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This is how she loses him.
In between one heartbeat and the next.
A string of multi-coloured fairy lights in the shape of chilli peppers that make her feel younger and giddy, back when she was on a date with a man she hadn’t found the courage to love yet.
A celebration of her freedom which will cost the loss of his.
The sad, inevitable smile on Matt’s face that tells her what she already knows.
She knows the second they run out of time. Matt reaches for her fingers, gripping them so tightly it hurts. Her hand settles over the top, gripping his just as fiercely. Already she can see the laughter lines fade from his face, his mouth firm. Dread fills her stomach as the multi-coloured fairy lights above them twinkle with the promise of a life they don’t get to have.
Karen wishes more than anything for more time.
Time to love him. Time to tell him how much she loves him and make him understand. Time to figure this life out. Time to have this moment with him.
But they don’t get more time, they get this stolen moment and make believe.
They get an empty Indian restaurant they love, a victory they earned and then they get to watch it fade.
“Will you move in with me?” Matt asks, the urgency in his voice doesn’t go unnoticed, the grip of his fingers desperate against hers.
She knows what he is doing. Knows he is drawing her gaze back from the window to him, giving his last seconds to her and making them count.
Giving her everything he has.
Something more than devotion, something that transcends love, something that defies war.
Karen swallows the lump in her throat, “We’ve been living together for months.”
And she has loved every second of it. Waking up with him, fighting with him, making love with him.
Her mind flicks through all the things she has learnt about him in those months. All those parts of him she gets to see. The way he dances, holding her impossibly close. The way he doesn’t sleep unless her skin is pressed against his. The way he is ticklish at the back of his knee. The way he loves her even in his anger, even in his despair.
Her heart squeezes in her chest, responding to the grip they have on each other's hands.
Not enough time.
There will never be enough time for what she wants with him.
Matt’s gaze is on her face, eyes hidden behind glasses so she can’t see what he is feeling but the grip on her hands tells her enough.
He doesn’t want to lose her either.
“I mean properly.” He says, a slight smirk on his face like this is any other date, “Find us somewhere. A place that isn’t mine or yours or someone else’s. Somewhere that’s ours. For that life we’re going to try and figure out.”
She doesn’t want his last memory of her to be tears so she holds them back. Inside her chest her heart is breaking, splintering, shattering and all she wants to do is cling onto Matt. The man she loves. The man who sacrificed everything for her.
“Yes.” She agrees, thinks she hears sirens in the distance getting closer. The Indian food turns in her stomach, the beer doing little to help.
Outside, the sky is setting to dusk. His favourite time of day.
“Call Cherry. He has access to my accounts. Use whatever you need. 50/50.” God she hates how this moment is tainted with what she knows is coming next, “I’m all in, Karen.”
But he won’t be.
He can’t be.
Because they both knew that Matt would need to answer for his crimes. They both knew the city would demand it.
Fuck the city, she thinks bitterly, for demanding this of him. Of them. When Matt has bled into these streets, gone to war over them, buried friends for them.
“Brooklyn?” It’s meant to be teasing but it comes out pained. The table cloth is a brilliant white, formal and out of place.
What she wouldn’t give for five more minutes of his teasing, his softness, his arms around her.
Matt’s thumb strokes her skin reassuringly, “Hell’s Kitchen. I’d like to be closer to Foggy.”
Oh god.
She can’t do this.
She can’t.
But Matt’s iron grip on her fingers is telling her he needs her to. Desperately. Because this isn’t a happy ending and he needs something to survive for.
Needs to know she’s with him.
“Lots of open space. Natural light, big windows.” Her voice is thick, the fairy lights above them giving their dream a layer of whimsy that feels so wrong it makes her head spin, “Roof access?”
“I don’t think I’ll need it anymore.”
Because he has lost that as well.
Daredevil. Foggy. His career. His freedom.
What more can Matt Murdock lose before God gives him a break?
Karen shifts forward in her seat, feeling the press of his knees under the table, “A balcony then, so you can hear the city properly.”
“And a big bathtub.” He adds, “An extra room for your office.”
“Matt.” Her voice trembles.
Losing him is going to destroy her.
It was always going to destroy her.
She knew that when she stayed. She knew that when she let him carry her to the bed that first night. She knew that when she fell in love with him.
“Hey, it’s okay.” He is comforting her and she hates it, knows she should be doing that for him.
The sirens get closer.
“We could run. Just disappear, go somewhere they wouldn’t find us.” She is desperate now, her mind racing with how to get out of the city, out of the country.
Anywhere with him really. Anywhere this city can’t touch him.
She imagines Matt in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, a big winter jacket and a small child clinging to his leg. She imagines his smile, the quiet and the ease of it. No blood on his knuckles, no wrath in their veins.
She imagines a life where she doesn’t lose him.
A pretty lie.
Because that’s what peace is for them. A lie. A punch line. A grenade.
“No.” He bursts her fantasy with a single word like she knew he would. If he thought they could run, they would have left Hell’s Kitchen the second they left the courthouse, “I want a life with you. I want a future with you. But not on the run, not looking over our shoulders. I broke the law, I’m not above it. Daredevil isn’t above it. I knew that.”
But it isn’t right or fair or just.
She understands why he clings to it though. He showed Fisk grace. He showed Bullseye mercy. Matt Murdock has faith in the institutions he loves. The church, the law.
He has faith in her as well.
He wouldn’t turn his back on her either.
“I don’t know how to lose you, Matt.” She tells him, “I don’t think I can. Not like this. Not after… Christ Matt, I can’t.”
She hears the squeal of tires on the tarmac, despite the fact her heart is beating so loudly Karen thinks it’s about to burst right out of her chest.
Inside her, something cracks.
Something vital.
They are out of time. They barely had it in the first place. So much wasted or lost or buried.
“Do you regret it?” She asks, sees the flashing blue lights in her peripheral vision.
Matt smiles, the soft kind she normally only sees when they are in bed together, “Not for a single second. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.”
Karen shakes her head, “Don’t leave me.”
“Never, sweetheart.” Even that stings, echoing through her bones like blood between her teeth, “This is temporary. My love for you isn’t.”
She squeezes her eyes shut when he pulls his hands away, standing up from his seat. Outside she hears car doors slamming, hears shouting. Behind her eyes, she sees a dozen different coloured fairy lights that feel like that don’t belong in this moment.
The moment she loses him.
Karen forces her eyes open, forces herself to soak in the image of Matt before her. He dressed up for their date, arms bare and straining against the sleeves. Snug button up she imagined taking off him later. Suddenly her own skirt and boots feel ridiculous, a decision that belonged to a different version of her. One that got to keep him.
Matt slips his silver chain off his neck, holding it out to her, “Keep this safe for me?”
Her numb fingers take it, the cross warm from his skin as he settles it into her palm. Then he is getting on his knees, as if he is about to propose, as if this date might have ended happily.
But that’s not the world they live in, the world Fisk left in his wake.
The world that knows Matt is Daredevil.
His hands move to the back of his head, “Kiss me? Something good for me to hold onto.”
The officer arrives before she can. He doesn’t fight the police as they handcuff him, offering an easy smile in her direction while his life turns to ash.
“Matthew Murdock?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re under arrest for assault, attempted murder, it’s a long list.”
“Daredevil’s crimes.”
All Karen can hear is static, the loss of him leeching the colours out of her world until everything is a muted shade of blue. A dull cobalt that was once brilliantly vivid. Until all she sees is those damn glasses that hide his eyes from her.
“You have the right to…”
“Waive the advisement, not the rights.”
God, she loves him.
Her heart breaks as his hands are forced behind his back, his body tilting closer to her. She catches the reflection of fairy lights in those red lenses, knows he is searching for her.
“I used to be a lawyer.” Words aimed at her, tongue-in-cheek because he can sense she is spiraling.
He used to be a lot of things. So did she.
They used to be fighters. They used to be vigilantes. They used to be happy.
Oh god.
Karen is pulling his face towards her, fusing her lips with his like she might be able to keep him with her if she doesn’t let go.
But Matt pulls back when the handcuffs snap into place, head tilting into her palm for a precious second longer.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He is hauled to his feet gently, guided out of the restaurant by police officers who look remorseful as she follows, lingering in the doorway of what they had and what is happening now.
Matt can hear her heart, he must because he pauses to look at her for final time. A smile at the corner of his mouth just for her. A promise for something neither of them knows how to get.
A life.
Together.
She watches him go, watches the car disappear out of sight and only then, when she is sure Matt is far enough away that he won’t be able to hear her, does she finally cry.
/
This is how she loses him.
In mountains of legal paperwork and newspaper articles that question his violence, his justice, his retribution.
In the hours she sits alone, waiting for him to come back to her when she knows he can’t.
In the words issued by a court of law that Karen knew were coming, expected were coming but still feel like a wrecking ball to her chest.
His bail is denied.
He’s a flight risk, too dangerous, too high profile.
It’s all bullshit.
Karen doesn’t even get a minute with him before he is getting hauled away, back to a jail cell with everyone he has ever put in there.
Matt tells her he is fine.
She knows he isn’t.
Luke and Jessica’s spare room is nice. They offered it to her the second they heard about Matt’s arrest. Because she doesn’t have a home anymore. It was Matt and Matt is…
It’s down the hallway from Danielle’s bedroom and Karen often sees the little girl dancing up and down the hall in her fairy wings with a wand in hand. Some days she asks for a wish. Others she lets the girl dance past, too exhausted to even lift her head off the pillow.
The bed is king size, ridiculously huge and Karen sometimes wonders if it will swallow her, if she’ll sink right through with the weight of her loss and never make her way out.
She misses Matt like a physical ache inside her, a punch to the gut, a missing organ, a lost limb. She feels like she has been drugged in a back alley and woken up with a kidney missing, a jagged scar and a phantom ache she didn’t consent to.
The days cycle by slowly. Karen lays in bed and doesn’t sleep. Luke brings her food that she doesn’t eat. Jessica gives her speeches about getting off her ass which she pretends not to hear.
Some nights she feels like she hallucinates so much she can feel Matt next to her. The press of his body, warm and solid. The gruffness of his voice, always the worst in the morning but she loves it. When her hand reaches out for him and finds nothing but cold sheets, Karen screams into her pillow and prays Danielle can’t hear it.
Eventually Jess hauls her out of bed, literally. One hand around Karen’s ankle until she pulls with enough force that she hits the floor fast. Karen springs up, the exhaustion replaced by anger. She takes a swing that Jess dodges easily, telling her to shower and then put some clothes on.
The fight leaves her as quickly as it comes, deflating inside her like a balloon. Karen showers, if only so she can cry without Jess hearing her.
Her anger comes back afterwards. At Fisk. At the city. At Matt.
Because it should have been her. It was meant to be her and Karen doesn’t know what to do with the fact it isn’t.
The fact he sacrificed himself for her.
His love for her that would never let him do anything else.
Matt loves her in such a way that he would let the media, the law, the world rip him apart to spare her. He loves her in such a way that he catches her flaws in a safety net, his contradictions offered to her in return. He loves her against all odds, all problems, all reason.
He gave up his biggest secret for her like it was nothing, like he was deciding to wear a lighter jacket.
That’s love. Beyond reason.
And she loves him just as fiercely which is why she wishes he had done anything else. Because she can handle a lot but not this. Not the loss of another home, not the seizure of her heart and the raid on their happiness.
Her fist hits the mirror above the sink, just the way Matt taught her. The flat of her fingers, not the knuckles. Power from her whole body not just her wrist.
The glass cracks, her hands come away bloody. Her heart stutters.
Some days Karen thinks she should rip the beating thing right out of her chest, offering it up as testimony to why Matt Murdock is a good person. One look at the way he loves her would be proof enough.
The pain in her knuckles settles her, gives her something to focus on instead of the invisible thing in her chest that makes her feel like she is bleeding out. Karen draws her first proper breath, the muted blues of her world sparking with red at the edges.
She’s always liked red.
/
Watching Jessica and Luke together is painful, the way they find their way back to each other after whatever happened between them. It makes her miss Matt, makes her miss a lot of things.
Reminds her she has a promise to keep.
So, she hunts for an apartment. Writes down a list of everything they agreed on and gets to work. Karen sees dozens of them, not quite right. She walks through empty rooms and tries to imagine Matt in the space, trying to imagine what it would look like if it was theirs.
Every day she goes back to Jessica’s and lets loose on the punching bag Luke installed in the garage for her. Every day she visits Foggy’s grave and asks him what the fuck she is meant to do.
She doesn’t bother with God. Hopes Matt will understand.
She visits Matt and counts his bruises. Tries to commit his voice to memory for the hours when she can’t sleep. Avoids the questions about her sleeping and her eating and how she is.
He already knows.
Karen doesn’t want to lie to him.
It’s Kirsten that tells her about the apartment for rent in Foggy’s old neighbourhood, passing the sign on her way into the office. She’s closing it down, trying to rebuild her own life again after Matt’s identity reveal.
When she goes to see the apartment she knows Matt would love it. Exposed brickwork with an open plan kitchen and living room. A small balcony off the living room big enough to fit a small table and chairs if she ever felt like writing again. Her laptop hasn’t been open in weeks but the view of the city is stunning this high up, reminding her that Matt’s price meant peace for Hell’s Kitchen. She knows he is relieved about that.
The main bedroom is airy, with bay windows and a built-in wardrobe. A smaller second room is next door that would work as an office, not that Karen has much of a job right now. It’s the bathroom that sells her on it. The claw foot tub that overlooks the city, a separate shower tucked into the corner.
“And it has roof access.” The real estate agent tells her, gesturing to the back door in the main bedroom that leads onto a private roof terrace.
Something inside her explodes. Violently. Recklessly. Impulsively.
A fight she didn’t think she still had.
Karen puts a down payment on it without a second thought, signing the paperwork with both hers and Matt’s name as promised. 50/50. A true partnership. Or the ghost of one.
/
Jessica and Luke help her move in, she doesn’t own much so it doesn’t take long. A few bags of hers and Matt’s stuff from Josie’s and her furniture which has been sitting in storage since Foggy died. She salvages what she can, makes a list of things she needs to buy or replace. Nothing survived from the grenade in Matt’s apartment so she adds things she knows he loves to that list. A record player. The softest mattress she can find. Silk sheets. Somewhere to put his keys when he gets in because he always loses them. So does she.
It feels empty, every corner of her soul. She is building a home because he asked but he isn’t here to build it with her.
Karen wonders if this is what hell feels like.
An empty apartment that was meant to be filled with love. A bed she doesn’t want to sleep in because Matt isn’t there next to her. An ache in her chest that feels like a bomb.
A late period which feels like another one.
She ignores it. Puts it down to stress, to her irregular cycles since going on the run. She refuses to buy a test. Refuses to spiral down the hole of… that.
Instead Karen keeps herself busy. Building a case for Matt’s appeal, gathering evidence and witnesses to dispute every conviction that they are charging him with. She isn’t a lawyer but she was there for every crime, in his life even if she was in the dark for some of it. She tells Kirsten where to look, who to contact, who to put on the stand.
When she isn’t working on his case, she’s in their new apartment. Adding braille tags to everything she can see, tying description cards to the hangers in the closet so Matt can find his way around.
Not a house, a home.
Because her home is in a jail cell right now and Karen thinks it’s all an illusion some days. She’ll wake up in her old apartment in San Francisco and it will have all been a dream.
She wears his clothes, wraps herself in the armour of him like she is preparing for a war.
Some days she takes out the suit, red and black and defiant. She presses the brow of his helmet to her head like it’s him. Then when the pain feels like it is flaying her alive, Karen shoves it back in the duffel bag and slides it under the bed.
It doesn’t bring her closer to him. Doesn’t offer her comfort.
Only pain.
Because she is made of pain now. Forged in it. Crafted by it. She is so sick of it, the way it lingers in her bones and races through her blood. The way pain comes in the form of his voice and their memories and those hours when she can’t sleep because she aches for him.
The portrait of a woman without her soulmate.
She finds the photo of her, Matt and Foggy from St. Patrick’s Day at Josie’s. It feels like a million years ago. She cries as she hangs it, their smiling faces staring at her every morning when she sits on the couch. She also finds Matt’s copy of Foggy’s funeral programme, runs her finds over the braille like she can read it. Imagines him doing the same. Karen slides it into the bible she finds in his bag, keeping them both on his bedside table on the side of the bed she knows he prefers.
The hurt comes in waves, as it always does. The smallest thing like adding oat milk to her coffee or hanging one of his shirts in the closet.
It isn’t a fierce thing, but pathetic. The way she misses him in tiny details, in useless ways that mean nothing except to her.
The blue of her world becomes a steel blue, the colour of lifelessness, of the cold.
The type of blue people call time of death over.
/
Jessica tracks her down a week later, offering her a job because Karen needs to pay rent on the apartment somehow and being a known associate of Daredevil isn’t exactly giving her a lot of job prospects.
“I heard you’re a hell of a PI.” Jessica shrugs, “Let’s see what you can do.”
“Don’t you need references and an interview before you offer me a job?” Karen asks, knowing Jessica is focusing on the fact she is wearing Matt’s t-shirt on a Wednesday afternoon with red-rimmed eyes. Karen can’t remember the last time she left the apartment, doesn’t remember the last time she ate. She feels light-headed and floaty. A dissociation about to disappear.
“I have a reference.” She replies, “You come highly recommended by your old firm.”
Matt.
She’s talking about Matt.
So, Karen goes back to work.
It keeps her busy, exhausted in a way that makes her crawl onto the couch to sleep despite the ache inside her for Matt. It helps, she thinks. Or it doesn’t hurt and that’s something.
She holds her breath sometimes, moments when she can’t feel the hurt. She freezes her whole body like she can hold onto the feeling of numbness. This, she thinks, she can handle this.
She still avoids the bed, the silk sheets and the soft mattress. She can’t without Matt, doesn’t know how to sleep in a double bed without him next to her. Doesn’t know how to not drown in the absence of him in one.
And the world keeps turning. As it always does.
Fisk is gone but investigations into the rest of his administration are still going on. They find the body of Daniel Blake, Karen supports BB as she testifies. No one can find Dr Glenn or Buck Cashman but both are wanted for questioning. The city elects a new mayor, people walk the streets after dark again.
This time without a horned protector.
She misses another period. Buys a test this time.
The two minute wait is agony, curled up on the bathroom floor with too many emotions to know which one to settle on.
The timer goes off before she can decide. She flips the stick over.
Negative.
She takes another. And another.
All five come back negative.
And that’s something. Relief, she thinks, as well as sadness. Because Matt isn’t here and she doesn’t want to do any of this without him. She doesn’t want this life without him.
All she is making in their home are bad memories, a soldier returning from the front knowing they are the last one standing. Not whole. Not victorious. Knowing they will never be the same.
The steel blue of her world shifts to a faded denim, washed out and weather-worn.
Jessica finds her still on the bathroom floor, Karen didn’t hear her knock but she hears the door being kicked in and sees Jessica’s dark hair through the haze of her tears.
She watches her take it in. Her hunched on the bathroom floor with her knees pressed against her chest and Matt’s shirt stretched to cover everything but her feet, the pregnancy tests littered around her.
“Oh Karen.”
She sobs. She can’t help it. She tries to say Matt’s name because that’s who she wants right now. Not Jessica. Not a baby. Matt.
Jessica kicks a few pregnancy tests away, kneeling down on the floor beside her looking uncomfortable. Crying always makes Jess uncomfortable.
“I would have left, Jess.” She tells her, “With him. I would have stayed on the run and loved him for the rest of my life.”
She doesn’t hug her, Karen is grateful for it but she presses her shoulder against Karen’s and lets her cry herself out.
She is grateful for that too.
“He loves you enough to stay.” Jess points out, “It’s meant to be my visit tomorrow but you should take it. Tell him.”
“There’s nothing to tell. It’s negative.”
“He’d still want to know.”
He would. She knows he would but the idea of confessing how much she is falling apart seems selfish when Matt is locked up. When it’s her fault.
“Maybe it was wrong of him to love me.” Karen whispers quietly, her eyes catching sight of the pink stick by her foot, “Look what it did to him.”
“Murdock did that.” Jess replies, “Knowing the cost. Jesus, sometimes I think if Luke had loved me a little more than he wouldn’t have left his family to go overseas. Maybe he went because he loves me too much. Love isn’t clean, Karen. Not this kind of love.”
“The messed up kind?”
“The forever kind.”
/
So Karen dresses in her purple suit, pretends she has her life together and walks into the prison with her head held high. She glares at the guards as she goes, surrenders her phone and her bag in a move she has done so many times before.
She spots Matt instantly, waiting for her. His beard has grown out, no new bruises today but a shocked look on his face when he realises it’s her instead of Jess. The orange jumpsuit strains against his chest, a peek of white underneath. She aches for him in a whole new way.
“Karen?” He is on his feet but stops short because he isn’t allowed to touch her, “What’s wrong?”
She slides into the vacant chair, waits for Matt to settle back in his, “I just needed to see you. Jess let me have her slot.”
He is different now, not closed off but cautious. With her. Like he is worried he made her up and she’ll shatter if he pushes his luck.
Like he doesn’t know how to make this better.
“Are you okay?”
The care in his voice almost breaks her, the way he places his hands flat on the table between them like he wants to reach out and touch her.
Karen rests hers in her lap, avoids the temptation, “I missed a period. A few of them actually.”
Matt’s whole body jolts, tilting his head to the side, “Are you…”
“No.” She sighs, “I took five tests. They were negative and all I could think was that I wanted you there. To hold me. To promise me everything was going to be alright no matter what the result was.”
He reaches further across the table and Karen caves, placing her hands inches from him. Matt takes them, his fingers rough but warm.
“I’m so sorry.” He tells her softly, “It is all going to be okay, I believe that. I believe in you.”
A guard walks by and bangs their table with the end of his baton, their fingers slipping away from each other again. It wouldn’t be the first time Matt has taken a beating for breaking that rule with her.
“I wasn’t…” She sighs, “I was relieved. A little sad but mostly relieved. Does that make me awful?”
“No.” He answers, “I feel the same. If you were pregnant then we’d figure it out, I’d love you and our baby entirely, Karen but I… If we start a family then I want to be there. For all of it. I don’t want it to be like this.”
Her ribs feel like they are about to cave in, “I would want you there as well.”
“So maybe once I’m out of here we can talk about it?” He says, a tiny smile on his face, “See if we’re ready?”
“Then let’s make sure you get out of here.”
Because their home is waiting for him, she is waiting for him and whatever they become after this is something Karen wants to experience.
/
This is how she refuses to lose him.
In the way she fights, even when she doesn’t know how, even when she feels like she wants to curl up and never move again.
In the way she builds up his record collection again. One vinyl at a time, trying to remember all of his favourites from memory and playing them when she can’t sleep.
In the way she continues to love him, boldly and unapologetically despite the fact the world has tried to rip him away from her.
Karen Page had gone to war for Matt Murdock before, she is happy to do it again.
They build a case, the best case she can. She calls in every favour she has, chases every lead she can find. Has Frank tracking down scumbags across the country to testify that Daredevil saved their life, that he let them live. That he offered them a chance. Mercy, she thinks ironically, always saving him.
The war she is fighting in bloody, long and endless. She doesn't do it behind a mask, she doesn’t do it with a gun. She does it the way Foggy would have, the way Matt had tried to. In a court of law. The same one he fought for her in. There’s something poetic in that she supposes, but is too worked up to think about it.
The suit she wears is a bold deep maroon, a statement that Matt can’t see but everyone else can.
I’m his. He’s mine.
Fight me.
And they do. The prosecution throws everything they can at her but Karen has stared down Wilson Fisk, she has put Frank Castle in his place and given her heart to the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
Intimidation isn’t something that rattles her anymore.
It angers her.
/
Every night she unpacks another box in their apartment, can only manage one at a time before her sadness threatens to drown her.
There are things she loves about this place that she makes sure to detail for Matt when she sees him. The balcony faces the setting sun so the bricks warm with an orange glow in the living room that reminds her of the billboard he used to have outside his old apartment. The kitchen is spacious, something she knew he would like because he loves to cook. Their bedroom is a little smaller but she likes that as well, the idea of her and Matt weaving around each other in the intimate space they will one day share.
Kirsten brings pizza and a box of Matt’s stuff from his office one evening but Karen sifts through it alone. She finds the usual things, echoes of his desk at Nelson, Murdock and Page. His braille books on law. His reader. His keys.
Karen pauses when she feels a familiar scrunchie on his keychain. Hers. She would know it anywhere. It was part of her Halloween costume years ago, when her, Matt and Foggy had gone to Josie’s for cheap drinks. Foggy had arrived dressed as Dracula, slicked back hair and fake fangs. The cape had been abandoned on the back of his chair that night and never recovered. Karen had dressed as a cheerleader. Not imaginative but Matt had put on a vintage brown leather pilot jacket and called it quits so she still wins, reminding him he had a perfectly good suit at home. The scrunchie was bright pink, silky and kept sliding out of her high ponytail. Eventually she had gotten annoyed, pulling it out of her hair with a huff. He must have taken it off the table when she went to the bathroom.
And kept it. All this time.
No wonder Heather hit her so hard.
She sets the keys aside, leaving the scrunchie where he stuck it to root through more of the box.
Plastic dinosaurs litter the bottom, once an army on Foggy’s monitor but now are mingled with the rest of Matt’s things. She lines them up on the bookshelf, the way Foggy used to.
Her heart feels heavy as she unpacks the rest.
A few random pens, his notebook. A bottle of aftershave he always kept in his desk for emergencies. Then, lastly, a folded piece of paper with her name written on it in Matt’s messy handwriting. The words slant across the lines rather than keeping in them like he was too impatient to use his writing aid properly.
Karen unfolds it, sees more of his messy scrawl on the inside. The words mash together in places, like he was rushing to get his thoughts out. He trails off mid-word like he changed his mind halfway through writing it.
Her eyes find the first line and she understands why.
I love you. Still. Always. And it’s killing me, Karen.
She doesn’t think he ever planned to send it, ever planned on her reading it but there is something about the way he wrote it in letters rather than braille like he meant it for her eyes.
Your voicemail is full. I think they’re all from me and I just-
I know this is my fault. I know you don’t want to talk to me. I know I don’t deserve it but I can’t just-
I love you.
I miss you.
I don’t know how to exist without you.
I know that makes me selfish. I can hear you yelling at me in my head. But if there is no future for us, if this is it then can you least tell me that to my face? Make it hurt, Karen please. Just don’t disappear like I imagined every moment of it.
Of you.
His letter ends there although she can see the ink of his pen on the next line like he wanted to continue, like he had more to say.
She takes the letter to bed with her and she cries, one hand curled around his necklace which she never takes off, the other pressing his letter to her chest like she can absorb the ink into her blood system and dilute the loneliness inside her.
The box stays in the corner of the living room, Karen doesn’t go near it again.
The letter stays with her. She reads it often.
She tucks it into her jacket pocket every morning when she makes her way to the courthouse, every time she sees Matt looking in her direction with a tilted chin that tells her he is listening to her heart she thinks about those words.
I love you. Still. Always.
But the great love stories that Karen knows don’t have happy endings. Romeo and Juliet. Anthony and Cleopatra. Cathy and Heathcliffe.
She cycles through her English classes trying to find one, trying to find some proof, some evidence there is an exception to a love like that.
Something that means she doesn’t lose him before she can love him without a required three meter distance and no physical contact.
She spends most of the trial watching Matt, flanked by two police officers with his hands still in cuffs - because he is a dangerous criminal - which Karen decides not to argue about when they have bigger stakes at play.
They recess early, the trial dragging on too long and the media outlets reporting every pen drop. A case to be handled with care. What Karen takes that to mean is that they have no idea what to do with him, so they are stalling for time in the legality of it all whilst the public weighs up the good Matt has done, the mistakes he has made.
She spits venom at every reporter that tries to ask her for comment, thankful when Brett’s hand finds her arm in the swarm of the chaos to steer her back into the bowels of the courthouse.
“Come with me.” He tells her quickly when she starts to protest, steering her through a maze of corridors to the lower depths where the prison entrance is.
“Brett?” She doesn’t dare hope, doesn’t want to have to carry the weight of it inside her.
“Five minutes, Karen. That’s all I can do.” Is all he says.
He opens the door on their left, iron groaning as it swings open. The flash of orange confirms her hopes, her feet already flying in that direction.
Matt catches her. Awkwardly with the cuffs still around his wrist but that doesn’t stop her from wrapping her arms around his neck, one hand cradling the back of his head. His face is tilted into her neck, nose tickling her hair.
She had forgotten how solid he was against her, how large his shoulders are. The beard scratches her cheek, his hands trapped between their bodies as his fingers desperately curl into the front of her suit jacket.
“Karen.” He breathes it against her skin, in awe and with so much love it stings at the corners of her eyes.
Pulling back, her hands move to touch his face, feeling Matt nuzzle into her palm.
“How?”
They haven’t touched in months, not really, not freely and this feels like a sensory overload to her system. Her heart is machine gun fire against his chest, her fingers shaking. She tries to store up every sensation. The roughness of his hands, the crinkles around his eyes, those eyes of his that slide from green to brownish depending on his mood.
“We don’t have long.” He tells her, resting his forehead against hers, “I just needed to… I can’t even hug you.”
Karen kisses him, hard and a little more aggressively than she would normally but Matt doesn’t seem to care. His lips attack hers with equal force, hands tugging her close as he follows her mouth, the raw edge of his kiss stealing the air from her lungs.
“God, I miss you.” He tells her, pulling back as he lifts his cuffed hands to her face, the sharpness of her jaw.
“Tell me we’re winning.”
“I don’t know.” He replies, “The judges are fair but there are so many charges. Any one of them could add years…”
“No. We aren’t wasting our time on that.” She is firm, “Just tell me we have a shot.”
“We do.”
That’s all she needs. A shot. A start. Some foundation she will build with her bare hands if she has to.
“I need you home.” She tells him softly.
“I’m coming. Wait for me.”
Brett’s knuckles rap on the door, echoing against the metal that makes them jump apart. Karen looks over her shoulder at him, the grim set of his mouth.
“I’m sorry.” He averts his eyes like he is trying to give them another precious second, “I need to get Matt back on the transport bus before they realise I’m not doing a random sweep for recording equipment.”
Matt’s hand finds hers, bringing them up to his mouth to press a kiss against her knuckles before placing their hands over his heart, “Hearts and minds, right?”
Karen smiles, or tries to, her mouth twitches, “Don’t stop fighting, Murdock.”
“Is that an order, Miss Page?”
“Yes.”
“Understood.” Brett clears his throat behind them. Matt releases her hands, “You’re worth fighting for, Karen.”
“What I wouldn’t give for twenty minutes alone with you and a door that locks.”
Matt’s smile is wicked, “I think you just made Brett uncomfortable. And we’d need at least forty minutes.”
The snap of reality settles in like a cracked rib.
Her eyes flutter shut as he moves past her, she doesn’t think she can watch him leave her again until she hears the fade of his footsteps past the door.
This is how she refuses to lose him.
She runs, Matt hearing her and spinning at the last second, causing Brett to falter at his side. He stumbles as she knocks into him, her lips on his one more time. It’s messy, not romantic so much as desperate but Matt returns it anyway.
“I love you.” She tells him as she steps back, hands sliding into her pockets to stop herself from reaching for him.
“I love you too.” Matt replies, letting the hand Brett places on his shoulder lead him further away from her.
This time Karen watches him go, commits it to memory and vows to never let it happen again.
Because they are going to win.
She is going to bring Matt home.
She is going to win this war for him, for them, and god help anyone who gets in her way.