Chapter Text
The first time he saw her, he had been annoyed as shit. Hospital staff, he could just scare off. Knock out the policeman, shoot near their heads and they go scurrying like rats. Simple. He does consider later that maybe he had been too rash, too high on the adrenaline of the trigger, shooting off in a hospital. Hell, he should’ve known that well enough as a veteran. So he concedes on that point to Red, not that he's going to admit it to the Catholic boy's face.
Hospital ethics aside, he hadn’t factored in her presence. Thought she would go off running like the rest of them and leave the dipshit alone once he fired a few warning shots at her. But she kept getting in the way, pulling the scumbag along, making Frank’s mission a pain in the ass. She was brave, he had to give her that. But also fucking stupid.
That’s why he hadn’t followed them down the stairwell. Wasn’t gonna accomplish much to continue anyway. The blonde would most likely end up as collateral damage, and although Frank had briefly considered that maybe people protecting scumbag thugs who murdered innocent old ladies deserved to get shot too, he had enough sense left to discard that thought. This was what service people do – doctors, nurses, lawyers, whatever she was.
Blonde hair. Tall. Pale. That’s all he remembered from their first meeting. He had seen her face for just a few seconds. In fact, he wouldn’t have been able to recall it if he hadn’t met her again. In a fucking hospital, this time him lying on the bed and her towering over him. Was this what you called karma?
He knew it was her. He had found out the people protecting the Irish were the team that had put Fisk away. Recognised the bespectacled, blind, pretentious bag of shit (fucking Red) and the stuttering counselor who badly needed a haircut. So the blonde must’ve been the one at the hospital.
After she had spoken, she had been all that was there. The blind one was gone, and only the fat one remained. But it didn’t matter. All that legal jargon. He only looked at her. This woman had pried into his life, walked into his house, touched the shell of his former life. Who the hell did she think she was? He had stared at her, and she had stared right back. Pretty - she was pretty. First time in a long while he had thought a woman was pretty. She brought back memories of sunny days and laughter.
She had the answers for him. That had been the first time. She would have the answers for him again and again.
*
The first time she saw him, she had been scared as hell. Who wouldn't be scared of a hulking mass of black coming at them with some sort of assault rifle? She didn’t know guns well, only knew enough of them to pick out her own semi-automatic. Her heart had pretty much jumped into her throat, but her body had kicked itself into action out of instinct before her mind caught up. Grab Grotto, run, don't get your brains blown out.
The bullets had rained on them. She hadn’t thought about anything much while running for her life, but she later wondered how she had escaped in one piece. Her shooter kindly provided the answer later: Quantico 307 apparently meant you had really good aim.
She didn’t know what possessed her to walk right up to him and shove the photo in his face. Sure, he was handcuffed to the bed, and probably too weak to have moved much, but agitating a mass murderer no matter what state he is in is not the smartest thing to do. She supposed it was around that time that alarm bells should have been going off in her head. She should have questioned why she felt so strongly about this man. For the longest time, she had told herself that it was a quest for the truth, but she knew now that this was only half of it.
Projecting, Ellison had called it. A man with a tragic past, coping with the repercussions of it. It had struck right at her core, the part of herself that she had carefully filed, boxed and hidden away in a corner of her own being. It wouldn’t be touched again, every time there was a shift and the box slid back out into view, she would simply push it back where it belonged.
It would have ended right there if Frank had not been so bloody soft. That was the only way she could describe him. Soft, broken. Perhaps it had affirmed her own unconscious desire to see him as a man capable of being rescued. They always say that women go for bad men because they unconsciously want to change and nurture them for the better. So when Frank had looked at her with wide, frantic eyes about failing to protect the ones he had loved, and the box had slid right into view again, close to opening up, she had already made a decision about the man that Frank was. Deranged, maybe. But not a monster. He was not a monster.
“You stay.”
The fear had struck again at his voice. Rough, deep. The memory of him walking down the hospital corridor flashed across her mind. But then, “please”. Soft. He had boxed his own past away too, put it behind locked doors and thrown away the key. It was there though. It was coming back. All she had to do was help him find the key and then maybe he would find peace.
She had been angry at Matt for a while. For lying to her, for his moral high ground, for not trusting her enough. She let go of that anger quickly enough, because she had realised that she had been no better. She had never been honest with him, never told him about Wesley or her brother, she had not trusted him enough to know her true self. And as for moral high grounds, from the way she had tried so hard to “save” Frank, she had her own messiah complex to deal with.
Things had changed since then. Frank eventually did find the key, but then he shot the head off, took a can of fuel and burned his whole house down, box and all. Still, she doesn’t forget how he was that first time they interacted, and throughout their time together. A different man from the one people knew him as and that people did not, could not, believe he could be. Only, he chose to prove them right. He had used her as bait, crashed into her car and literally closed the door on her. She wondered whether the next time they met, he would quite treat her the same way.
*
“Who did that to you?”
The rough voice was so sudden, Karen nearly dropped her keys in fright. She had been outside her apartment block, trying to get the key to enter the freaking keyhole. It was a little tough given her black eye and swollen jaw, and the dull, throbbing headache that had plagued her since the attack that morning.
She whipped around, her mind registering the owner of the voice just a mini-second later, her heart jumping into her throat. He was standing a few feet off from the stairs, half-hidden in the shadows, hands in his pockets. He was sporting a shiner himself, but with his baseball cap drawn low over his face and the lack of illumination on his face, that was all Karen could make out.
“Frank.” She breathed out, realising that she had been holding her breath. This was the first time she was seeing him in almost six months. “W-what are you-”
“I asked you a question.” He brusquely cut across her. “Who did that?”
Karen’s heart began to race even faster than it already was. Her mind began to process the meaning behind his words. If she told him what had happened, that a man had pulled her into an alley that morning and roughed her up, he might go after him. Kill him. That’s what the Punisher did, right? Kill bad guys.
“This was nothing.” She replied quickly. “I just-” Shit, she didn’t have an excuse. “I just pissed off the wrong people.”
He raised his face slightly, the light from the building windows reaching his face then. His eyes were dark and narrowed. Karen felt a chill travel down her spine. “Did he have a scar on his face? Down one eye.”
Karen blanched. “What?”
“I said,” His voice was strained, frustration breaking through at her slow uptake. He was on edge, clearly uncomfortable at being there, talking to her. “Did he have a scar across one eye? Russian, tanned skin.”
Karen’s could feel the blood draining even more from her face. She had assumed that the Russian had been after her because of an article she had written a few weeks back on some underground trafficking activities, but this meant…Although she hadn’t said anything, Frank had obviously received his answer already from her reaction. He seemed to stand a little taller, perhaps drawing himself together, and he abruptly turned his back to her and began to walk away.
“Frank, wait!” She cried out, knowing what he meant to do now. “Don’t do this. Just leave it alone okay.” He ignored her, weaving in between the cars parked by the curb. “Frank! Don’t get blood on my hands, please.”
He stopped at that, turning back just a bit to fix her with a hard gaze. His voice, when he spoke, was cold. It sent a chill up her spine once again. “The blood won’t be on your hands.”
And that was it. A nondescript, white van had drawn up beside him, driven by a man too hidden in the dark for Karen to make out. Frank opened the passenger door, climbed in, and banged the door close without a second glance back. Karen stood at the roadside for a while more, watching the van drive away, hands slightly shaking and a terrible sense of foreboding coiling up in her stomach. As with all the times in the past, Frank re-entered her life with the promise of bloodshed. Hell’s Kitchen was coming alive once more.