Work Text:
- One -
Ellison lets Karen work as a stringer, writing human interest stories for the Bulletin's website. He posts them when the news cycle is slow, or he thinks their readers need a dose of what he calls her 'characteristic bittersweet sentimentality,' or he thinks they'll do well to round out an existing package. Or, you know, whenever he feels like it. It's steady work but shit pay, which is fine because she wanted to move anyway.
There are worse decisions to make than switching apartments after getting abducted from the last one, but she really hopes it doesn't happen again. Three times makes a habit, isn't that how the saying goes? It's not even cheaper than smoking, what with losing those security deposits.
She probably could have contested the deposits, but that might involve lawyers, and. No. No lawyers.
Ellison farms out research to her every now and then, lets her chase leads when something piques her interest. More often than not, most of her hard news stories never get past the editing stage. "...better," he'll grudgingly grant her sometimes, "but you're not there yet."
"Look," she says, pulling up the map she's put together on her refurbished tablet and handing it to him, "over a dozen John Does found dead around Hell's Kitchen, all killed in similar ways, each with their fingerprints missing like they sanded 'em off every morning. All young, athletic, and dressed entirely in black." She's not going to say ninjas, she's not. "Every one is Asian and undocumented, as far as anybody can tell. That's weird, and that's a pattern. Tell me you see it."
Ellison sighs. "I see it. But what's the angle, here - what are you trying to find out? Is this an immigration piece, organized crime, a serial killer?"
Karen slumps, propping her hip against his desk, shoulders dropping. "I don't know."
"What does your gut tell you?"
"To figure it out?"
Ellison hands her tablet back. "Attagirl. Now get your ass off my desk and trim two hundred and fifty words off your piece about the Irish gang widows. I have to call a senator so he can tell me I'm an asshole again."
"Yes, boss," she says, and he gives her a droll, sidelong glance before picking up his phone.
Karen goes straight home after work, keeps her head down and her hand on the mace on her keyring. She sometimes stops by the liquor store or the little bodega on the corner by her building, but she doesn't have a social life to speak of. It's not like she's going back to Josie's anytime soon.
How do adults make friends, anyway? Normal ones, that is. Normal adults. Normal friends.
She doesn't look up anymore, doesn't search the rooftops for reassurance that someone is watching, keeping the streets safe. If he hasn't gotten himself killed, he's probably up there somewhere. Her goal now is to not need help.
So she keeps her head down, keeps a weapon handy. Takes krav maga on Tuesdays and pinches pennies so she can start taking online journalism classes when the summer semester begins. She writes.
Tonight, she finds herself restless, pacing while she tries to sort out the pieces of the scattered, perfunctory police reports on the mystery murder victims. The map glows patiently from her monitor. She's checked businesses in the area, restaurants and real estate companies and import/exporters, and come up with nothing.
Wait, Karen thinks, stopping, staring at the dingy paint on the empty wall above her bed. Am I trying to find where they work or where they live? She does another search, examining apartments and cross-referencing public records online to see if any of the landlords seem suspicious. Checks halfway houses, hostels, community centers with homeless shelters...
She almost skips over the church. But it's the one where Elliot Grote's funeral had been.
Which. Is weird, right? It's a small neighborhood, but what are the odds that the same church is right smack in the middle of all the murders?
Karen gets her coat.
- x -
The main entrance is locked when she arrives, and Karen stares at it, stymied. She didn't even know churches locked their doors. It is Hell's Kitchen, sure, but wow.
"Fuck," she mutters under her breath, feeling stupid. Maybe there's a side entrance?
There are a dozen doors, to the church proper, to the rectory, to the small school wing. It's a big church. But they're all locked.
"Shit," she says aloud to the fire exit that doesn't even have the good grace to have a lock to consider picking, given that it's the one least likely to be seen from the street. Getting arrested for breaking into a house of God might be a bit much. And she's really not looking forward to the lecture she'd inevitably get along with the bail money.
The fire escape rattles, and she turns towards it, only to discover that it had been a deliberate misdirect. There's a body at her back and a blade at her throat and a woman's voice hissing, "Did Matthew send you?"
"...what?" Karen says, frozen with incredulity. Mortifyingly, her voice cracks on the word, and she tries to remember what she'd learned about fending off attacks from behind, but her mind has gone blank, and who the fuck pulls a knife on someone in a church? Outside a church. Whatever. "No one sent me."
The woman scoffs. "Don't lie to me, I know you're his... friend."
I'm not his anything, Karen wants to say. I'm not sure I ever was. "I haven't spoken to him in weeks," Karen insists instead, her words tripping over themselves in her fright. "I came on my own, I swear to god, please don't kill me like you killed those ninja guys." God damn it, she wasn't going to call them ninjas.
The woman is quiet for a moment, and then she's gone. Karen spins, putting her back to the stone wall, her can of mace in her hand. She almost drops it again when she recognizes the woman staring back at her past the edges of a makeshift mask tied over the bottom half of her face. Despite that, Karen can see the sly amusement in the angle of her brows, the calculation in her eyes, the long dark hair and the high cheekbones. Given who they both have in common...
"You were the woman in his bed," Karen blurts. "When..." When so so many things were happening, she still can't even process it all.
"The wind is going the wrong way," the woman comments. "If you try to spray me, you'll only hit yourself."
"...are you going to kill me?"
"I'd rather not," the woman says. "I'm not really in the mood to haul another body away tonight."
Another. "Okay," Karen says, and notices that her hands are shaking as she puts the mace away. It's probably the cold. There's a dark smear on her coat where the woman had grabbed her, and droplets of crimson in the snow. She looks up, alarmed. "Are you hurt?"
"I'll be fine." Her sleeve is gaping at the shoulder, cleanly sliced. Karen can't see any injury, but she glimpses red beneath the edges of the cut fabric.
"Bullshit, you're bleeding."
"Father Lantom has a first aid kit."
Karen feels a little better about her earlier hunch, now. "You have been hiding out here."
The woman shrugs. "Where else to seek sanctuary from the Devil?"
"He's after you? What did you do?" Aside from killing those men.
"Not that Devil," the woman says. "He doesn't know I'm still... around."
"Wait," Karen says, puzzle pieces clicking. "Are you Elektra? You died."
The corners of the woman's eyes crease in a smile. "It didn't take."
"Is that why you're hiding? Are... were the men you've killed the same ones who tried to kill you?"
"They work for the man who did," Elektra says. "He brought me back. To use me." There's a wealth of meaning there that Karen can't even begin to unpack. She does understand the implication that the deaths that brought her here were probably self-defense and not outright murder. "Are you going to tell anyone I'm here?"
"No," Karen says, suspecting that her own life depends on it. "But you can't stay here anymore. The bodies of the... lackeys you killed, they practically make a bullseye around this place. If I found you, so will others. It's only a matter of time before innocent people start getting caught in the crossfire." By the kind of people who wouldn't mind cutting a bloody swath through parishioners attending Sunday Mass, she's guessing.
Elektra steps in close again, a full five inches shorter than Karen but intimidating as shit, regardless. "I can take care of myself," she snarls through her mask, eyes flashing in the dim light.
"Come home with me," Karen blurts. "You'll be safer there. No one knows we know each other, there's no connection they can trace, no one will suspect. Just for a little while." Karen reaches out towards the spreading damp patch around the cut on Elektra's sleeve, and Elektra swats her hand away irritably, more gently than she could have. "I have a first aid kit." She picked it up from an army surplus store; it's alarmingly well-stocked. But then, this isn't the first vigilante she's invited into her home.
What was that again, about habits?
Elektra glares at Karen calculatingly for a long minute, then pulls down her mask, revealing a smirk. "Go home with you, really? At least buy me dinner first."
Karen's surprised to find a giggle bubbling up from her chest.
- Two -
It should be more difficult to walk home from church at midnight with a fugitive murderer in tow. Karen expects at least a token mugging, but no.
"Kit's in the bathroom," she tells Elektra as they walk in the door. She points the way, even though there's not much here besides the tiny living room, the open kitchen area past the tall island counter on the right-hand side, and the two doors off to the left, clearly bed and bath. "Under the sink. If you need to use the shower, go ahead. I'm ordering pizza."
"A hot shower sounds like heaven," Elektra says, already halfway there, shedding layers as she goes: gloves, mask-scarf, fleece vest, turtleneck... Karen looks away, trying not to stare at the muscles and scars now exposed, and scrambles to close the curtains. "But I didn't actually mean it about buying me dinner."
"I haven't had anything since lunch," Karen says. "And I'm not really much of a cooker, more like a reheater. Or a microwaver. We're both better off." She has her grandmother's recipe book, gathering dust on the little shelf next to the sink, but she doesn't often have the energy to go to the trouble of using it. Let alone making sure she always has the groceries she'd need.
"Let me pay for it," Elektra says, and Karen turns to find a belt sailing through the air at her. She catches it and sees the zipper hidden on the inside.
Pulling it open, she gasps. "Holy shit, did you rob a bank?" How does a dead woman get all this? She counts over $1,500 in American bills, but there's a bunch of other currencies from around the world.
"I managed to get to one of my smaller stashes," Elektra says, and opens the faucet. "It was a risk, but a calculated one, at least until I can get access to an alias that isn't on anyone's radars. It's difficult, though - the Hand is patrolling the boundaries of Hell's Kitchen as if it's their own little LAC."
"The Hand?" Karen asks.
Elektra pokes her head out the open door. "The men who are after me. Do you have a razor?"
Karen gets a little plastic disposable from the pack in the closet, adding her still-packaged backup toothbrush and a dark blue towel for good measure. Elektra's face lights up in gratitude. "You're an angel," she effuses, and disappears into the steam.
"Be careful," Karen calls after her, "if you hear the pipes groaning, the water's about to turn to ice." She takes refuge in the kitchen and dials the nearest decent pizza joint that will deliver to her building at this hour. Hopefully the guy will have change for a hundred.
- x -
Elektra seems completely different sitting cross-legged on Karen's couch, stuffed on pizza and with her hair air-drying in loose waves over her shoulders. She's wearing a set of Karen's pink-striped pajama bottoms and a matching cami, a wicked-looking pair of what she called 'sais' within easy reach. There's marinara sauce on her shirt and she's pushing a needle through the edges of the gash on her own shoulder.
Karen can't not watch. It's disgusting and terrible and strangely riveting. Elektra hadn't even taken any painkillers or used any anesthetic, aside from dry-swallowing an aspirin half an hour ago.
"How do you do that?" she asks, watching Elektra making a neat row of knots against her skin.
"One stitch at a time," Elektra replies with a strained smile. A thin trickle of blood oozes out and runs down her arm.
Karen grabs the washcloth from the nearby bowl of water, tinted pink already from earlier cleanup, and wrings it before bringing it up to Elektra's skin, catching the crimson droplet before it stains her couch. The upholstery is ugly and scratchy, but she's pretty sure none of the stains have been blood yet. She'd prefer to forestall the inevitable as long as possible.
Elektra hisses and flinches when the cloth reaches the deep purpling skin around her cut. She's covered in bruises, some darker than this one and some older, already fading to sallow green blotches. That's not even counting all the scars, from the thinnest pale hairlines criss-crossing her knuckles to the dark, wide slash over her stomach that Karen had glimpsed earlier. "...why do they want you so badly?" Karen asks, without thinking.
Elektra's glance is like a cold draft slipping past a broken window at night, laden with the memory of sharp edges and shadows. Karen draws away, saying, "I'm sorry, that's none of my business, I just... they seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble."
"No," Elektra sighs, "you've invited me into your home, you deserve to know what you've signed up for." She ties off the last stitch and reaches for the gauze and tape.
The story she tells next is unbelievable, impossible, but perfectly in line with everything else Karen's experienced. It fits right in with 'blind man punching his way through New York's criminal underbelly on a nightly basis,' and miles beyond 'shooting a man in an abandoned warehouse and never getting charged for the crime.' Karen's not shocked by the story itself but by the telling of it; she'd asked, and Elektra told her.
Honesty is more novel nowadays than someone coming back from the dead.
- Three -
With some clean sheets, an old washed-soft quilt, and a pillowcase bundling the two flat throw pillows into one functional cushion, Karen's couch becomes comfortable enough to sleep on, and Elektra takes it without complaint. Maybe she's being polite; being raised by Ambassadors, she must be used to fine linens on enoumous beds that don't smell like Febreze over exhaust fumes from their time on the curb
"I'm sorry I can't offer more," Karen says, forcing herself to stop wringing her hands. She's acutely aware that almost everything she owns is second- or third-hand, mended or chipped or dented, but she doesn't need to be awkward about it.
"It's fine," Elektra says, smiling reassurance. Sounding genuine. It's still strange.
Karen wishes her a good night and goes to bed.
- x -
She's jolted out of sleep in the thin, gray light of pre-dawn, heart pounding, without knowing why. Hearing a harsh gasp from the other room, she immediately scrambles for the gun in the drawer of her bedside table. There's a thump, like a fist or an elbow hitting the wall.
Karen creeps towards the open door, steadying her breath. Then she whirls around the doorframe, raising the gun and barely remembering to thumb off the safety while she tries to get a bead on whatever sonuvabitch has decided to break into her place this time.
The room is empty, save for Elektra, and she seems to be asleep. Her face is screwed up, her body tangled in the covers as she strikes out at an imagined assailant. Karen sets the gun aside, next to the tv she rarely uses for anything other than watching the news. Elektra doesn't wake when Karen approaches; one knee almost cracks Karen in the shin as she crouches between couch and coffee table.
"Elektra," she hisses. "Elektra, wake up, it's okay, it's-"
Karen's bowled over backwards when Elektra sits up abruptly, shoving Karen away hard enough that she nearly completes a full reverse somersault. Karen rights herself and finds her feet again, the way she learned in self-defense class.
Elektra's panting, staring sightlessly at the wall, hands gripping the quilt as if it's her only lifeline.
"Hey," Karen murmurs, reaching out again. "Hey, it's okay. You're safe. It's only me."
Elektra draws her knees up to her chest but doesn't pull away from the gentle hand Karen curls around her elbow. "I don't know what's worse..." Elektra says in a quiet, broken whisper, "how I always dream about dying, or how waking up reminds me of coming back from the dead." She takes a ragged breath, but there are no tears in her eyes, just an empty shadow, like a pit that goes on forever.
"I'm sorry," Karen says, not knowing what else she can say.
- Four -
"Do you have any eggs?" Elektra asks, partway through the morning. She's already done some kind of really distracting calisthenics, poked through Karen's bookshelf, and tried to steal her tablet twice while Karen was working on it. "I make an excellent frittata."
Karen blinks up at her over her keyboard, halfway through emailing Ellison to tell him that she won't be in today. "Um, what?"
"Eggs," Elektra says, "Cheese, vegetables, maybe some meat?"
"You want to cook?" Karen asks.
"I can cook," Elektra says. "I didn't always rely on help, you know."
Karen suppresses a smile. "I never said-"
Elektra rolls her eyes. "No, no, I can guess what you must think of me. I confess my transcontinental heiress past, you assume I'm some spoiled brat..."
"Pretty sure most transcontinental heiresses aren't roaming Hell's Kitchen," Karen points out.
"Not anymore," Elektra says, waving dismissively. "The scene here got really played out."
Karen breaks first, snickering while Elektra chuckles, warm and rich. "...but seriously, if you wanna cook, the kitchen's all yours. I don't know what I have, but use whatever."
"Thank you," Elektra says with a little lilt, bouncing to her feet. Karen turns back to finish and send her email, a grin still playing around the corners of her mouth. Pots and pans clang and clatter in the cupboards as Elektra rummages for what she needs. "Tch," she says after opening the fridge, pulling out the crisper to a disused screech. "Not much, but i think I can make do... Is this bacon pre-cooked?" She sounds scandalized.
"It's for sandwiches!" Karen protests.
Whatever Elektra is about to say next, it's interrupted by Karen's computer chiming with a notification. Ellison is messaging her: Let me know if you need ANYTHING.
Bemused, Karen stares at the screen for a minute before replying, Will do, boss. She turns on her little radio and brings it to the kitchen. Elektra's dicing up the larger vegetables from Karen's leftover Buddha's Delight from... the night before last? maybe? "Are those still good?" she asks. "I haven't cleaned out my fridge in a while..."
"I noticed," Elektra says with an arched eyebrow. "But this should do. Do you have a pan that's a little deeper?"
"Yeah, um, it's above the sink," Karen says. She steals a pinch of the chopped bacon from under Elektra's elbow.
"Can you get it for me?" Elektra asks, sweeping the vegetables and bacon into a bowl and turning to the carton of eggs.
Karen doesn't make fun of the deadly assassin for being short. She doesn't. It's a close thing, though. But when she realizes that Elektra's humming along to the music, she can't resist. "...you do know that this is Taylor Swift, right?"
Elektra shrugs. "I listen to the radio sometimes. I go to clubs - I like dancing." Karen's willing to bet that Elektra has never had to wait in a line or pay a cover charge in her entire life. Elektra flashes a mischievous smile. "Maybe I'll take you sometime."
Karen feels her face heat, and turns away to hunt for the Crisco spray and spatula while Elektra hums along to Bad Blood behind her, cracking the eggs on beat.
- x -
The news comes on as breakfast is baking. Questions of professional ethics have arisen in the wake of the shocking murder of District Attorney Samantha Reyes. Wilson Fisk- Karen frowns at the name, and Elektra catches it.
"Isn't Fisk the man who was running that real estate racket?" she asks, munching on slivers of water chestnuts that never made it to the pan. "With the drugs, and the bombs, and-"
"Yes," Karen says, feeling her shoulders tense up. "I... I was the one who found the Union Allied pension file."
Elektra blinks. - oday under house arre - "Oh. Didn't they try to frame you for murder?"
"Yeah," Karen replies tersely. She tries not to think about it, tries not to think about the men who tried to kill her after, tries not to remember how fucking naive she'd been...
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't pry," Elektra says, leaning back, voice going smooth and cool and polite.
Karen reaches out and touches the back of Elektra's hand gently, with just the faintest brush of her fingertips. "No, it's okay. You were honest with me, I should be honest with you."
Elektra's smile is a tremulous thing for a moment, before she seems to collect herself. "Well, if it's any consolation, you're the only person I've ever met who's been charged for murder but never actually killed anybody."
Karen swallows hard. "Well..." she says.
- Five -
"So let me get this straight," Elektra says, taking a sip of her orange juice. "This guy drugs you and carries you off to a deserted warehouse, threatens everyone you've ever met, and you feel bad about shooting him?"
"He was unarmed!" Karen says.
"Darling," Elektra says with a stern look. "Power isn't always about who's holding the gun. If you'd just run off, he had any number of weapons at his disposal to destroy you - which he'd already spent an asinine amount of time detailing." She takes a forkful of eggs directly from the pan. "Honestly, I'd've shot him just to shut him up."
Karen covers her face with her hands and groans faintly, caught between incredulity and resignation. "How is this my life?" she mutters into her palms.
Elektra scoffs. "Because this is the life you wanted. Don't lie to yourself." Karen looks up at her questioningly, and Elektra points with her fork at the bookshelf. "Most of your novels are about adventures, and your life must have been very boring for them to be so tattered and well-read. If you wanted a nice, normal, dreary life, you wouldn't have moved to the city. You certainly wouldn't have stayed once things started getting exciting, or gotten a job at a newspaper where you chase crime stories and rumors of attractive, morally-confused vigilantes." Karen gives her a half-hearted glare, and Elektra laughs at her. "Not that I'm complai-"
A knock at the door interrupts; Elektra's on her feet, reaching over for her sais, and Karen catches her by the elbow before she can do anything drastic and messy. "I'll answer it," she whispers. She doesn't want Tala from next door to get scared out of her wits just because she picked the wrong time to search for her perpetually-roaming cat.
"As you wish," Elektra says, but doesn't put down her weapons.
Glancing through the peep hole, Karen sees two police officers in suits, badges hanging over their ties, clearly visible. Karen smooths down her hair and puts on a bland smile and unlocks the door partway, leaving the chain on and peering out into the hallway. "Hi, how can I help you?"
"Miss Page, may we speak to you privately? It's about Wilson Fisk."
Karen frowns. "...what about him?"
"He was paroled this morning," the one on the left says. "He's on house arrest, but as you were a key witness at his trial..."
"This may not be a conversation you want your neighbors to overhear. May we come in, Miss?"
"Um," Karen says, trying to think past the vortex of terror and outrage and shock that howls through her thoughts. She looks back over her shoulder at Elektra. Elektra shakes her head incredulously.
The door slams open with a splintering crash. Karen gets shoved backwards into the wall, and when one of the men reaches forward to grab one of her flailing arms, his wrist gets neatly pinned to the wall by a blur of silver that resolves into one of Elektra's sais. Disorientation clearing, Karen drives her elbow into his throat and he slumps against the ruins of the door, choking.
Elektra's already through the door and skirmishing with the second man in the hallway. Karen can hear his grunts, a loud thump, and a short, high cry. By the time she's scrambled over her attacker, knocking his head into the doorframe as she goes, Elektra's peering over the staircase railing with a pleased smile. "Amateurs," she says, spotting Karen. Her other sai is dripping blood onto the floor tiles.
"They weren't expecting you," Karen points out, heart still pounding in her chest.
"Nobody does, really," Elektra says, sounding breathless or breezy or both. "How big is your trash chute?"
Karen stares at her. "No."
- Plus One (Trust) -
"Hi, um. My name is Karen Page?" she says, phone sandwiched awkwardly between her cheek and shoulder. "You might not remember me, but you know a couple of my friends, and I got your number from one of them, and uh. I might need to be talked through dealing with an impaled wrist."
"Are you kidding me?" Claire says.
- x -
Treating the surviving man's wounds without much regard for his comfort is great incentive for him to give up a few useful bits of information. He and his partner had been sent by Wilson Fisk, who is indeed out on parole and on house arrest - complete with ankle monitor and daily check-ins. Apparently rampant corruption in the prosecuting DA's office provides plenty of fodder for appeals. A fair number of his underlings are free, too, especially those convicted of lesser crimes on more flimsy evidence.
Meaning these two are just the beginning.
They send him off with a bandaged arm and the corpse of his partner - and with a warning. He looks at the gun Karen's holding with casual ease and the way Elektra's staring with idle disdain across the kitchen counter as she picks at the remains of breakfast, and makes the smart decision.
Once he's gone, Karen shoves her front door more or less into place and makes a note to call the management company later, once she figures out what the hell to tell them. The door jamb is trashed, but she wedges a chair under the doorknob and hopes it takes a while for her attackers to regroup. She sighs, setting aside her gun on top of the fridge, debating with herself about whether it's too early to open a beer.
Elektra props her elbow on the counter and her chin on her palm, watching Karen thoughtfully. "And here I thought I was putting you in danger," she comments.
"I am so, so sorry," Karen says, "I had no idea-"
Elektra waves her off. "No, no, low-level local mob goons don't frighten me. I'm more entertained by the idea of Fisk and Nobu facing off over who gets the first crack at us."
"Us?" Karen asks. "Aren't you planning to get out of here as soon as possible?"
A dark shadow crosses Elektra's expression. "I have unfinished business here." She shakes her head like she's forcibly shedding her gloom and gives Karen a loaded smirk. "Besides, I still want to take you out dancing."
Karen ducks her head, her hair falling in a curtain across her face. Somehow, she doesn't jump when Elektra takes her hand, fingers tucking into her palm, thumb rubbing over the knuckles. She looks up again, sidelong and curious.
"I could leave, though, if you want me to," Elektra tells her.
Karen has some idea of how much that offer costs Elektra to make. Without hesitating, she smiles, tucking her hair behind her ear, and replies, "Why would I want to do anything that boring?"
Elektra's still grinning when Karen impulsively, inevitably leans in to kiss her.
After all, Karen reasons, if I'm going to make a habit out of getting in over my head, I may as well enjoy it.
- end -