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His hands are rough, where they graze her skin, textured with scars and callouses and constant reminders of everything that’s brought him to her.
They’re the twenty girls he spared from being shipped off like cattle;
The shaking of his hands early in the morning when he crawls into bed, whispering hushed and rasping tales of his time overseas;
They’re the kids who won’t get that first free hit laced in their drinks, straight from the club owner on 32nd and Marshall;
The hands that held his daughter, lifeless and barely recognisable and vowed to never grant another human absolution.
The same hands that hold her now with such reverence.
There’s a fire under his skin, the same fire that leaves a trail of raised goose bumps on her skin in its wake, wherever their skin touches.
Deliberate, grounding.
He turns her away from the counter with a single link of their fingers, and she feels it all the way down her spine.
His thumb rubs patterns on the inside of her thigh while he drives, and she has to repeat a mantra of silent prayers to ask for restraint and control. Feels a spark of his fire within herself, just a taste.
His whole palm cradles her face when he’s inside her, so small under his touch, and her prayers have been answered, even if they weren’t the right ones.
His hands are justice and ordinance, punishment and truth. But to her they are synonymous with the hands that soothe and heal and tantalise and she cannot possibly have one without the other.
Sometimes the fire is blood and bruise; the hours he tucks himself away to mend and repair any damage, entirely insistent upon being able to manage that feat alone, before he crawls into bed beside her, boneless. His hands search for her in earnest – pulling her to him; wrapping around her; settling themselves under the hem of her shirt, as though her skin grounds him in those open moments of reflection.
Sometimes the fire is cultivation; the flowers and herbs he has tirelessly grown in mismatched pots on her windowsill. He tends to them daily with a patience that she will never understand. He pulls her to him then, after, with an air of carefree joy that was very rarely present. A spark. She thinks of all that he has given up, but cannot help but hold on to the idea that somebody so desperate to create life and watch it flourish could not be as unfeeling as they perceived themselves to be.
She knows him.
The fire within him was also an ache that would never go away.
The searing touch of his caress is all the people that he’s killed, it’s the lingering memory of his family, the weight of everything he holds himself accountable for.
But it is hers.
Her Frank is not the Frank that the rest of the world sees.
To them, he is a scorching blaze that leaves nothing behind – wild, a destroyer. But she knows differently.
He allows her to see everything, from the triumph of his crusades, to those wilting moments of doubt, right down to the broken moments of loss and remembrance, and he trusts her with them. She sees the flames, the smoke, the ash and embers. To her, he is not a wildfire. There is no analogy that could ever encapsulate all that is the complexity of Frank Castle, and she has given up on trying to find one.
He kills.
She’s seen it – watched, heard, experienced in full just how brutal he could be, and the unflinching storm of his assault.
But.
Despite how much she couldn’t ignore that part of him, that stark change in demeanour when he gave himself a mission, she trusted him.
Never, not once, had she felt unsafe around him. He was no danger to her, contrary to what her friends believed. The comfort of his presence made her feel protected, gave her the greatest sense of ease, even in the thick of Hell’s Kitchen.
Those hands that singed her skin, they would wage a war on her behalf. Kill for her. And they have.
It’s as terrifying as it is heartening, and she doesn’t like to think about what it says about her that she knows – she knows and she accepts him, anyway.
Loves him, even.
By all accounts, Frank Castle is a dead man, body left to decay at the bottom of the Hudson River.
But he is the only real thing she can touch, anymore.
True, tangible.
Constantly burning beneath her own skin.
His hands, those same hands of punishment, they are the hands that have shielded and protected her; held her as though she were the answer to his own prayers.
And perhaps, perhaps that was true for the both of them.
She had asked for many things throughout her life but often – always – found her way by a different path. Fought, battled, scraped her way through until she reached her goal.
What she had asked for, and what she needed, they were two very different things.
All she knows, really, truly, is that Frank would give her everything and every part of himself, unapologetically.
The uncurbed fire that ran within his veins.
The affection and the trust that he had never thought himself possible of feeling again.
The respect that she showed in simply allowing her to fight her own battles and simply do her job without interference.
Knowing he would be there, standing shoulder to shoulder with her, in the frontline of battle, if only she simply asked.
She had wanted something without complication. Gentle and easy.
But.
All it took was one look, one rasping call of her name and Karen knew that Frank had been right.
Love that hurt, that burned, and bit, and made her question everything she ever thought of as ‘love’, that was worth holding onto.
And every time his hand gripped her own, it felt like a promise.