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Foggy was the one who most persistently tried to reason with her. No judgments, just friendly concern. When she showed up at Josie’s with dark circles under her eyes from a sleepless night, or a stack of files tucked under one arm that she promised she wouldn’t look at for the next hour, but always did. When her hand rested casually on her purse the entire night, and Foggy was certain he’d seen the telling flash of aluminum in its depths at one point. When her eyes wouldn’t stop darting to the door, or she’d swallow her vodka tonic just a little too quickly and leave early with excuses that were just a little too flimsy.
You’re like a dog with a bone, Karen. Why don’t you just walk away?
She’d always shake her head and pretend to take great offense at the unflattering allegory. Make some crack about his cushy lawyer job and how not everyone has the luxury of attorney-client privilege to make a person open up and spill their guts on cue – some people have to dig for their information. He’d fire back that not everyone has the luxury of publishing their honest opinion of scumbags rather than wheedling a jury for months just for a lesser sentence than the scumbag so obviously deserves. She’d remark that, well, I guess every job has its downsides. He’d say cheers to that, they’d clink glasses, and then move on to other topics.
She avoided the question. It was difficult to pin down what exactly drew her in each time Frank Castle showed up on her fire escape. Usually he came to collect intel from her, but regularly she needed information from him that could only be acquired through more…innovative methods than her overused press pass. Copious amounts of coffee frequently made an appearance during these late night exchanges, sometimes head-butting when both of them were running low on sleep. Maybe laughter, a few times. Usually someone crashed on the couch. That someone was often her – jolting awake just in time to see Frank snapping together whichever firearm he’d disassembled and cleaned, before ducking out the window. She’d quickly gotten used to the familiarity of his comings and goings, and would now respond to the disruption by simply grabbing the afghan from the floor and crawling into bed to catch a few more hours before her alarm went off. She thought she’d caught his eye during one of those moments, her hair in a snarl around her shoulders and her eyes bleary with sleep. Thought she’d seen his own eyes tighten at the edges with something that resembled protectiveness. But when she blinked it was gone, and a few seconds later so was he.
Why didn’t she just walk away? The answer felt too nebulous put into words. She was surprised at how often her mind drifted back to that night in the woods – the time she swore she would walk away from Frank Castle and never look back. She’d promised herself (hell, she’d promised him) that he was dead to her – and that he would stay dead. He’d even agreed – she should get away from him. I’m already dead. He truly believed that.
Maybe that’s what had sabotaged her attempts at indifference, in the end. She’d always been contrary. Maybe what twinged the back of her skull was the indisputable knowledge that, despite the alloy and lead he viciously encased himself in, Frank Castle was very much alive and kicking beneath the Punisher skull emblazoned on his chest. He could deny it, he could fight it all he wanted, but she saw it. She saw it in the way he grumbled about her needing hard facts to publish, then left all the source materials he could track down in an unassuming stack on her kitchen table – no note. She saw it in the way he looked at her like he was silently reading every thought in her head, and was never thrown by the subtle messages that squirmed between the lines when she spoke. She was certain that he often saw through her excuses about Matt, but he uncharacteristically didn’t poke that bear, for which she was grateful. She saw it in the way he made blunt, corny jokes just to draw a laugh out of her when the days were vicious.
She saw it in the way he held on to the quiet memories of his wife and children like lifelines, refusing to relinquish his grip on them even as he relived the pain over and over again, fresh ribbon cuts on skin already scarred.
She looked up from her orange chicken as they sat on her threadbare couch one night. He was lost in concentration, scanning the newspaper’s latest report on a serial murderer that had been gaining notoriety in lower Manhattan. There was an angry slash on his cheekbone from a knife fight he’d gotten into two days ago. He hadn’t gone into detail, but she presumed the other person hadn’t walked away.
She scrutinized him, her eyes narrowing. What is it? Why don’t I just walk away?
Maybe the reason she stayed was because no one else had. Maybe that was her weakness. She could admit to that. Give her a broken, misjudged powder keg of a man with an unshakeable internal code. Give her a soldier who recognized the gray areas of her own morality and respected them for the internal struggle they represented. Give her a man that people backed away from in fear, but who backed away from her because only he saw the hurricane behind her eyes. Blindside her with poignant glimpses of an undeniable, unkillable humanity beneath a skeleton mask of ferocity and blood.
Give her a not-quite-lost cause, and she’d come back. Despite the risks, despite the inevitable pain she often felt reaching for her, just out of sight – the same pain she’d experienced that cold night under the trees; she knew when it came the anguish would be sharp enough to freeze the breath in her lungs. She kept coming back. Like a dog with a bone.
She probably owed Foggy a round.