Work Text:
February in New York City is worse than February in Fagan Corners. Karen may not know many truths anymore, but she does know this.
At least in Vermont people don’t splash black slush over her boots on the way home from work. They don’t inch along the pavement, acting like they’ve never seen ice despite the fact that Hell’s Kitchen is no Bora Bora. Mostly, no one in Vermont drags crimson red snow into her apartment without at least wiping their feet on the mat first.
“Oh, my God,” Karen chokes out at the sight, her eye glued to the peephole. She should scramble to the knob, undo the chain, but instead she just stares. Like an idiot, like a child unsure of a stranger.
His stubble has grown back into a beard, and dotted in it, sparkling like freshly fallen snow, are speckles of red.
Vermont doesn’t have Frank Castle. A win for New York.
Sure, she hasn’t seen him for four months, maybe even five, but she does keep up with the news. Religiously. As a former reporter, it’s ingrained. As a paralegal, it’s required. It’s become something of an office tradition to read the paper in Nelson’s Meats each morning, out loud, looking for potential clients, until they reach sections about the shootings. She and Matt talk about that in shared silence. Not much needs to be said, but if it’s particularly big, Karen manages a low, Did you hear about last night? to which Matt pinches the space between those unseeing eyes that see far too much of her, that leave her feeling exposed, and responds, He’s fine. It’s the only answer he ever gives; she knows better than to press. If Frank wanted her to know, he wouldn’t have disappeared without a word.
No, Karen’s not shocked that Frank’s alive—she’s just shocked that he’s at her apartment.
From behind the reinforced steel door, he teeters side to side and mumbles, “Gonna open that before your neighbors start gettin’ curious?”
Right.
She clears the locks and swings the door open, bumping her own foot against it like an idiot. Frank doesn’t need a verbal invite. He just walks in. Glances around at the bare walls and lone couch for a moment, then slides his coat off arm by arm, grunting like an animal fresh from the hunt.
“You got a place I can hang this?” He holds up his coat, which is looking equally animalistic, and makes for her coat hanger as Karen seals the door again.
“Not on my hook,” she says, snatching it from his hand and making a beeline for the bathtub. It’s dripping blood and she’s not going to clean that off the carpet her landlord just replaced last week.
After months of radio silence, Frank decides to follow her.
Because of course he does.
(‘I don’t want that.’)
So, while she douses the coat in lavender body wash and blasts the tub faucet on cold, Frank eases himself onto the toilet seat, jaw set in a firm line. Like this is normal. His leaning back makes the ceramic tank lid press against the wall with a thud, but Frank doesn’t react to that. Just breathes out through his nose and shuts his eyes.
Typical.
Karen doesn’t need to be told, which is a terrifying sign that her downward spiral lifestyle is finally hitting an equilibrium. Regardless, she leaves the coat to soak in the tub and grabs a towel off the rack.
The sink water is warmer, less full of irritant soaps from the corner store’s clearance aisle, so she dips the towel in that before bringing it over to Frank. He’s got his hand pressed to the right side of his ribcage. Since his eyes are closed, she pries it away, kneeling down at eye level with his bicep.
The gash runs deep. Not to anything important, thankfully, but it’s bleeding profusely, dripping out at every angle and coating him in a thick, fishy scent that resembles the Hudson. She knows why he came, now.
“You’ll need stitches,” she says, looking up at his face because the sight of the wound is a bit much to stomach. At least the blood on his face probably belongs to someone else.
At first he doesn’t seem to have heard her, maybe already delirious from the pain, maybe dying here on her rusty toilet, but then he shakes his head. Turns out he was just being Frank about it. “Not unless you got sewing skills,” he says.
“Frank,” Karen sighs, wiping the edge of her off-white towel against his skin until it turns pink. “Have you looked at this?”
The blood doesn’t pay any mind to her—it just keeps pooling out, gravity pulling it onto the tiled floor.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” he bites back, eyes opening. “Hurts a bit. You notice how my face was plastered on the front page not too long ago?”
Sure, she knows he’s right. Knows it in her bones. If by some miracle he’s not recognized amongst the swarm of doctors and nurses and patients at Metro-General, a wound like that won’t go unreported to the cops. It’d only be a matter of time before he was back in jail, risking far worse than his current state, probably never seeing her again. But Karen also knows what being knifed in the ribcage looks like, and it never ends well. “You need a hospital,” she says, more blunt this time.
“No. I need you.”
They’re only four words, yet still, Karen adds them to the truths she knows. He’s stubborn. Too much for his own good, usually, and he’d definitely have bled out on the street if he didn’t knock at her door. Might have even wanted to, knowing Frank. But he didn’t, and maybe there’s more to that than unfulfilled revenge. Maybe he does need her; maybe he has for as long as she’s needed him and is only now ready to admit it, or maybe he wasn’t ready to admit it at all and the blood loss has loosened his lips. Karen doesn’t ask now. She knows when the time is for questions and when she should keep putting pressure on the gaping hole in his side. But she’d be deceiving herself if she didn’t note the tingle that travels down her spine at his words. At the way he huffs them out, half in pain, half unsure if it oversteps what they are.
He needs her. And she knows she needs him, too. She knows in the way her heart lurches when the local station talks about the crime decline, about the shootings at midnight that precede it. She knows in the way Matt cocks his head when she’s asking of Frank, when there’s no reason for his attention to be so acute aside from the twinge in her heart. Mostly, she knows in the way she’s been buying flowers once every few weeks from the too-expensive florist four blocks over. The way she drags them across town to Maria and the children’s graves, because she can’t mind her own damn business. She wonders, each time she goes and finds ones that aren’t from her, if Frank knows in that way, too.
“Okay.” She gives the smallest of nods, then grabs his hand and holds it over the towel, in place of hers. She stands, poises one foot out of the bathroom door, and rocks back onto her heel. “What do I need?”
“Needle.”
“Right.”
She’s never done this before. Matt has, she knows, and that makes her wish he was here to take over. To let his hands do the work and become numb to the process, because even blind as a bat, Karen knows he’ll be better. She’s seen him walk through the Nelsons backdoor in early mornings, fresh set of stitches above his eyebrow, a bit wonky but never leaving scars. Karen would even settle for Foggy, who winces at the sight of Matt’s already completed sewing job. At least a wince is better than how her stomach hurls over itself. In the hallway, her hand hovers over the phone in her cardigan pocket for a moment, considering. Tempting as it is, she knows Matt and Frank have… philosophical disagreements. And Foggy, good as he’d be for moral support, would faint either at the sight of the blood or at the Punisher casually visiting in her bathroom. No, this is her job. He needs her.
In a cupboard in her bedroom, Karen finds the sewing kit she’d bought last year to fix her torn clothes from Poindexter’s Bulletin massacre, then promptly never learned how to use because she’d thrown the clothes out in a cold sweat. She grabs a spool of blue thread, then digs around for a stray needle. There’s one at the bottom, slightly long but thin enough. She holds it tight between two fingers on her way through the hall.
“Got it,” she says, mouth drying at the thought of running metal through Frank’s skin. “Now what?”
“Get tongs from the kitchen,” Frank tells her through grit teeth. Then he adds, “Alcohol, too. You got a gas stove?”
“Yeah.”
“Turn it on, use the tongs to hold the needle over the flames. Get it hot, sterilize it.”
Karen nods and pushes her hair back. “Then run the thread through?”
“No, wait for it to cool.” Otherwise she’ll end up burning herself before she can get the thread… He pauses, eyes narrowing. “Thread?”
In her hand, there’s the blue spool of thread he hasn’t told her what to do with. She shakes it. “Yeah, how else am I supposed to put you back together again?”
“What am I, Humpty Dumpty?” He sits up straighter at that, which sends more blood seeping out. “Can’t use thread. That’ll cause an infection. Breaks more easy, too. Got any… uh, got dental floss?”
Karen tosses the spool onto the bathroom floor and begins shuffling around in her single sink drawer. “Yeah, here.”
“Good. Good, use that instead. Let the needle cool and slide it through, then I’ll walk you through the rest when we get there.”
“Okay.”
“And Karen?”
She looks over her shoulder.
“Don’t take too long.”
The needle, still a little warm from its dive into the blue flames of her stovetop, feels foreign in her fingers. She pulls it through and out, again and again.
She thought, at first, that pulling up a tutorial on YouTube might help. She’d watched some before, a couple of times. How to make a tourniquet, how to keep someone conscious, how to extract a bullet. You go through enough life and death situations and you start to think, around 3:40am on random Thursdays, maybe I should prepare for the next time. But that didn’t mean any of it stuck, much less that she could access wherever the steps of sewing a wound shut are stored in her brain. Probably beat out of her cerebrum by all that DA office paperwork. But her phone’s on the other end of the apartment, and Frank’s starting to pale.
In and out. It’s harder than it looks in the movies. His flesh isn’t some solid mass, it’s jiggling and the blood only makes it slippery. Frank’s hand is braced against the wall, the other one on her counter. To his credit, he doesn’t make a sound. Karen thinks she might be swearing enough to send Matt’s mother to an early grave, though.
“Doing alright?” she asks him, eyes leaving her work for a split second. Just enough to check in.
“Fine,” he says. His breaths are controlled, in through the nose. A little shallow, but she’s just getting started. He said it would even out eventually—she hadn’t been sure if he was talking about the pain or her crooked stitches.
“It’s going to scar. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Had worse.”
Well, clearly. Karen can see them all pretty plainly. At least the ones on his torso and arms. How many are from his days as a Marine, and how many are recent? She sees a couple she thinks she might even remember.
They’ve been through a good deal together. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that, for as long as he disappears from her life, he’s stuck around a good while. Feels like longer than most people in Karen’s life, aside from Foggy and Matt. She wonders, when she looks at the scratch that runs from his forehead to his cheekbone, if he recognizes any of her scars.
She’s made it a quarter down the gash when she realizes it's best to stop the wandering gaze. Eyes locked on her needle, she grasps at conversation to distract from the sight of it all.
“Which one?”
“Huh?”
“Which one was the worst?”
“Oh.” For a moment, he’s silent again. “Left arm, just under the shoulder. Caught a hunk of barbed wire through it my first year deployed.”
She does look up at it, then. It’s a ragged line of white flesh, grown over whatever bloodied pulp once stood.
Back to her task. “Doesn’t look so bad now. Bye bye muscle shirts, I guess.”
He laughs, and when his stomach clenches so does the wound. It pushes out her last stitch. She pulls the thread again, a little tighter than she’d meant, and that does cause him to wince, finally.
“Sorry,” she whispers as she digs back in.
To stave off the pain, or maybe to stop himself from having too good a time with the utterly rancid thought of wearing a muscle shirt, Frank takes another sip of the gin she found in her pantry cabinet. He got lucky with that. She’s not in the business of keeping liquor in her home these days. Marci brought that one evening a few weeks ago, spouting the excuse of leaving Foggy and Matt behind for a girls night while also trying to pawn information on one of their client’s hit-and-run-turned-near-kidnapping case.
It was a good girls night. They watched Dirty Dancing while eating takeout from one of those fancier places in Manhattan, and then when Karen, deep in a gin and tonic, admitted she’d never seen Legally Blonde, Marci dropped the rival lawyer ruse and demanded they rectify that, because, “ How can you work for a law office and not have seen this country’s most influential and moving work of legal art? Foggy thinks that’s My Cousin Vinny and Matt says it’s Twelve Angry Men, but Karen, you have to understand Elle Woods would beat all of them with one cross-examination…”
“Yeah,” says Frank. She’s halfway done now and it’s looking like he was right about the stabilization. Once the wound is shutting, it’s not so slippery. “I, uh… I did have to take a couple weeks off for that one. Not enough to get sent home, but… I was hoping.”
Karen glances back up. He’s looking at her empty towel rack, but his eyes are bouncing around so quickly she can’t keep track of where they’re headed next. One second they’re on the sink, and not even another Mississippi until they catch the bathtub full of suds and clothes.
“After our medic pulled the barbs out I called Maria and let her know I was alright but they weren't letting me on leave. SAT phone, you know, so we couldn’t talk too long. Not even that bad an injury compared to what some of the other guys got. Not bad compared to what I've racked up after that, and then after I finished with the Marines, you know?"
Karen takes a second to wipe some of the blood away from the edges of her poor sewing job, and when she places the towel down on the edge of the tub, she fights the urge to lay her hand over his.
“Almost there.”
It’s in the quiet hours of the morning that she eventually finishes, his side sloppily patched together like baby’s first quilting class. Unfortunately for tonight’s guest, her cooking is just as nonexistent as her sewing. When Frank hobbles over to her fridge, he makes a sound not unlike a skidding car engine.
“You never keep any food around here?” he asks, staring into the refrigerator light casting his chest in a yellow glow. He’s not wearing his shirt, on account of it joining his coat in her bathtub. She can’t take it to the laundromat until it’s bloodless, and none of her shirts fit.
“Don’t really have a need to,” Karen replies from the couch. She’s flicking through the TV channels, trying to get to the news. It would be faster if she punched in the number, but then she’d have nothing to do with her hands. “I eat at work, mostly. Or get take-out.”
Work. They hadn’t spoken about much aside from his being stabbed. Apparently it was from some gang member he’d been chasing for the past two weeks. Nothing big, he’d said with that smirk of his that he pulls out to dissuade worry, and Karen would have questioned further if she hadn’t been pushing a needle through him. But they haven’t discussed her work. She assumed he’d been keeping tabs. And assumed that, if he wasn’t, then…
“You get into the habit of staying at the Bulletin for dinner?” He pulls out a half-empty styrofoam container of pad thai and grabs two forks from the correct drawer on the first try.
Karen shakes her head, settling on a nationwide channel instead of the local one since Frank’s shoving a fork into her hand and plopping himself at her side. With a respectful distance, of course. Always was old fashioned. Besides, they’re more long-term acquaintances than they are… anything more. She sinks her teeth into the noodles before answering. “I work with Foggy and Matt again. Starting over. Clean slate and all that.”
Frank’s quiet. Doesn’t eat his share of her food despite separating exactly half of it to the lid portion of the container. Has she upset him by mentioning Matt? He’s a part of her life in more ways than one. It would be impossible to leave the Murdock out of Nelson, Murdock, and Page. So if that’s what he wants her to do, if he wants her to ignore Matt’s existence and censor him out of her life because they’ve had disagreements on every fundamental level one can disagree and on some so hyper-specific they’re new to the very invention of arguing, then she’s—
“‘S good. I’m, uh… I’m happy for you.”
Karen’s mouth hangs open a moment. The recovery is quick.
“We’re working out of, um, Nelson’s Meats?” She offers the information up even though she knows he won’t ask for it. A precaution, she tells herself, in case they ever need his professional assistance. “It’s Foggy’s family’s place. Butcher shop. We work in the back room, for now.”
“Mm. Legal offices not good enough?”
He has his eyes locked on the television screen. Unreadable.
Karen likes to imagine that she’s fairly decent at understanding Frank. Prides herself on it. People tend to assume he’s simple—that there’s not much in his brain but violence playing on a loop like a broken VHS; no matter how many times you try to fix the tape, it just keeps rewinding itself. But Karen knows him better. Usually, that is.
She tears her eyes away from his scraped up face and tucks her feet underneath her thighs. The TV is mumbling low, talking about some African royalty incident she’s not caught up on. Far away, other side of the world nonsense. Lately, Karen’s concerned herself more with this city. The people that live in it, love in it, die in it. Mostly, Karen focuses on the people who’d give their all to protect it.
She can’t focus on the news. It’s been months; he’s like a magnet, sitting right there, finally shoveling food into his mouth. Now that he’s not dying, she takes in the new lines that run the length of his eyes. Not quite laugh lines, though she’d like to imagine they are. She’d like to imagine that, in a different life, his injuries all came from playing too hard at a park. From teaching his kids how to ride bikes, not from sniping criminals off motorcycles. Karen keeps that thought to herself, tugging her only throw blanket over her legs, nudging a side toward Frank and not entirely expecting him to take her up on the offer. He moves closer to fit underneath it; she can feel his hot skin against her clammy arm. It’s not a fever. Infection wouldn’t set in so quick, and she followed his instructions for cleaning out the wound sacredly.
She restrains herself, biting down on her lip. They’re friends, if that. (I don’t want that). He came to her because he needed medical attention. She knows too much about Frank to ever… Well, she’s thought about it. Dreamt about it a few times. There is something intoxicating about Frank Castle. If he wasn’t a mass murderer, if he wasn’t currently going by Pete Castiglione the construction worker, maybe more people would see him the way she did. Uncomfortable sharing a blanket with the woman he’s been through hell with, skittish at the thought of stepping too far. Cautious, but mostly scared. Of the world, its cruelty, and the way it constantly pulls the rug out from under him every damn time he begins to feel happy.
Karen knows the world doesn’t specialize in fairness. Her own upbringing, her own fall from grace—that made it clear. Even in her line of work, profit feeds off the unfair. But that doesn’t stop her from wishing each night that the world would gift some of that stolen fairness to Frank.
His eyes snap to hers from the screen then, watching as she presses a thin hand against her scalp. “Am I more interesting than usurped thrones in Wakanda?”
“Hm?”
He laughs, hard but quiet, careful not to disturb the neighbors. She’s seen him laugh before, but it’s different when the sunrise is glistening through her window, brighter than it should be as it reflects off the snow piles littering the street. He looks younger, and no, she hasn’t been paying attention to the news.
It’s just a stare, a few moments longer than necessary. Long enough for his grin to fade and the spark in his eyes to be replaced with something else. Karen knows this one.
“You been okay?”
Since he left. No, Karen hasn’t. She’s been hunted by Fisk, by Poindexter. And yet somehow, Karen finds herself thinking of Frank more than she thinks of either of them (which means she thinks of Frank a lot, and often). Frank, who hadn’t said a word to her beyond that day in the hospital (I don’t want that), who hadn’t even signaled that he cared beyond a bouquet of roses sent that first week as confirmation he’d lived. Frank, who just decided to show up on her doorstep tonight, because somehow she’s the best option he has, the only person he has to go to in a time of need. There’s not even room in her heart to feign anger—she just misses him, plain and simple.
“I’m still alive,” she breathes out, shaking at the edges. Beneath the blanket, her leg brushes his.
Frank’s head lists so slightly to the right. “Heard about what happened while I was gone,” he says, and then there’s a pause, his eyes flickering back to the screen before they meet hers again. Maybe it’s just the exhaustion setting in, but Karen thinks she can see tears brimming. “Glad you’re… okay.”
She just presses her lips together. Let him do the talking.
“I didn’t want to go dark, you know. Had to for my safety and the girl’s.” Amy, she thinks she remembers. The teen with impeccable timing trailing along after Frank like a second shadow. Fearing the worst, Karen doesn’t ask what became of her. Frank keeps talking. “But… when I came back, I heard you were alright. Had a friend look into it. He didn’t tell me anything about you working with Nelson and Red, but he did tell me you were making a habit of goin’ to see them for me. Dropping flowers when I couldn’t.”
Them. Maria, Lisa, and Frank Jr. Karen stills—his voice is rough. Maybe she’d gone too far, stepped too close to the ticking time bomb that was Frank’s personal life. But then his hand is under her chin, tilting her gaze back to meet his, and she can see that his eyes are pooling, but not with the blood from earlier. There are tears seeping out, falling onto her couch instead of the bathroom floor.
“What’d I do to deserve you?” he asks, lower than necessary. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him none of her neighbors are up before seven.
I think you’ve saved my life once or twice is what she wants to say, but doesn’t. This is the serious Frank look, the one that barges in at the worst times, the one that she knows means he’s been thinking. Loathing, lamenting, though Frank would never admit he does any of that melodramatic bullcrap. Grieving, she thinks, is more likely to be the word he’d allow her to describe him with.
This is not what’s intoxicating about Frank, but it is what makes the oxygen leave her lungs and build up in her esophagus.
“You always have,” she says, and lightly touches her fingertips to his.
Truthfully, Karen doesn’t believe anyone deserves her, not like he put it. Not like she’s an improvement on anyone’s life, because she’s not. She digs around in business she has no place in; creates trouble where there isn’t a need for any. Leaves flowers for children that aren’t hers, for a woman she never met but feels oddly attached to, if only by means of knowing the same man. Frank might not entirely understand, Karen thinks, and maybe he’s envisioning her as someone she’s not. People tend to do that when it’s someone they love.
“No.” Frank shakes his head, presses his own hand over hers until the heat is transferred and she’s feeling those tingles all across her body again. Like a stupid school girl crush. He doesn’t elaborate beyond the look in his eyes. The one she’s never seen him give outside of her company. Tear tracks still shine down his face.
He takes her other hand, holds it above his heart, where she can feel it beating underneath his dog tags. She didn’t know he still had them, didn’t think it was something he’d hold onto. Didn’t think he tried too hard to hold onto anything. His heartbeat is steady, sound, and her own thoughts play back to her.
When it’s someone you love.
In this city’s barren cold, Karen Page watches as the Punisher kisses the top of her head. A thank you, and maybe a promise of something more.