Archive of Our Own

Much of The Bulletin’s staff is crammed into the main room, slotted around cubicles as they drink, chat, and laugh. One of the fashion writers and one of the gossip columnists are looking chummy, dancing in the corner near the window of Ben’s office.

Karen smiles wistfully. Christmas carols playing in the air, it’s almost like she’s watching a movie of her otherwise always busy coworkers taking a break to enjoy the holidays, get drunk and laugh without abandon.

She is watching from the other side of the window, though, like a wayward observer. She listens to the carols and thinks about her wrecked apartment devoid of a tree, Foggy at his own required-to-show-up work party, Matt off who knows where with who knows whom, and Frank. 

Frank, out there in the city somewhere, focusing on hunting down every terrible criminal in Hell’s Kitchen because he has no home to return to. Never mind that he was probably the one to blow it up — she has a gut feeling about that. Blown up or not, it was empty regardless; no children to laughingly decorate a tree with, no wife to lovingly wrap presents with.

She gave him a shitty ultimatum. His response gave her no choice but to follow through.

Karen needs to let Frank Castle go from her mind, and she is trying, she is, but it’s difficult.

She holes up in Ben’s old office, away from the tipsy crowds, doing her best to tune everyone out while she stares at the blank screen and tries desperately to think of how to write this article when the subject is someone that she is also actively trying so hard not to dwell on.

The article changes. The subject expands.

It is a fluff piece, yes, but it’s also an assurance of camaraderie. A sort of observation. Something that everyone in Hell’s Kitchen that has been affected or felt affected after the explosive events of the past months needs to read.

Or maybe she’s projecting with that, too.

Frank is no longer a component of it but one of the audience, at least in her intention, so her fingers finally move.

 One person that she doesn’t write those words for is Matt. 

One of the people she does write them for is Daredevil.

When she finds out they’re one and the same, Karen doesn’t know what to do. It takes her a minute after seeing the mask for it all to sink in. She gets upset. She paces, stutters out words in yells, moves away from Matt’s attempts to reach a hand out to her. 

She starts to calm herself while asking some of the burning questions on her mind. The answers she gets ultimately only make her hurry out in a huff as each new one taints another set of fond memories from her time at Nelson & Murdock.

Matt means well. But she cannot do this, this revelation of lies, so many lies. Not now.

She goes to Josie’s by herself because the only alcohol she has in her apartment is the expensive stuff from Ellison. Karen drinks one beer but finds she can’t stand being alone at a place in which every facet makes her heart throb with déjà vu, like a fresh bruise. 

After all, Foggy had closed out their tab only days before.

Rooting around in her wallet, she plans to pay with exact change — money was tight before, but during this transitionary period of her life, this past month, it’s been even worse — when her eyes catch on someone near the door.

Broad shoulders, dark coat, ball cap. But then they turn, and something twists in her stomach when it’s not him. No, it’s just another stranger.

Karen ends up slapping a ten dollar bill on the bar top and calling it a day before rushing out.

Frank is in her apartment.

Not really, because she is dreaming, and a part of her manages to be aware of this. Maybe it is the part of her that called upon this in the first place.

He stands in her apartment, by the door, but it is closed this time, and no bullets are coming through her windows. Her gun is in her hand, though, gripped loose from where it hangs at her side.

“Why?” She asks. It’s a whisper of a loaded question.

He doesn’t respond, just stares at her, gaze too unreadable.

Karen wakes with a frustrated sigh.

She has Ellison to thank for a lot of things, but it is Ellison that thanks her, instead, the first workday after the holidays, when the article is a surprise hit. She more than anyone is shocked by this but that does not stop her from leaping at the chance of settling into her new calling.

“Does this mean I have a job?” She asks, hopeful.

She hates the way her voice lilts near the end of her words but Ellison is Ellison, doesn’t point it out, doesn’t take a beat after it or treat her differently — he only shoves one of the files in his hands at her. “You kidding? I was just waiting for your potential to pay off. As it finally has. So, this is your first assignment. Some fact-checking that needs done for tomorrow’s cover story.” He raises his eyebrow at her look. “You got your chance and you proved yourself, great; now you have to work backwards into that experience you need to be more reliable on those deadlines. No buts.”

“Okay. Okay,” she nods. She wants to protest against being sidelined, excited in the moment, but she gets it. And she knows she has no stories miraculously waiting in the wings for her to write up in the next couple of days, anyway.

She won’t fight against this chance.

“Good. And stop by HR sometime today; they’ll get you a press badge you can wave around!” He calls to her as he’s heading down the hall to his own office. 

Brett Mahoney scoffs at her press badge when she ends up on one of his scenes a couple of weeks later. 

She has done the dirty work, the double-checking, the interviewing for other writers, and sat in on enough pitch meetings now to get a feel for how a journalist really picks a story. How Ellison decides what goes in and what gets tossed out from the paper. 

Naturally, her first solo article as an official journalist with The Bulletin is about The Punisher, again. Ellison thought it would be easier material for her to start with, and she didn’t argue.

She stumbles upon this particular scene almost by accident. Almost, because she could have chosen not to come, but here she is anyway, gut feeling telling her it’s related to the shooting of six dead Punisher-style in an alley merely thirty hours earlier. Coming here only helps her tell more of the story, form a broader picture of what he’s up to. 

“Shit, you again. I thought you would’ve disappeared and gotten a better job after ditching Nelson and Murdock,” Brett says. “A safer job.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.”

Her tone is much more sweet than his. He sighs and gives her a brief rundown on this shooting while stressing the anonymity aspect of his sharing and then walking away with a stern look when she gets too bold and asks after having a peek closer to the crime scene. 

That’s alright. She wasn’t really expecting to get it. 

Matt calls several times at various, almost random intervals after the New Year. After he gives her some time. She only answers once and the phone call is fittingly short, her caving with a terrible excuse that allows her to hang up first.

He says he didn’t intend to hurt her, and she believes that. But after he got to know her — after she thought they knew each other, intimately, but she’s not so sure about that now — he made the conscious choice not to tell her. To lie and pull back when she offered to be there for him.

She was there, in that moment, when he told her. At least that part of her promise is kept.

She can’t will herself to be there for him after as the betrayal of trust cuts too deep. 

He doesn’t know how deep, he doesn’t know particularly why it stretches so far for her, but she’s too upset to explain that now, which means they’re stuck in this place, treading water at the center of a lake with no land in sight.

Still. She gets into the habit of looking up at rooftops sometimes when she’s walking home late.

She never catches a glimpse of horns, she concludes he’s probably too stealthy for that, but she catches something once. A barrel of a gun, maybe. A silhouette of a man, surely. Her heart aches as she lowers her gaze.

It doesn’t strike her once that she should be afraid. She’s angry, sometimes, but never afraid.

Writing the second article is hard, but not impossible. It’s only hard because it is so different.

She erases hundreds of words several times when she catches herself waxing in length about how badly the men gunned down deserved to be punished, how long their violent rap-sheets were, how much justice this vigilante was doing when they acted this way. 

That is biased writing. So, she erases it. They don’t know if it’s really the Punisher, or a copycat, like the DA’s office likes to say now, so she erases it.

It is hard, but somehow the part of looking at the photographs of mangled body parts isn’t.

Karen doesn’t let herself think too hard about what that means.

“What did you do to your hair?” Is the greeting that pops out of her mouth when she meets up with Foggy for the first time in nearly two weeks. 

His hand reaches up to it self-consciously for a moment. Then his face twists with a grimace that slides into a cocky, self-deprecating grin. “What? You don’t like the professional look? I’m going classy with the new job.”

“Clearly.” She smiles. “It’s just so…. I’m used to shaggy Foggy.”

“Alright, first two rounds are on me if you don’t utter my name and the word shaggy in the same sentence again.”

“Deal,” she laughs.

The three beers — much stronger than the piss water at Josie’s, as fond as she is of that place — knock her on her ass enough that she feels progressively lighter the rest of the night. She feels something like happiness course through her veins. Mostly.

It is February, and the weekend before Valentine’s Day, she moves apartments. 

Everyone else is running around planning flowers, chocolate, romantic getaways and dates, or alternatively planning bar hopping, sleepovers, and alcohol and chocolate fit for one. 

Where everyone is focused on romance and heartbreak, Karen focuses on the spackled over bullet holes across her apartment and the drywall dust she cannot manage to completely remove from her carpet. She has just barely saved up enough to afford to move but she is more than ready to do so.

The new place is slightly bigger. At least, it appears so. 

Instead of long, it is wide. The small windows are directly across from the door, not to the left. The kitchen and bathroom are back-to-back against the left wall, and there’s a slight alcove made with the space to the right where she’s able to put her bed. It sits in the dark without any windows near it but she thinks she likes that.

Foggy helps her move. She doesn’t ask after Matt and he doesn’t offer to call the man for extra hands. 

It manages to be somewhat awkward when Foggy shows up with Marci, but it turns out that the woman is very good at organizing, and it means less trips between apartments for her things, too, so all is well that ends well.

Her next couple of articles become about a mirage of tenement complaints in the poorer blocks of Hell’s Kitchen and a handful of ongoing disputes between investment companies wanting to bully small-time business owners into selling.

In a way, they remind her of Union Allied. They remind her of Elena Cardenas.

She fights hard on these stories, drinking an energizing diet of coffee and rarely sleeping a full eight hours as she juggles researching, interviewing, and writing.

Ellison tells her to take a break as she keeps digging. Give herself a breather before she jumps in to look even deeper for yet another follow up article on one of these places. She brushes him off.

Some days later, she is exiting one of these buildings and eyeing the nighttime sky as she fishes her keys and gun out of her purse before daring to make the trek across the dark road to Ben’s car. She was able to have it repaired, thankfully. As she has her hand in her purse, a harmless and entirely hopeless druggie she knows is named Jesse sits on the step a mere foot in front of her. 

He’s shaking, without a fix as he tries to quit again. He’s helped her out once or twice, so she’s not afraid of him one bit. He’s just another lost soul in this city.

She catches sight of a silhouette on a rooftop once again. It’s a few buildings down — someone sitting on the edge, near the fire escape. They’re probably being dangerous about it, legs stretched far off the cusp, courting death.

She wouldn’t put it past him.

Karen lowers her gaze as she pulls out her keys, pockets her gun for easier access. She steps past Jesse but bends back near him to offer a small bag of trail mix. These and granola bars had started getting her through the day, lately. She smiles when he takes it. “Stay safe out here.”

He murmurs something, maybe thanks, maybe a return of the warning, before tearing into the plastic.

She looks both ways before crossing the empty street. She double-checks the back seat before opening the door. She locks the doors as soon as she gets in, and peels away from the curb before putting on her seatbelt so she’s not a sitting duck for anyone dangerous skulking nearby.

Nowadays, she is always cautious. 

But even she has to admit to herself later, sitting amongst the still unpacked boxes of her apartment with her laptop and files spread in front of her, that that was a bit of a show. A reassurance.

Just in case the glimpse she caught was indeed who she suspected him to be.

He is not in her apartment, this time. Instead, they’re in the diner.

It feels cozier than it did before, warm coffee mug clutched between her hands, his sitting half-drunken but surprisingly untouched as he clasps his hands, gestures, rubs his hands back together, and occasionally reaches a thumb to push up the tip of the ball-cap slung low over his eyes so he can see her better as he talks with intense focus.

She thinks she might say something, once or twice, but it’s mainly him. She enjoys his voice.

When she wakes up, she doesn’t remember any of the words. None except for her addressing him as ‘Frank’ and him saying ‘Ma’am’, neither protesting the monikers for one second.

Karen lies awake until her alarm goes off and thinks about how she misses the other dream. It was more ambiguous than this one, left it easier for her to think about him being dead, about her useless anger and questions for someone that was mere shreds resembling a ghost now.

But this one. Oh, this one was lively. This one wasn’t confused or angry at all; it was content.

She wishes these dreams would just stop altogether.

Ellison throws out a Punisher story in the next pitch meeting.

Usually one of the dedicated crime reporters has it first, but Ellison is the editor for a reason. He is usually quite silent about it, but he always has an eye open for spotting patterns, and he’s good at it. 

The couple of ongoing police investigations in the file in his hand are seemingly unrelated, seemingly random, but they’ve been buried by someone in the department lately because they all end the same — a bullet to the skull. A calling card for someone. Certainly not them, if it’s really The Punisher, but someone.

Her hand raises faster than anyone else’s.

“What about the next follow up with the tenements on 47th?” 

“Landlord’s lawyers got an extension on the case, so for now there’s nothing new to report.” 

There was always something to report. She could have found something worthwhile, had a start of something worthwhile already as she had only just begun looking into the landlord’s strange son.

Ellison nods slow, accepting the reasoning, and then slides the file over.

“You just got a thing for dangerous situations, or a thing for the messes that The Punisher wannabes leave behind?” Brett asks when she catches him outside the precinct.

“So the police think these were copycats?”

She knows they aren’t, felt it in her gut the moment she saw the pictures, did research into the names. 

They’re all random hits on the surface — except that they were all in prison and recently paroled due to over-population, one getting the excuse of good behavior even though that clause shouldn’t have come up in his case for another 14 months, and another somehow getting his entire prison stay sealed from the public. The only way she found out was because of a new, trustworthy source.

Whoever was helping these men out probably figured they’d probably mix up the release reasonings or else they’d get caught. Too bad. They were already caught. It was just a matter of time before either ink exposed them or lead filled their brain. Maybe both.

“I’m just doing my job, same as you. I can’t avoid my editor when he decides which of us gets to write about The Punisher today. Do you get to pick all of your cases?”

She must have gotten good at bullshitting lately, because that actually works on him, making Brett huff and then nod his head as he starts walking. A clue for her to follow. She does. 

“Thank you.”

“The only reason I’m helping you is I happen to like you, Karen, and I know the shit you’ve been through. You’re a good person.” He shakes his head. “That, and I know you’ll keep riding my ass like Nelson does until he gets something.”

She smiles.

The article is turned in days early.

Factual, matter-of-fact, with only a brief persuasive bit of questioning at the end about why these men were paroled in the first place. It reads like any other good piece of objective journalism, or so Ellison tells her, before pausing in the doorway.

“You already planning a follow up?”

She rolls her lips and sags in her seat as she idly passes a pen between her fingers. “The Punisher killed these guys because they’re unrepentant criminals, and that can be enough for him, but someone else got them out. And I don’t think they’re going to be the last to get this special treatment.”

He taps the doorway slightly, nods. “Tell me what you’ve got by Friday morning.”

It’s mid-March, her apartment is still full of boxes that are half-unpacked, and Karen has her windows open to the breeze of a warm afternoon while she puts away her basket of clean laundry.

The noise outside isn’t too loud, muffled enough by the walls and the fact that it’s only the dead traffic of mid-day. She is able to identify everything, keeps one ear attuned to it so she can enjoy it and not get startled enough to jump. 

She’s gotten a little better at that, lately. Just a little.

Karen is hanging up one of her blouses when she hears Shining Star play, and she freezes. A car passing by and stopped at a red light must be playing it but she doesn’t go to look. It disappears within a minute, drifts off into the wind, and there is something restless inside of her for the remainder of the night.

Finding the money deposited in their accounts on the day of their release is fairly easy. Tracking where it was before that is hard, hidden in layers upon layers of shell companies. 

That would be suspicious in and of itself, except that the group that actually gives the money to these guys before they meet their demise at the hands of the The Punisher is a charity that prides itself on prisoner rehabilitation. If she just writes about them, it’s very likely her intentions of exposing corruption will backfire, and she’ll be the one looking like an asshole.

So, she tracks the money further up. Karen is good at this, she’s done it before, but the cold hard truth about this is that it takes time. Time and patience for the right opportunities.

She heads back to the tenement on 47th, visits the few residents that were willing to talk to her. She stays late one night when a young mother with a toddler bouncing on her hip insists on making her coffee as she shares some stories about the landlord’s son. A real piece of work, prone to a fiery temper.

It makes her wonder if maybe the landlord isn’t the problem. Maybe the son is behind all the neglect running rampant here, the landlord really not having the money to fix this place up.

Half an hour past dusk, she exits the building. Jesse is on the step again. 

Karen’s got her gun and keys out before she’s walking forward. She nudges him with her heel, to get his attention so he’ll head inside before it gets too bitter out, a cold snap blanketing the city for the new few days at least, but then he’s tipping forward and she jumps back, gun raised in an instant.

He rolls down the step. Blood sticks on the concrete in his wake, a pool at his feet where he used to sit.

Her gaze is wild as she looks around, but they’re truly alone. She’s alone. 

It isn’t until after she is holding the line with the operator, waiting for a squad car to arrive, that Karen can feel how hard she is breathing and has enough of a mind to slip her highly illegal gun back into her purse.

The only witness they have, Karen gets pulled down to the police station to be questioned at two different times, alternating between sitting in the terrible metal chair in the waiting room and the chair with slightly better padding by the detective’s desk. 

The detective isn’t one she recognizes. She is kind of glad about that.

The ordeal takes another 3 hours from her life, and she just wants to go home so she can stand in the shower until she has the picture of the man’s lifeless eyes out of her head, but as soon as she shuts the door behind her, her phone is ringing. Matt.

Coincidence or not? Is he calling as her friend, or because he heard the commotion while Daredevil?

“Karen, what happened?”

No casual greeting. There is her answer. She sighs. “Matt, can we do this tomorrow?”

“Is this because of one of your stories?”

“I don’t know.” Her first instinct is to blame her presence, in some way, but she wants to be wrong. Hopes to be wrong. “I wasn’t near him when it happened. He was trying to quit, I don’t know, heroin, I think. He might have owed some money, he might have gotten in a fight, or maybe he— he hurt himself.”

 “With a knife to the stomach?”

“Why are you calling me if you already overheard everything?” Karen asks, exasperated. 

There was a time where she desperately wanted to know Daredevil’s identity. There was a time where she thinks — no, she knows — she could have heard the story of his full identity and been more than willing to accommodate a precious spot for it in her life. But life never stops moving forward.

Matt’s voice croaks, slight, as he changes his mind on what words to use. “Are you okay?”

“It’s not my first rodeo,” she says, phrase slipping out before she thinks about it.

He doesn’t make any comment on it, because it means nothing to him. She is sure that images of kidnappings, attempted beatings, attempted murders — those are what come to mind for him. In a way, they’re the truth, just not the whole truth.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she assures. “Hell’s Kitchen is what it is…. Goodnight, Matt.”

She hangs up before he can say more. She wonders if he was even planning on trying to.

Karen takes the shower. It doesn’t help.

She lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, shifting around in a dozen different positions before getting up and going to work with her things spread out on the ground, computer on her coffee table. She has too much energy, too much focus on Jesse, on the tenement, on the landlord and his son.

She might as well be productive.

By the time dawn rises, she has one of her yellow legal pads leftover from defunct Nelson & Murdock on the table, half-filled with scribbled notes, diagrams, and questions. The whiskey gift from Ellison also joined the mess at one point, some poured and sitting untouched in a long since abandoned glass. She is humming Shining Star low at the back of her throat, unaware.

One of the doors in her hallway slams closed from a rushed resident.

Karen jumps, and the humming stops.

She has no idea when she started doing it. Was it after she saw a news alert come across about another possible Punisher hit, and ignored it, or after she poured her third glass and had a moment where she questioned where Frank was, who else he was protecting if he wasn’t across the street watching that building this time while she was there?

That’s absurd, though, to think about The Punisher protecting people, and she mutters as such to herself as she gets up to take another shower before heading into The Bulletin.

The Punisher only punishes. The man that actively protected, that tried his best to protect those that didn’t deserve brutality, he was dead. She shouldn’t keep forgetting that.

“Go home—”

“And rest? No thanks, already tried that, and failed miserably.”

“Page.”

“Do you want a piece for the Sunday paper, or not?” She raises her eyebrows when she looks up.

Ellison crosses his arms. He’s not happy, but he doesn’t have to be.

There isn’t really a reason for her to go back to the building on 47th today.

The article is in, Jesse’s blank face finally disappeared from her mind’s eye several hours before, and she’s operating on exhaustion that’s been powered through with at least five cups of coffee. Disgusting, watery newsroom coffee.

But. She doesn’t want to go home just yet.

She knocks on the door of the young mother she talked to earlier, but gets no response, no chance to thank again. That’s alright. Karen is turning to leave when she hears something shattering inside the apartment, the baby starting to cry. She doesn’t think before she starts rattling the locked knob and pounding on the door.

She’s yelling out, demanding the door opens, asking if they’re okay.

And then the lock gives way and she almost falls in at the same time that the landlord’s son is running out. He’s red-faced from rage and what look like the beginnings of marks from nail scratches. He’s got a knife in hand that drips dark with blood.

“I knew it,” she breathes out, not too wisely, in shock.

The dozens of rehab attempts that drained the landlord’s savings, that lead to the rent hikes, that left the place in disrepair. The increasing unknown attacks on the block that aligned with the strange disappearances of the landlord, but also his son. The barely documented ER visit by the landlord because of an ‘accident’ with a staircase that sounded far too much like a beating if you looked close enough.

The landlord wasn’t trying to be cruel here; he was trying to protect his cruel son.

He comes running at her as soon as the words tumble from her mouth, bowls her over, but she twists out of the way of being stabbed straight on and slams into the wall. The blade cuts along her side, accompanied by a hot flareup of pain, but adrenaline courses through Karen, adrenaline and anger as she only hears the baby wailing and nothing — no one — else. 

She lunges for her purse on the ground as he claws at her. She pushes, flails, kicks until she gets a good knee into his groin. He recoils, but not before twisting a hand in her hair and pulling. A scream erupts from her throat.

He’s trying to climb on top of her, then, dragging her back to the ground, but she sees the knife again before he can get the element of surprise. It slices through the arm she raises instead of hitting her throat and Karen doesn’t hesitate when her fingers finally curl around the pistol. 

He’s close, too close, so she presses it against his gut and empties every shot.

“You ever think about a vacation?” Brett asks kindly her several hours later after driving her home.

When she was allowed to leave the scene, he hadn’t said anything, just took her gently by the arm and put her in his car.

The young mother was recovering in the hospital, having taken several cuts to the stomach, but she would live. Her baby was thankfully untouched by the now dead psychopath with rage issues.

No one asked the reporter currently in shock and being patched up on the curb by the paramedics about why the man who ran around stabbing people would also be carrying a gun. No one questioned her lie that it was his, that he grabbed it out of the back of his pants and she was just lucky to have taken it from him. No one voices any doubts they may have when it’s easier to close the case on a dead mad this way.

“Thanks,” is all she replies before climbing out.

They’re back in her apartment. Her old one.

The door is closed but she has her gun out and pointed at Frank this time. The first time she’s dreamed it like this. He has his hands up, too. She wants to tell him he doesn’t have to, wants to lower the gun herself, but she can’t. She needs it.

What if she’s in danger in the next second, and she doesn’t have it?

He’s shushing her, stepping closer. Her eyes flick up to his as he tells her everything’s okay, and her resolve starts crumbling instantly.

He catches her, gentle hands taking her gun away from her, slipping it so subtly from her grip it is as if it was never there. In this haze, she almost accepts that maybe it really wasn’t. Her gun disappears but he is still holding her hands, and they may be near the same height, but she feels small in his grip. So damn small.

“Hey, hey,” he says softly. She falls apart with a sob and he kneels down with her, wraps her up tight and simply holds her.

Karen wakes from a restless doze with tears etching tracks down along her temples.

Foggy calls.

She just barely talks him out of stopping by when she assures him that she’s not working, but instead taking time alone. Finally taking the time she needs to just breathe. That makes him happy.

She doesn’t share that Ellison all but benched her for the sake of her sanity.

Without a gun, again, Karen fists her pepper spray tightly in her pocket every time she leaves her apartment. Going for a walk, for coffee, for take-out. Her left hand is always clenched around the bit of plastic, knuckles pressed white.

She feels naked, in a way, but it doesn’t stop her from looking into a new story.

She is too restless to sit with no purpose in her apartment longer than a week, so Karen goes to her desk, finds the files on the prisoners released early that she had temporarily stopped looking into. She opens up her laptop, grabs a pen, and flips to the page where she’s got a handful of rhetorical questions jotted down.

She’s sat on her ass long enough. Time to get to work.

Nightmares for her have come and gone since as long as she could remember.

When she was a kid, they were silly things about faceless monsters and the evil omnipresence of thunderstorms. After a fateful night in Vermont, they became about her brother’s tragic end and those that took him. After dumping a gun in the river, they took on the haunting forms of Wesley and Fisk.

Now, they are about the man she shot at such a close range that she felt his last breath against her skin and his blood slide down the barrel until it left a thick coating over her fingers.

The dead of night, she jolts awake with sweat slicking her skin and lungs heaving out corrupted gasps. 

She nearly trips over a moving box as she heads to the shower. Karen stands under it until her heart beats steadily. When she emerges, she makes quick work of putting her damp hair in a bun, grabbing her things, and heading out the door.

There’s a name that repeats as she traces the money, a bank manager that shouldn’t be anyone special. She knows he’s the key.

It’s because she has nothing better to do, nothing else she wants to do, that Karen is sitting low in her car at the end of his block. He lives in a nice part of town, all upscale townhouses that no doubt possess the luxury of a grassy patch of yard in the back, too.

This part of town is so nice that after she doesn’t see anyone pass in half an hour, after yet another yawn presses out from her despite the hot coffee she’s sipping, she lets her grip on the pepper spray relax. It gets put between her thighs instead.

Consciously, for once, when she opens the glove compartment and rifles through the tapes. The lights are off in her car, so she can’t see the name until she’s holding it close to her face, but then she barks a laugh. Of course it’s that one. That’s just her luck.

She pops it in the player, anyway.

After her recent brush with danger, Karen cannot help but find it soothing somehow when the songs shuffle and Shining Star is eventually among them. There is a special kind of fucked up in that, a kind that would make anyone knowing the full story behind it look at her incredulously, but it is what it is. 

She fishes out the book and clip light that Marci almost definitely picked up from a drug store and then gave her in a cheap box on Christmas purely because she was more cozy with Foggy these days, and being cozy with Foggy meant making an effort with his friends. Karen had stashed these in the center console of the car and forgotten until now to pull them out, let alone throw them away. 

Well, she had planned on donating the book, but keeping the light. It was a decent light. The book on the other hand was an obviously cheesy, awkward romance novel that she wouldn’t be caught reading in a million years.

And yet, here she was.

The console blinks a steady 4AM at her and she’s almost a third of the way through the book — it is indeed awful, so she’s skimming the especially cringe-worthy bits — when there’s a knock at the window.

She almost has a heart attack.

Her pepper spray is in hand, arm outstretched across the console, before she’s able to adjust her eyes back to the darkness and see a man’s face through the passenger side window. The recognition shouldn’t lessen her adrenaline, there’s no reason that it should. 

If The Punisher is here, then something is wrong.

She finds herself slumping in the seat, pulling her hand back, and fumbling with the other for the door’s locking switch. His face shouldn’t calm her, but she shouldn’t have been dreaming about him keeping her company her all this time, either. It is transference, pure and simple. She knows it.

Karen unlocks the doors anyway.

Frank slips into her car easily, settles as he scans the street once more, and then he is turning to her. His gaze does not fully meet hers before it’s locking on to the console speakers. She curses to herself and scrambles to turn off the music. It’s not loud, but the tail end of the song was unmistakable. 

“Surprised you haven’t thrown those out,” he comments, voice soft, a contradiction given the way it also sounds like he just chewed on gravel.

“They’re not mine to get rid of.” She finds she can’t look at him as she keeps her gaze on the street, on the steering wheel, on the console. If she looks at him, she will have a harder time keeping herself together. She clears her throat. “Do you get a kick out of showing up uninvited?” 

He scoffs, shifts in the seat for a few seconds as the silence descends. Finally, “How reckless do you plan on being with this, ma’am?”

“What?”

“This guy,” Frank jerks his head, as if nodding to the house she has staked out. His voice hardens. “What are you gonna do, you gonna catch him when he comes out to get the paper? Before he heads to work? Follow him around all day while you play detective?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I think it’s some of mine when it’s the men I killed that’ve got you here.”

“You’re wrong,” she says, shaking her head. Karen is trying to be cold — why, she doesn’t quite know; self-preservation, maybe, as she reminds herself that he’s dead, Frank Castle is dead, he made that perfectly clear — but she is failing, words coming out a touch too passionately. “It doesn’t matter how I got this lead. I’m following the corruption as far as it goes and I don’t care what you have to say.”

She hears nothing for a minute except the tapping of his trigger finger against his knee. “No,” he says, barely audible, and he’s quiet again. 

Karen wishes he would go back to being firm, loud, because then it wouldn’t feel like a tucked away moment. Then it would feel more like a fight. She can do fights right now. It would help distract her from this urge to sink into his voice, his stare, to reach out just like her dreams.

“No, you’re good. I respect that.” He turns his head towards her. “But I’m telling you, ma’am, the end of this trail won’t bring the sort of satisfying conclusion in a neat little bow that you want.”

“I just want to expose the truth.”

“Writing about this won’t change a goddamn thing. It’ll only put you in more danger.”

“So just like that, the truth shouldn’t matter to me?” Her gaze snaps up, meets his. She’s struck by how intense his stare is, despite the way he was talking, despite how casually he’s sitting here next to her. Karen rolls her lips and juts out her chin. “I can’t do that. I can’t pick and choose what secrets to share when it’s convenient to furthering what I’m after. I am not you or Daredevil.”

The other vigilante’s name flashes something his eyes, and then he’s shaking his head. “Christ’s sake, I am not like Red. That is not what I’m doing.”

“How is that not exactly what you’re doing?”

Frank’s jaw clenches and he won’t look at her this time as she leans forward. 

“How is that not what you did in the woods? You knew— I can’t believe it took me so long to put it together, but I guess I was preoccupied with the dislocated shoulder,” she bites, more bitter at herself. “God, you knew, you knew exactly what Shoonover was talking about, and you let me stand there and try to plead with you.”

“I didn’t ask for that—”

“No, but you heard me out, and then slammed the door on my face. Because you already knew the truth so why would you need to tell me, huh? No, I was just the person foolish enough to keep helping you, because I thought— I thought—” Tears prick her eyes. She turns her head to the window, pressing her cheek against her hand.

“…Ma’am, you’re not a fool.”

She chokes a painful laugh into her hand. “I guess I should just believe you weren’t using me the whole time, either.”

“I wasn’t. The diner….That was a one time thing, and you didn’t deserve it.”

She feels weak at how much his voice sounds like it did at her apartment when he approached, when he had been calm but adamant in trying to convince her of the truth, when he put his hands up only because it was her holding the gun.

Karen feels weak, so she ignores it, wiping roughly at her face and swallowing hard. 

She tucks her hair behind her ears looks back at him. It feels like it takes every bit of strength in her to meet his wide eyes with her own and still say, “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore….Dead men don’t get to give advice and they sure as hell don’t get to make my decisions for me.”

A part of her wants him to fight her on that, too. At least fight the moniker. Maybe even cave and share what he knows, laying everything out on the line like the way they’ve done before.

He doesn’t.

“Be careful, ma’am,” are all the gruff words she gets before he leaves in one quick motion.

Ten minutes later, and she is almost inclined to think she imagined him, but the pit in her chest is too real for his presence to have been an illusion. Their conversation plays in loop in her head, and before too long she manages to regret nearly every word she uttered.

She doesn’t confront the banker, but she does tail him, as Frank predicted.

The fact that he knew she might do this means absolutely nothing.

It is a pretty predictable move for anyone in her position, really.

Karen tails the guy on and off for four solid days but it doesn’t amount to much of anything that’s concrete, so she goes back to researching at her computer.

There are some new off-shore bank accounts she finds, some affiliations he has with some of these banks and the charity as well that would be suspect if she could just find one solid piece of evidence linking him to someone or something that would directly benefit from these releases. 

As it is, he stands alone as a coincidence.

While she’s looking, another gets released. They show up with a bullet to the head in a parking lot not long after.

Ellison calls her, gives her first dibs on the story as an invite to come back to work. She doesn’t have to think about it. She immediately accepts.

Karen feels good as she’s leaned over her desk at The Bulletin, fingers flying across the keyboard. It’s late in the evening and everyone is slowly filtering out. One of the women at the front desk pokes her head in, telling Karen that she put on a fresh pot for her and the rest of the stragglers staying late.

It’s a nice gesture that pulls a smile from her. 

Unfortunately, it also breaks her concentration just long enough to bring down her productivity to the pace of a snail’s crawl. Karen gets a fresh cup, settles back in her chair, and finds her fingers barely twitching. She saves the document and decides to pour over all of her notes and findings once more. 

She doesn’t leave the office until it’s after 2AM, she’s stared at the picture of the dead guy’s brains splattered over the asphalt too long to be considered healthy, and she has heard Shining Star play more than thirty times over after seeking it out on YouTube.

A lot about her new norms of behavior is pathetic, but she won’t apologize for them.

The scene shifts between the diner and the warehouse. It makes her sick, makes her head spin with confusion, but somehow, despite this, no part of her knows that this is a dream this time. Not while she is in it. 

“Maybe it’s not your first rodeo,” Frank asks, but it doesn’t sound like he’s asking. It sounds like he is telling her, telling her that he can see a sliver of her soul and he knows what she isn’t sharing.

“It’s not,” she says boldly. 

Her arms are stretched out, then, Wesley’s heavy gun in her hands. 

But it is still Frank sitting across from her.

He leans back, like Wesley did, but he isn’t smarmy or over-confident about it. He doesn’t move to stand. He’s steady like an anchor as his stare drinks her in, looking for her inner most secrets.

“Maybe it’s not your second.”

She doesn’t have to respond. The metal is starting to warm in her grip.

“It’s not,” Karen repeats, but she’s quiet, no longer bold. It’s a confession.

He nods slow, understanding. “Maybe it’s not even your third.”

She chokes on a sob, and when she lowers her head, she’s back at the diner. The mug is hot under her hands. “I wish it was.”

If Ellison knew she was dreaming about The Punisher comforting her in her darkest moments, he would pull her off of the string of questionably paroled prisoners being punished in a heartbeat. If he knew she had an argument with The Punisher in her car without the thought of calling the police entering her mind for a second, he might recommend she go see a shrink.

She is not sure she would fight the second part of that. Maybe she is losing her mind. Maybe she does need help.

But, when she’s working these stories, when she’s exposing the puzzle pieces that she is only gradually forming the bigger picture of, she doesn’t feel insane. She feels grounded. She feels purpose.

She feels like she is doing more than just living, even when surrounded by reminders of death.

“Karen, it’s almost May,” Foggy breathes out in confusion as he takes in the state of her apartment. The state of her still minimalistic and not completely unpacked apartment. 

She bites her lip and holds up the carafe in her hand instead. “Coffee?”

“No, I’m— I’m good. Seriously, Karen, are you okay?”

She deflects his worried gaze as she adds sugar to her cup and stirs the dark liquid. “I’m fine, Foggy, I’ve just been so busy with The Bulletin. I practically live there.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Yeah? Says the guy putting in sixteen hour days at his new job because he’s on the fast track to partner.”

She looks at him with a raised eyebrow. He frowns, but concedes. 

“Now, you gonna fork over those burgers before they get cold, or what?”

The weather is clear, calm, and brisk without harboring a chill.

Karen walks home after staying late at The Bulletin, again. Her deadline wasn’t until tomorrow, but this way she has the chance to sleep in instead of dealing with any potential writer’s block when she’s down to the wire on time. This plan has worked well for her so far the past couple of months, so why change it?

The only downside is that it’s always past midnight when she’s done, and both the streets and cabs can be sketchy. 

The street is too dead for her to get the chance to contemplate whether or not to take a taxi, so she walks, head swiveling often as she keeps an eye on her surroundings.

She sees the mugger at the edge of the alley several paces before she gets there, starts to step off the curb to cross the street to avoid them, but they see this, dart out to catch her. It’s a scrawny man and she’s ready for him as she pulls her pepper spray from her pocket and blasts his face.

He curses and grunts. His hands catch the tail of her coat and pull her before she can twist completely away. She trips on her heels.

Karen gets a sloppy punch to the gut that nevertheless knocks the wind from her before she is able to gouge at his eyes. As soon as he falls back, cursing at her with more animation, she takes off running. 

Her panting breath and thundering heels are all that fill her head for a couple seconds, until she hears shuffling as the man gets up behind her, and then there’s a shot that echoes through the air. Something hits the ground in a clumsy heap behind her.

She has a feeling she knows the origins of the sounds, doesn’t have any fear in her at the origin of the shot, but she keeps running.

She doesn’t sleep that night until the sun is up and she succumbs to exhaustion while curled against her bed’s headboard. It doesn’t matter that the sun is shining while she’s sleeping — the nightmares of the last life she took hauntingly play out behind her eyelids.

There’s a knock at her door just a little after noon. 

Karen’s a bit more than bleary-eyed as she stumbles across the apartment, checks the peephole.

She drops the pepper spray — that’s it, after last night, she needs to make getting another gun a priority — in one of the boxes at her feet before opening the door. “What are you doing here?” She asks as she lets Matt through, mentally notes the faint scrapes and bruises along his jaw from an uppercut as she locks the deadbolt and chain behind him.

“What are you looking into that’s making people come after you, Karen?”

That was not what she expected. She folds her arms. “I piss off a lot of people with my job, you have to be more specific.”

“The guy Frank shot last night,” he says with no small amount of frustration in his voice. 

She’s surprised for some reason that Matt knows, that he was there and she had no idea, but the calming assurance that the shot was from Frank after all takes precedent, easing her mind. It shouldn’t, but what else is new?

“He wasn’t a random mugger, he was paid to go after you.”

“How do you know?”

Matt stays stiff as a board. “I didn’t let Frank kill him, and the guy talked.”

Karen blinks several times, lets that sink in. “What did you do? After?”

Shaking his head slightly, Matt moves to the couch, rests one of his hands on the back of it. Relaxing into her space. “I left him by a patrol car and they took him to a hospital. He’ll be lucky to make it through the day.”

He told her, as if he was waiting for the anger, and she did have some. But at the same time, she didn’t begrudge the choice he made. She knew Daredevil’s moral code — knew his moral code — and she couldn’t say for certain what she would do in that situation if she didn’t have the perspective of being the victim with a faint bruise on her stomach and a sore ankle.

“Whatever you’re still working on, someone knows, and they’re trying to come after you. They’ll keep trying, Karen.” He straightens when she shifts on her feet again. “I can help. I can take it from here so you don’t get hurt, just point me in a direction.”

“You’ll help, or Daredevil?” His head bows and Karen immediately regrets her words. “That’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

“I just want to keep this city safe.”

“I know, but you’re not the only one trying to do that. I’m not dropping my story, Matt. You…do what you have to do, as Daredevil, but writing exposes, that’s what I can do. That’s what I’m going to keep doing. Period.”

He’s still upset when he leaves. She doesn’t waver.

Ellison offers her a chance to fill-in for one of the sick entertainment writers so she can pump out something that’s mindless, for once. An informal sort of break.

She declines.

When she gets home the next night, there’s something on her counter, and one of her notepads has been moved next to it. Karen’s heart races, but she doesn’t run. She flicks on the light.

It’s a gun, and a small box of ammunition.

It is another .380, so similar to her old one that she almost thinks they could be one and the same, but there’s a knick in the handle here that wasn’t in hers. She doesn’t know what it could be from, but she brushes her thumb over it for a moment, memorizing the different feel of it in her grip.

—Keep is close. Be careful.

The words seem to be written almost hastily with one of her pens. It isn’t signed, but it doesn’t have to be.

The next Saturday, she opens her windows again. This May is cliche with the constant raining, but she keeps an eye out so she can open and close them as the mild storms pass over the city, the humid air a comfort since it brings with it a gusting wind.

She decides to finally suck it up as she ties back her hair and starts unpacking, television running mindless daytime dribble in the background, even noise to help her focus but not enough to distract. Thankfully, the initial unpacking does not take as long as she thought. Probably because she had already been living out of the boxes for a while now.

The organizing, on the other hand; that is an ordeal. She ends up switching her desk and dresser around, red-faced as she pushed them around herself, and deciding where to put what extra dishes in which cabinet is another adventure. She stretches out rugs, bangs nails in the walls to hang pictures, and moves knick-knacks around half a dozen times.

It’s only takes three trips to get rid of the boxes, and when she returns, she puts her hands on her hips and surveys it, pleased. The apartment is more open now. It’s comfortable. It feels like a home.

Another brief rain starts up and she has to pull the windows closed. She latches them before texting Foggy to make impromptu dinner plans.

They’re in the diner, but it’s almost daytime out, and the cups are joined by a plate this time.

Frank doesn’t look towards the windows very often, eyes on the piece of cherry pie. She messes up the whipped cream in the middle so there’s some on her fork after spearing a small bite. A sigh escapes her at the taste.

He smiles. 

“You should try some, it’s heaven.”

He shakes his head.

Karen sets the fork aside. He watches her every move, but it doesn’t bother her. It’s the only thing keeping her from reaching out a hand right now, but as soon as the thought crosses her mind, she’s doing it. “You’re taking care of yourself, right? When I don’t see you?”

“Why does that matter? I’m good as dead.”

“Frank—”

It was almost bright out, outside the diner, until darkness seeps through the windows like a flood. 

She wakes against her will thanks to one of her neighbors slamming a door.

The Punisher gets caught in a deadly shoot-out with one of the cartels. 

Almost two dozen are gunned down a block away from the docks, and it takes the police what feels like forever to report that every one of those deceased are part of the cartel. No Punisher or so-called Punisher wannabes are found amongst the carnage of the aftermath.

The reports, the chopper videos, the pictures. It is absolutely and horrifically brutal.

The Bulletin is abuzz because new details emerge every couple of hours, Ellison and everyone else constantly revising how to spin the stories, what information to add into them, how this changes the speculated reasoning behind the scene that unfolded.

Karen has bile at the back of her throat that doesn’t go away, not even after she dry heaves into one of the toilets. She intends to keep one ear open for news, any news on Frank, but around noon she can’t take it anymore, closing her door and picking up her phone.

“Have you seen him?”

She doesn’t open with any other greeting, but he must hear it from the panic in her voice, because his is full of warning. “Karen—”

“Have you seen him, or not?!” She hisses. It’s loud outside her door, but not loud enough for her to yell like she wants to. 

“No, I haven’t, but he struck after I took off— after I got home. I was going to check tonight after the police settle down,” he sighs. “But if they haven’t found him yet, my guess is he’s holed up at some kind of safe house for the day. He’s either recovering, or….”

He sounds upset, too, almost says what they’re surely both thinking.

Karen hangs up abruptly.

She spends a few hours in the storage room looking through piles upon piles of newspapers. 

Her notepad is full with addresses of The Punisher’s hits. Every single one she can find. She tries to look for a pattern, a method to the madness, something that shows up one too many times to indicate where he is, where he might be. At the very least a general vicinity. Something.

There’s nothing. He’s too careful this time.

The bile that lingers in her throat is joined by tears stinging her eyes. Karen can’t stand this. She hasn’t felt like this since— since—

Since that night at the docks. Since she thought Frank blew up on a boat, and waiting all night for the glimpse of his bodies, for the glimpse of a goodbye. 

She slips out of the offices during the chaos and, gratefully, no one notices.

“Jesus Christ,” she gasps before whipping around to close the door behind herself and lock it tight.

He’s in her apartment. Shit. He’s in her apartment, and he’s in blood-soaked clothes.

Her purse is abandoned somewhere by the door before she crosses to kneel next to where he’s sitting leaned against the wall by her windows. Her hands hover over him, not sure what to do or where to check, but he’s wheezing a breath, so there is some relief in that.

Karen finally presses a hand gently to his cheek to turn his head. His eyes snap open and meet hers, before he’s coughing a breath. Small droplets of blood burst across the inside of her forearm. 

“Sorry.”

It sounds like a loaded apology but she shushes him this time, puts her other hand on his forehead. No fever, so no infection. He’s just glazed over from blood loss. Okay, well, that’s something potentially positive. “How long have you been here?”

“Tried— I have a place, near. But yours was closer, and sun was coming up.”

“The one time I pull an all-nighter at The Bulletin,” she says, huffing, trying not to succumb to her fear.

Frank’s lips stretch. “One time?”

She smiles soft, blinking away the resurgence of tears that threaten. “In theory.” The smile slips away as he coughs more and then she’s raking her gaze over his body again. “Where did you get hit? Which parts are worse off?”

“Stomach’s worse. Shitbag caught me with a knife.”

She wants to quip that she’s been there, done that, but now really is not the time to try injecting any more humor. He looks to be too closely on the verge of passing out.

“There’s a bullet, left shoulder. Don’t know— might be a graze. It’s not in me, that’s for damn sure.”

“Your legs are bloody.”

“Right one’s bad. I don’t remember….” He coughs again and then he’s wheezing. “Shit, this fucking thing—”

He starts to grip at his chest, but Karen puts her hands on his, and he stills. His eyes clear more when he looks back at her. She rolls her lips. “Okay….Okay, first thing’s first, the bathroom is the easiest place to do this. I think. Can you move?”

He grunts and starts to push up.

She helps him, pulls what she thinks is his better arm over her shoulders as they shuffle around the corner to the bathroom. He wasn’t kidding about the leg.

They get to the tub and then Frank is all but folding himself into it, pressing his head back against the cool tile. Panic sets in, really sets in, for the first time. The comfort she felt at seeing him in front of her and breathing is completely gone. He may be here, breathing, but he’s banged up beyond what she thinks she could fix on a good day.

Hands slightly shaking from her nerves, heart beating a mile a minute, she doesn’t think this qualifies as a good day.

She helps him start to peel off his clothes. When he gets the vest off his chest — it’s riddled with several bullets stopped just short of doing more than bruising his skin and ribs, and it’s a terrifying sight to see such an obvious display of a brush with death — he breathes a bit easier. 

He’s just in his underwear now and her hands are fluttering, again, hovering just above his chest as she tries to catalogue the injuries, tries to make sense of where to start first, what he said, when he takes hold of her and steadies her.

It’s ludicrous. She should be the one grounding him.

But it’s never that simple, is it?

It feels like one of her dreams, her hands wrapped in his, but she’s painfully wide awake and he’s more hurt than she’s ever seen him. “Red’s got a— a nurse friend.”

She nods, quickly, almost can’t stop once she starts, nerves pitching towards the hysterical end of the spectrum.

She manages a deep breath when he meets her stare. It’s vulnerable, all of a sudden. “I’m sorry.”

Before she can respond with anything, his eyes roll to the back of his head and he’s out cold.

Karen’s had a lot of experience with terrifying nights that scar into her memory.

A lot of different situations, but all incredibly fearful nonetheless.

This becomes one of those nights that scar so deeply she has no chance of ever forgetting it.

Claire is a kind woman. Exasperated, sassy, and wary, but unbelievably kind.

“Good God,” she remarks under her breath as soon as she catches sight of Karen. She’s got Matt behind her, and they both step in as quickly as possible so that none of the neighbors catch sight of Karen’s heavily blood-stained appearance.

She hadn’t really noticed before, focusing on cleaning up Frank as much as she could before Matt and the previously unknown nurse arrived. Her bathroom sink is slow to drain, which didn’t help with how often she was rinsing out the towel. 

It’s still got some water in it, blood settled at the bottom of the porcelain. She wonders absently if it will stain.

“This better be worth it,” Claire says. She stops short in the bathroom doorway, hisses something that could be a curse but wasn’t completely formed. She presses her lips together tight when she spies the spray-painted skull in the pile of clothing on the floor. “Alright. Just….Someone make coffee. This will take a while.”

She sets the innocuous bag full of supplies down by the toilet and sets to work.

“Karen, why is he here?”

Matt’s voice is low from where he stands next to her. 

Her gaze is fixed on the blood stains that press into her carpet, the wall. Eight hours he sat there. Eight. Just waiting for her to walk through the door to find him alive or dead. Waiting, tired, bleeding out without anywhere closer to go, any other allies he could find.

“Karen.”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. It’s the truth.

It makes Matt pull away, regardless.

When she’s done, Matt helps Claire carry Frank across the apartment and dump him on Karen’s bed. He wasn’t happy at the request but she was firm. Frank doesn’t appear to have a concussion, so he can be moved, and if he can be moved, a comfortable and flat bed is a much better location for him to rest in rather than a cramped, hard tub.

Matt doesn’t argue with Claire.

It’s refreshing, and if Karen were in a better state, she might appreciate it more.

She listens dutifully to Claire’s instructions about the bandages, the wounds, takes the phone number and punches it into her own cell carefully so that this way any potential necessary follow up — for this incident and this incident only, Claire stresses tiredly — can be directly ascertained.

Just like that, they’re gone, and she’s alone in her apartment once again with Frank.

She should catch some shut-eye, but she pulls out the bleach from underneath her sink, instead.

 Frank sleeps straight through the night.

He sleeps through her drinking the rest of the coffee pot herself, sleeps through her rinsing every inch of the bathroom, sleeps through her scrubbing the wall and the carpet, and sleeps through her washing out bucket after bucket until she’s satisfied that everything is as close to normal once more as much as it can possibly be.

The carpet and the wall weren’t white before, but Karen thinks that white spots look much easier to explain than red ones.

He sleeps through her dumping her bloody clothes in the trash, changing into her favorite baggy sleepwear, and curling up on the other side of the bed.

He takes up more than half of the space, but that’s just fine. 

She’s too exhausted to put effort into making up the couch, too emotionally drained to settle for less than the luxury of pulling familiar covers tight around herself, and too paranoid about him to stray farther than a couple feet in case he starts spluttering or seizing up or doing any one of the horrible images that flashed through her head at various times through the night and had her running to the bed to double-check that he was indeed perfectly stable.

Karen drifts off at some point without noticing.

When she wakes up, her limbs ache, and her head takes more than a few minutes to stop begging for more sleep and instead let her eyes focus. The night before was so surreal, so strange, that she expects it to be another dream. Just one more messed up look into her subconscious that is obsessed with clinging on to Frank.

But it wasn’t.

Her hand is pressed against his very real, very warm side from where she stretched out her arm at some point in the night. She doesn’t pull it back right away, not like she should. She enjoys the feel of his steady breathing beneath her touch, even if she can also see him, hear him.

Karen thinks he is still sleeping until she stretches her legs underneath the sheets, the action alerting him to her conscious state. He opens his eyes and turns his head. His gaze is much clearer than last night. Heavy, an exhaustion there from his healing state, but clear.

She has a sudden longing to see him without bruises across his face again, like the way he was towards the end of his trial, the way he was in all the pictures she saw.

“I should go,” is the first thing he says.

She huffs. “You’re staying until you can walk out of here in one piece.”

“Yeah?” Frank almost rolls his eyes, but relents with pressed lips. “Okay; you’re the boss.” 

He moves a bit then, looking around the apartment as he raises himself to sit up slightly. She keeps her hand where it is. He doesn’t make any indication either way about it, only glances at it a moment before his eyes roam elsewhere.

“Where’s my gear?”

“Under the bed.” Karen bites her lip as she remembers, says, “I tried to clean them. They were caked in blood and I was trying to clean everything and I didn’t think about if wiping them down with bleach would be okay or not until— until after I did it.”

A smirk stretches his purple splotched face. “They’ll be just fine, ma’am.”

She starts to smile back, relaxing. 

He’s the same Frank, and he’s going to be fine, and it feels like a giant weight is slowly lifting off from her chest with the more he talks, the more she watches him with his ticks. Head never completely still, eyes casting around, finger twitching on his leg every couple of seconds.

She isn’t watching his face, so she doesn’t catch when his smile slips. “Got to say, I’m surprised you’re alright with keeping a dead guy in your apartment.”

The back of her hand smacks against his chest. It’s a terribly weak strike from the angle, from her position on her side, yet he jolts slightly at the contact. For a moment, she fears that she’s hurt one of his injuries, but his hands don’t move to grip his side.

“Don’t say that, Frank.”

He tilts his head against the pillow further to look at her properly after he hears the anger in her tone. “It’s the truth.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not…..And I didn’t mean it, not really,” she confides, shame at the truth and embarrassment at finally saying it making her flush. “I wish I could take it all back.”

His gaze is more pained at those words than from the way he seems to feel from any one of his many wounds. It’s disconcerting, but she cannot find it in herself to look away. 

It really does feel like one of her dreams, but those were always based in some sense of reality, right from the start. She gets that now.

His Adam’s apple bobs before he speaks. “…You shouldn’t.”

There’s a protest on the tip of her tongue.

Of course she should want to take it back when he’s so clearly alive, so clearly human. 

She had been afraid that killing the Colonel would kill him, and he was sure he was already gone, but someone that was nothing more than a ghost wouldn’t only take down murderers and abusers. Someone that was nothing more than a ghost wouldn’t protect Matt, her, countless others in dangers.

But the fight in her dies when it’s clear from his stare that he doesn’t have any of that kind of energy in him for this conversation, this argument. Not with her. Not in this moment.

She could still push, knows he would let her try like she did in the woods that night.

Karen pulls back her hand and gets up, instead.