn in her eyes and she almost tells him. Everything --- she almost tells Frank Castle everything. She is surprised how badly she wants to.
But she can’t. She won’t.
She doesn’t know how he’ll react (and she needs to know before she can pull it out of her).
“Leave,” she says as her chest rises and falls rapidly. She wants something for the pain all of a sudden (she had valiantly turned the nurse down before she had fallen asleep). Now the pain claws at her chest and mixes with her growing sense of panic. “Now. Leave now.”
For a moment she thinks he is going to stand his ground. But mercifully he stands. She refuses to look at him (the answer might spill out of she does). She thinks he is searching for something to say but in the end, he just walks away.
She waits a moment or two. Waits until she is sure that she is alone.
Then she doubles over, her mouth opening. No sound comes out but the tears fall.
Does she want to die?
X
The councilman gets arrested the day after she is released from the hospital. He shows up, slightly bloodied and with a copy of Jessica’s picture pinned to his chest.
She has Matt (The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen) to thank for that.
X
The two men who hurt her are found the same night.
Beaten until they were a bloody mess before they each took a bullet to the head.
Detective Mahoney is the one that tells her. The police think it was the Italians trying to cover their tracks.
Karen knows better.
X
Ellison makes her take a few more days off (she tries to argue but he silences her by reminding her of how this easily could have gone the wrong way).
She doesn’t take to time off easily. In fact she splits her so called freedom between sitting in Foggy’s sparkling new office and drinking at Josie’s.
She figures she has had one beer too many when she struggles to get her key in the lock. She leans heavily against her door and then stumbles when the lock finally gives way. She thinks maybe she’ll climb into the bath and try to soak the rest of bruises away.
She has her top stripped off when she notices it. For a moment, she freezes, her eyes darting around her apartment. It’s just her; she knows it instinctively but still. When the rational side of her takes over once more she sinks down on the edge of her bed.
Sitting on her dresser is the .380.
Karen has assumed it was lost alongside everything in her purse. She reaches out to lift it from its perch. It’s been cleaned up, polished. Her fingers tighten until her knuckles turn white. She figures it is his way of apologizing.
And she knows she hasn’t seen the last of him.
(she also knows that when they cross paths, she will give him an answer to his question)