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Karen doesn’t believe in soulmates.
She doesn’t believe in them because she can’t, because she has seen it end badly too many times. (She’s seen too many people lose time waiting for someone who never came; she’s seen her mom and Paxton and how they’d turned out.) She doesn’t believe because if she does it means that there’s another person out there wielding too many bruises; means that there was another child who felt the pain of her broken arm when she was 4, black eye when she was 6, fractured wrist when she was 9.
Karen doesn’t believe in soulmates until she turns 17 and passes out to a blinding pain in the middle of homeroom. When she wakes up in the hospital with three broken ribs and a torn lung that had all but sprung into existence, coughing up blood - then, she might have to reconsider. Especially when it gets worse after that. She figures her soulmate must be in a war zone - maybe one with guns; maybe one with someone like her dad. She makes it through high school with two other hospitalizations, and only barely manages to walk the stage.
She moves to New York immediately after she graduates, and the first thing she does is sign up for a first aid course. She stocks her kitchen with supplies - bandages, slings, even a credit card and some tape in case of a serious gunshot wound - and visits the ER less and less after this.
She’s stopped trying to guess who her soulmate is. She thinks it might be Matt, years later, for only a heartbeat - their injuries show up at the same time, nearly, and she wants it to be him so much it hurts. But just because they both have a penchant for being wounded doesn’t make them meant to be, and she notices the discrepancies soon after she stops trying to make him into someone he’s not.
When Frank realizes that Maria isn’t his soulmate, the relief feels like it caves in his lungs. Because if Maria isn’t his soulmate then no one is; no one needs to feel the injuries he accrues too often overseas, and there is no reason to feel guilty about going back.
(Except when he sees the look in his wife’s eyes when he’s leaving. Except when what he does gets everyone he loves killed.)
So when he begins his tirade as the Punisher there’s nothing to hold him back - no one but him is feeling the pain of his own mortality, day after day, night after night. He can bandage himself up without feeling guilt for anything but his own existence.
He meets Karen for the first time when he’s in a hospital bed and she’s stunning, gorgeous, world-shattering - and he doesn’t notice the black eye underneath her makeup.
Karen is alright. Karen is always alright - she makes sure of it. Makes sure that even when her ex is buried underneath a pile of rubble and her best friend isn’t speaking to her, she still puts foundation over her new bruises and split lip, and wears a long-sleeved blouse to work to cover up the tenser bandage around her wrist.
“You have got to be the most accident-prone person I’ve ever met,” Ellison told her once before, when she had to go to the emergency twice in two months, but this is nothing, and he only murmurs “good morning, sunshine” to her when she walks into the building. She’s heard whispers of a man called kingpin, and today she grabs her computer and starts digging.
Three cups of coffee later, and there’s nothing. No trails on the dark web, no hints in old articles. So it’s to the streets - and she shoots a whistful glance at her phone for a moment, wishing she could have Frank’s number to ask him about this. She’ll put up the flowers, later, if she doesn’t think better of it before then.
She manages to find Mace, a local gangster who owes her a favor, after only a half hour of walking around his usual spots. He’s with his buddies, and so she walks past without acknowledging him. He meets her around the corner after five minutes, with a terse “what d’you need?”
“Kingpin.” Karen asks in a low voice, ignoring the urge to scratch her wrist. “I need information on him.”
“Well, I don’t got any.” Mace replies without meeting her eyes. “Haven’t heard of the dude, sorry.”
She sighs and leans her weight against the wall. “Give it up, Mace. You owe me. I can keep you safe, if that’s what you’re worried about -”
“Oh, fuck that! You think you can keep me safe? From Kingpin? ” Mace asks incredulously, like she has no idea. Like she’s in over her head, again. “Look, I owe you one. So I’m gonna return the favor - drop this. Leave it alone. Or you’ll end up with a bullet through your head like I almost did.”
And then Karen is alone in a desolate Hell’s Kitchen alley, with nothing more than she’s had in weeks - nothing but a warning she can’t help but ignore, and the pounding feeling in her skull that’s telling her she’s missing something.
“You really got a death wish, don’t you?” A voice comes from behind her and she swings around, her hand flying to her purse before she remembers that her wrist hurts, and before she realizes who was speaking.
“Why are you here?” She asks Frank flatly; because it’s been two months since he’d died a second time, and this is the first she’s heard from him.
“I could ask you the same question,” Frank challenges her. “Down a back alley talking to the local shitheads when it’s getting dark out? The hell, Karen?”
“Oh, so you get to be worried?” Karen spits, and this is more than she was expecting - she didn’t realize how livid she was until this moment. “How do you think it’s been for me the past two months? I had to pry it out of Daniel that you were even alive, not to mention unhurt, and what? Now you just show up like nothing happened?”
Frank looks appropriately ashamed. “I’m an asshole,” he acknowledges. “But can I walk you home, and explain?”
Karen lets him.
Frank is trying to learn how to be normal. Normal-ish. He’s trying to figure out how to be in people’s lives without breaking them apart, and it’s this fact that leads him to checking up on Karen, every once in a while. Just to make sure she’s okay. Sometimes this happens by him taking to the streets punisher-style, hood up and hidden in shadows, tracing her footsteps to follow her home. But sometimes he lets it be real person things - a phone call, a text; even coffee. He got a burner that has three numbers in it, and even this feels too close to permanent.
He keeps the violence far away from Karen, until one night when he can’t.
He’s following her home on her way back from work when four men step out of the shadows, surrounding her. Pushing her up against a wall. His heart is in his throat and the only thought in his head is don’t let them hurt her, as he dives out to stop them. He’s fast and brutal, but they get their hits in. He feels a fist hit his face, white pain shooting through him as he fights through it to continue his dance of parrying and punching. He pulls his pistol from his jeans and pulls the trigger quickly, efficiently - dead, dead, dead. He’s so focused on taking out the men in front of him that he doesn’t see the dagger flying towards him until it’s too late.
The blade sinks into his side, and he hears Karen cry out as he stumbles. He can’t check on her yet, not until they’re gone - and it only takes a few more shots to take out the rest.
“Karen,” he gasps, stumbling over to her, “Karen -” because she’s in a pile on the ground clutching her side, face whiter than he’s ever seen it.
“I’m okay,” she says shakily, and then astonishes him by standing up. She’s shaking, but her arm extends towards him with a kind of blinding confidence as she says “my apartment’s two blocks away. I can fix this.”
Frank wants to argue that he can deal with his wounds, that she doesn’t need to take care of him - but she’s already walking, letting him lean on her as she leads the way.
“You’re a wildfire, Karen Page,” Frank doesn’t mean to say as she unlocks the door to her apartment and all but carries him in, “you’re amazing.”
He doesn’t realize how amazing until she dumps him on the couch and staggers over to the kitchen, pulling out a too-efficient first aid kit. Until she pulls out the knife (“it didn’t hit an artery” she says, and he doesn’t ask how she knows) and stitches him up. Until she excuses herself to the bathroom and he hears a muffled gasp from behind the door; until he bursts in and finds her on the floor, stitching up a bloody gash on her side that nearly matches his own.
“What the hell, Karen -!” He shouts as he kneels next to her. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you stupid - ”
“I’m fine,” she bites, but her hands are shaking almost too much for her to finish the stitches, and she surrenders the needle to him as soon as he reaches for it.
“Fuck.” Frank swears underneath his breath. “I didn’t even see them - I didn’t even see you get hurt. And then you hid it with your coat the whole way home? What the fuck? ”
“Yeah, well,” Karen says, a hitch in her voice as he ties off the thread. “They must’ve been quick with that knife. I didn’t see it, either.”
Frank doesn’t let her go to sleep until he’s checked her for a concussion and made sure her side isn’t showing any signs of infection. Once he’s done this he makes his way to the sofa and spreads himself across it, watching Karen as she pads across the floor to her room. She leaves the door open just a little, and it makes it a little easier for him to fall asleep, knowing he can hear if anything happens to her. He falls asleep in twenty minutes, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t dream.
The night of the ambush, Karen cries herself to sleep.
It’s too hard to ignore, now - she lays in bed lining up all her injuries with his. Black eyes, broken bones, sprained wrists. She’s been so stupid, to not see it for this long.
She falls asleep at 5am with the sun already rising, and her alarm goes off two hours later. Her head hurts from crying, and her wrist and side are both throbbing. Frank is awake on the couch, blankets folded neatly beside him when she finishes getting dressed and walks into the living room.
“What are you doing?” He asks her without prelude, and it takes her aback.
“I’m sorry?”
“You - this.” He gestures to her outfit. “You need to get more rest.”
“Says the guy who is also dressed to go out after being beaten half to death,” Karen retorts. “I have a job, like most normal people, that requires me to be there every day.”
“Not when you’ve just been stabbed,” Frank replies firmly.
“I wasn’t even really stabbed!” Karen exclaims, freezing when she realizes what she gave away. She rushes forward, hurtling ahead like her life depends on it - “it was more like a light graze.”
“Karen,” Frank says with too much concern hidden behind gruffness, and it tears her apart the way he looks at her. The way she looks at him. The way her heart bruises her ribcage when she thinks the word soulmate.
She leaves without grabbing her purse.
She doesn’t realize how big of a mistake she’s made until she’s walking home and they grab her. Until a voice whispers Kingpin says to stop looking, and she has no .380 in her bag to save her.
She doesn’t feel it when the knife hits her gut. Not until she looks down and sees the hilt sticking out; until she feels herself sliding to the ground and thinks this is it this is it this is it. She’s hazy, slipping between reality and dreams - and then she thinks of Frank. Thinks of him sitting in her apartment, unaware of why he’s being stabbed, again. She reaches out to her phone, and there’s a crack on it’s surface. There’s blood on her hands. Her fingers manage to dial 911 before the pain hits, a tidal wave that takes away her lungs and her fingertips and anything that isn’t the knife in her stomach. She thinks she gives the operator Frank’s location and hers, before the tidal wave crashes over her one last time and pulls her out to sea.
Frank doesn’t know how he got to the hospital. He remembers letting himself back into Karen’s apartment, waiting for her to get home. He remembers sitting on the sofa and getting sucker punched by a blinding pain.
He remembers most of all that there was no one there to stab him.
He almost pulls the IV out of his arm before he remembers his new identity; that he’s no longer on the run, not really. Frank Castle is dead and he is an innocent civilian - albeit one with an unusual number of injuries - so when the nurse waddles in, an elderly woman with dyed red hair, he focuses on keeping his pulse normal instead of incapacitating her to escape.
“How are you feeling today?” She asks him, looking down at her clipboard then rushing ahead before he could answer. “You had a very close call, sweetheart - if it weren’t for your guardian angel there we’d have lost you. Almost did anyways, mind you! Dr. Stevens does good work, though, and she patched you all up.”
“Guardian angel?” Frank replies, catching onto the most confusing part of her statement.
“Oh, yes.” The nurse smiles at him too brightly. “Sweet young lady. Park? Page? Page, that was it. Karen Page. Called the ambulance just in time.”
So Karen must’ve got home and seen him there. His chest tightens imagining it - her walking in after work, seeing him laying there in a pool of blood. He wishes it had been anywhere else.
“Yes, I hear she’s doing quite well, too.” The woman chatters, and Frank’s attention snaps back to her.
“What do you mean?” He bites, and sees her eyes widen at his sudden shift in demeanor. “What do you mean, she’s doing well?”
“Well, she was wheeled in just after you,” the nurse explains slowly, like she’s suddenly afraid he’ll bite. “Nearly identical stab wound. A little more torn up inside, though - she’s stable, but still hasn’t woken up yet.”
And Frank goes still.
Karen got stabbed. Karen got stabbed but she called the ambulance for me. Karen got stabbed and she got here after -
Karen hasn't woken up.
“I need to see her,” he growls, and he’s the opposite of frozen, he can’t do anything but move - the nurse tries to stop him but he grabs her arm and asks her in his most menacing voice, “what room is she in?”
“I - I shouldn’t -” he squeezes her arm harder - “room 304. Down the hall to your right.”
Everything around him is too quiet. It’s a fucking hospital - shouldn’t there be doctors running back and forth, families crying in the common area, nurses calling out codes? But instead it’s silent and still, like nothing here is real. Like he’s waking up from a nightmare to reality, where he’ll find himself on Karen’s couch with her safe in her bed.
The silence sits and the stillness stays, and he opens the door to Karen’s room.
Karen dreams of fire.
She dreams that she’s engulfed in flames, burning white-hot against her skin, until she’s consumed by it. She dreams of herself digging Matt’s grave as he stands beside her with his pleading, unseeing eyes - of Foggy imploring her to stop, please, please, Karen, just stop -
She dreams of Frank climbing into the grave with Matt, holding her gaze as she shovels soil onto them. As she burns. As Foggy begs. As the world crumbles around them, and she is the last part to fall to pieces.
When she opens her eyes, she is still burning.
The fire is more muted now, but it’s there in her stomach, sending waves of pain to rack her whole body. She breaths in, then out. In, out. And then she opens her eyes.
Frank and Foggy are both in front of her.
“Karen?” Foggy gasps, reaching out for her immediately. “Oh my god, Karen, you’re awake, I thought - I thought -”
“I’m okay, Foggy,” Karen breathes out, reaching to grasp his hand. “I’m okay.” And her eyes slide to Frank, who is waiting with an expression that looks something like relief, and hurt, and something else. And then she sees the bandages and she remembers - “You idiot! ” She exclaims, trying to push herself up on her elbows and then falling back with a cry as the pain hits her with such force that it leaves her gasping. “You fucking - you -”
“Give us a minute,” Frank says to Foggy, and there’s an undertone of something so determined that Foggy just gives him a look before getting out of his seat.
“I’ll be waiting outside,” he says, giving Karen’s hand a quick squeeze before turning to leave.
And then they’re alone, and Karen knows that this is it.
“How long have you known?” He asks her with a voice so undercut with rage it feels like he hit her.
Karen makes herself hold his gaze as she tells him the last thing he wants to hear. “Since you got stabbed in the alley.”
Frank just looks at her, unmoving. “Since I got stabbed,” he repeats slowly, and then there’s a crash as he slams his hand onto the end table, so hard and fast it makes her jump. “And you’ve just - you’ve just been feeling everything I have, for how long?”
“It’s not just you,” Karen whispers. “I got hurt so much when I was a kid.” She’s slowly recognizing the look on his face as horror, and as abject loathing. Please don’t. Please don’t.
“I just thought I was clumsy,” Frank mutters. “And so I got a couple bruises, so what - and you’ve just been stitching yourself up for - for the past ten years? Giving yourself a splint whenever I broke bones, saran-wrapping your ribs when I snapped a few of those? Covering up bruises with your - your fucking makeup - ”
“Frank,” Karen says urgently, “Frank, this isn’t your fault -” but he’s already backing away from her.
“I’m so sorry, Karen,” he tell her, his voice breaking. He won’t look at her. “I’m so fucking sorry.” And then he opens the door, and he leaves.
It hurts too much to cry, Karen tells herself as her breath hitches, it hurts too much -
She can’t help it. She cups her arms around herself and sobs, matching pain with pain until there’s no more air in her lungs and the black spots become all that she can see, and only then does her mind drift away to darkness.
My fault, my fault, my fault. Frank is running, his feet pounding against the pavement. He doesn’t notice his surroundings, doesn’t watch for potential threats - the guilt is taking over him and he is going to explode. He’s cataloging every painful injury he’s had, every bruised knuckle, punctured lung, broken bone. All the times he’d been hurting himself, punishing himself for everything he’s done wrong - he’d been hurting Karen. Punishing Karen. He remembers all the times she stitched him up with shaking hands. All the times she’d flinched when he’d touched her - when he’d thought she was just afraid. All this time, it’d been because of him.
It doesn’t take him long to find the men who stabbed her - not even a day. He brings a sniper rifle and sets up far enough that there’s no way they can hurt him (hurt her) before he puts a bullet through their skull.
One shot, one kill. Dead. Dead. Dead. He kills them all, and all it leaves him feeling is hollow. He should’ve stopped them sooner. He should’ve been there to save her when it mattered.
Karen is discharged from the hospital two weeks later; two agonizing weeks. She wants to get back to work. She wants to find Frank, tie him down, make him listen. Because she knows what it feels like to cause the people she loves pain, too well. She knows what it’s like to be the cause of too much hurt.
She gets to her apartment, and curls up on the couch. And then she does the only thing that she knows will get his attention; she braces herself, and then punches a hand into her stomach. She still isn’t ready for how much it hurts - her throat is gasping for air as she bends over, heaving and gulping and digging her nails into her palms. She’s barely upright before she hears her window sliding open, and turns to see Frank crawling in through it.
“I’m so sorry,” she apologizes, and sees the comprehension dawn on him as he sees that she’s alright. “I needed to see you.”
“You don’t need anything from me,” Frank growls. “You’ve gotten too much from me already -”
“Sit down.” Karen commands, and to her surprise Frank walks around and perches on the other end of the couch. “Sit down, and - and listen to me, okay? Listen to me. You have saved my life more times than I can count. I would be dead if you weren’t in my life, and I don’t plan on staying out of trouble anytime soon, so. I need you to - to stay.” She takes a shaky breath. “Please.”
Frank won’t meet her eyes. “Karen…”
“When I was four years old, my father broke my arm.”
His eyes flick up to her again with that look, like he’d tear apart the world to get her vengeance. To keep her safe. He listens.
“He hit my mother. He hit me. He hit my little brother, even when I tried to stop him. And he was hurting you, too - you would’ve felt it. You would’ve been just a kid, too.” She stops, and looks at him. “All I’m saying,” she adds, her voice growing soft, “is that I know what it’s like to hurt the people you care about.”
Frank sits in silence, too still.
“I can’t be responsible for - for you hurting.” He breaks, finally. “I can’t be the one who does that to you.”
“Then don’t do that to yourself,” Karen replies immediately. “Be careful. You’re fighting this war like you don’t need to survive it. Change.”
Frank thinks about it, and Karen waits. Until he moves closer, puts a hand on the back of her neck and pulls her forehead to his.
“I can try,” he tells her, his voice hoarse. “Karen. I can try.”
Frank still feels guilty. He feels it like a kick to the face, whenever he looks at Karen - her wrist, her eye, the stab wound he gave her and the one he didn’t protect her from -
He thinks that whatever pain he’s caused her, he’ll never be able to pay it back; but he can at least start now.
She doesn’t try to dissuade him from his regular routine of watching her when she walks to work, and when she walks home; and she’s sworn to him after many arguments about safety and space that if she’s following up a lead on anything to do with kingpin, she’ll call him. After a while, he ends up staying on her couch most nights. He sleeps better there, anyways.
Soulmate, he lets himself think one night, when she’s sitting on the couch next to him with her laptop, typing up something for work. Her hair is falling over her shoulders and he wants to reach over and run his fingers through it, just to remind himself that she’s here, she’s safe. They haven’t talked about it, aside from the physical aspects. Soulmates doesn’t mean good together, he reminds himself. Soulmates doesn’t always mean love. But here, with the moonlight filtering in through her apartment window to highlight her silhouette, with her bare legs curled up inches away from his arm -
Here, he could almost think it does.
“It feels like I’m going in circles,” Karen tells him one night as they’re both limping home - she’d gotten too close, again, and Frank hadn’t been able to make it out completely unharmed. “Every time I find something that might lead me in the right direction, I find something else that tells me I’ve been wrong about two other things. And then we just - end up like this -” she gestures to their wounded legs, “because of me.”
They sit on the step outside her apartment, because it’s easier than dealing with the stairs. (The elevator’s been broken for longer than she’s been living here, but she still won’t listen to him about getting a better place. I make things work, Frank, she says with a roll of her eyes whenever he brings it up.)
“Does this mean we gotta go back to that dumbass hospital?” Frank asks as Karen leans onto his shoulder, just enough to use him for balance. To show him that even after nearly dying on the streets, she’s comfortable with him.
“I’ve got splints under the sink,” Karen replies, stretching her leg out with a wince. “It doesn’t feel bad enough to be more than a fracture, so we don’t need it set or anything.”
He feels that familiar pang in his chest, the one that says she shouldn’t have to know this.
“Don’t say you’re sorry, Frank.” Karen says sharply, correctly interpreting the look in his eyes. “We’re past that. You’ve saved my life too many times to be sorry.”
And so he just nods, and helps her up the stairs.
Karen’s going crazy.
Every day she feels like she’s falling deeper into a sinkhole of her own making. Matt’s dead, Foggy’s dropped off the face of the earth; the one person who will never love her is her soulmate. So instead of feeling sorry for herself she dives deeper into her work; makes that her whole world. She’s so close to something big, she can feel it. But every time she thinks the truth is almost in her grasp it slips away.
She’s more worried now, walking home at night. Because she knows that one of these times, a knife or a bullet might slip through - and then it’s not just her who’s going to feel it. And if she gives Frank any more pain than he already has to deal with, she might not ever stop hating herself.
The night that they fracture their legs, they sit on the couch and help bandage each other up. “You’ve gotten good at this,” Frank notices, and Karen smiles tightly.
“Lots of practice,” she replies, then sees the look on his face. “Not from you!” She reassures him, although it is, to some extent. “My mom wasn’t - she didn’t deal well, with everything. And my dad wouldn’t let us go to the hospital, cause someone might notice after a while that we were in a lot. So I dealt with it. I took care of us.”
Frank is quiet for a while, focusing on splinting her leg. “You love your family a lot,” he says, finally.
“I loved my brother a lot,” Karen bites off coldly, her fingers twitching. “Kevin was - was the only good thing about home.”
He can’t have missed the past tense, but he doesn’t push. Just finishes the splint and sits back next to her. Karen is trying to figure out what to say when he scoots closer. And then he’s pulling her towards him, more gently than she realized was possible, so her head is on his shoulder and his arms are wrapped around her waist. He strokes her hair and hums something in her ear; something that sounds vaguely scottish and feels so much like freedom.
“All I want is to keep you safe, Karen,” he murmurs after too long. “I need you - I need you to be safe.”
“And I need you alive,” Karen replies, lifting her head to look at him; “so this works out well for both of us.”
Frank doesn’t sleep that night. Karen falls asleep on his shoulder, hair splaying across his chest. He’s too close, he’s too fucking close so he waits until her breathing is long and slow, and he lets her head down onto the couch. Covers her in a blanket and unpacks his sniper rifle from where he has it hidden in the kitchen, and then lets himself out through the window.
He spends the next three days at the warehouse. Runs intel, trains, takes out a few assholes dragging women to the docks. He makes it out almost unscathed, but he snaps his ring finger putting down the last few - the ones who hide. He tapes it up when he gets back to the warehouse, and hopes with a blind sort of desperation that it doesn’t reach Karen.
No one knows how to break soulmate bonds. He knows this because he’s searched high and low, asked every person he can find who’s any sort of expert on it. He would do anything to be able to stop Karen from feeling this constant, war-zone pain. And if he can’t stop her from feeling it, the least he can do is keep himself from causing her more. He knows that that’s all that being close to her will do. He knows this, and he still let himself care. And now he has to make up for it. So he stays away as much as he can, still keeping her in his sights when she’s walking to and from work. But he doesn’t answer her calls or texts, just listens to the voicemail to make sure she’s alright. She sends him a text on the third day. I won’t call again unless there’s an emergency. Please call soon.
That night, she doesn’t get off the subway at her stop.
After Karen sends her last text, she heads to the liquor store a few stops from her place. She’d called Foggy to see if he wanted to meet up at Josie’s but he’d let it go to voicemail as usual, so Karen turns her phone off as she picks out a bottle of cheap tequila and pays for it in cash.
She walks around for half an hour before she settles down on the docks, feet hanging off the edge, high heels dropped on the concrete beside her. She wasn’t followed. Not by kingpin’s men, not by Frank - for the first time in a long time, she is completely and totally alone.
She celebrates by downing far too much of the tequila. And when she’s reached the point where she can’t feel her injuries anymore, when the drowning feels normal; then she throws the bottle into the water. She hears it smash against the rocks, and pictures what that would feel like - breaking into little pieces. She thinks that maybe that’s the only thing she feels anymore.
She sits there for she doesn’t know how long, feeling the cement scraping against her palms and the cool air on her skin. She looks out at the water and its reflection of stars, of the moon, of city lights. Remembers the summer they’d spent on the lake, with her and Kevin running off to skip stones where their parents couldn’t find them, and how everything had been simpler then. Before she left. Before she shot her father in the kneecap and ran; before she got the phone call from her mother and realized that she couldn’t protect anyone, not even herself.
“Karen,” a gruff voice says from behind her, and she should have known she could only have avoided him for so long. “Karen, what’re you doing out here?”
“Go away, Frank,” she slurs, keeping her gaze out across the water. “You’ve made it clear that you don’t want whatever this is so please, just leave me alone.”
She doesn’t hear anything and for a second she thinks maybe he really left. But then he sits down on the dock beside her, swings his legs to hang off the edge like hers. “You didn’t answer your phone,” he says nonchalantly, and Karen laughs.
“Yeah, well,” she spits, too bitterly, “it seems to be going around.”
He folds his hands together and settles back into that too-familiar slouch. “Y’know, Karen,” he tells her too calmly, staring out at the horizon as he settles in. “I used to come home from overseas and I’d be a mess. Didn’t sleep, didn’t eat - I tried to keep up a good face for Maria and the kids, but they saw right through it. One time I got smashed out of my mind, really trashed, and Maria she told me - told me that if I was gonna come home, I had to come home. She said that if my head was still gonna be over there, that I should start looking for an apartment. She was serious, too - dead serious. And so I stopped drinking. Started eating full meals, saw a therapist about the nightmares. I came home.”
Karen stares steadfastly at the water. “Why are you telling me this, Frank?” She whispers, because it’s all she can manage. “What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Because after they died I didn’t have a home to come to, Karen.” Frank ducks his head then looks over at her. “For a long time, I was over there 24/7. And I felt like I was - like I was never gonna get out. Like I didn’t deserve to. Like I had this war zone inside of me, and it was only a matter of time before I exploded.
“And then I met you. I met you, and I had something that wasn’t just - just death and destruction. But sometimes I look at you and I see that same sort of war zone. And you haven’t got out, Karen. You’re still there, 24/7.”
Karen laughs. “So what, Frank?” She digs her hand into the cement; wishes she hadn’t thrown away the tequila. “So you’re here to save me? You fucking left. You don’t get to run away and then come back to give me a lecture about - about stability.”
“Karen, listen -”
“No, you don’t - you don’t fucking get to do this! Not -”
“Listen! ” He grabs her shoulder and turns her to face him. “Karen listen, I shouldn’t have left. I shouldn’t’ve, but I was scared, alright? I was fucking scared, being that close to you. Cause the last people I cared about, I got ‘em killed. If that happened to you, I don’t know - I don’t know what I’d do.”
Karen ducks her head. Stares at her bare feet, at the rocks and the drop and the shattered glass beneath her.
“What’re you running from, Karen?” Frank murmurs. “What the hell is this all about?”
She lifts her head to look at the stars, and she blinks back the tears threatening to spill. And then she starts to explain.
She tells him all of it. How the last time her dad hit Kevin she shot him three times in the kneecap and told him if he hurt anyone again she’d shoot it through his skull; tells him how even with all that, Kevin still died. She explains through choked breaths how she woke up with Daniel’s blood on her hands; how she put seven bullets into Wesley’s unarmed body; how she’s the reason Ben is gone. And then she stops.
“Karen.” Frank tilts his head, leans down so she’ll look at him. “Karen, hey. What you did - you didn’t have a choice. That shithead, he would’ve come after you, he would’ve sent men after you - you did what you had to do.”
Karen shook her head. “There are - there are too many people dead. Because of me.” She looks over at him again. “That’s what this is all about.”
When Karen tells him, Frank thinks his heart is the closest it’s been to breaking since Maria. She looks at him like she’s drowning, like she walked off the edge herself.
She tries to stand and stumbles over her feet - Frank had noticed she’d been tipsy, but apparently she’s better at masking her drunkenness than he thought. So he grabs her elbow and slings her arm beside his head; puts a hand on her waist. She leans against him, drunk and shivering, and he sees the tears slipping down her cheeks.
“The way I see it,” he says, forcing his voice to be calm, “you know what I do. You’ve seen the shit I left behind, and you still let me sleep on your couch, for christ’s sake. If you can do that, you can forgive yourself for all this shit that you couldn’t control.”
She nods, taking a sharp breath in as she wipes the tears from her face.
When she stumbles again he picks her up and carries her all the way back to her apartment. Tucks her into the bed and sits there listening to her even breathing, noticing how she only looks peaceful when she’s asleep.
He wants to fix this the only way he knows how; wants to grab his guns and his knives and beat someone bloody. But there’s nothing he can do in this moment except stroke her hair and hope to god that he can take some part of her pain away, like she's done so many times for him.
When Karen wakes up, it’s to the stabbing pain in her gut and the throbbing of her skull. The one in her skull is from the hangover, and a little search of her injuries lets her know that in her drunken stupor she tore some of the stitches on her stomach. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She walks out to the living room bleeding too much, and Frank stands up in a rush.
“Hey, hey, what happened -” he moves towards her so quickly, and Karen shakes her head with a wince.
“Tequila does not mix well with stitches,” she tells him with a rueful smile, and he’s already reaching for the first aid kit. He gives her an icepack for her head (she didn’t realize their shared pain applied to hangovers,) and brings the needle through her skin as quickly and gently as Karen thinks is probably possible. He ties it off before bringing her shirt down carefully over it, his fingers skimming her side as he does so.
“Listen,” he tells her, his hands resting on the couch on either side of her. “Karen, we should talk about last night.”
Karen lifts a hand to push her hair back and doesn’t meet his gaze. “What’s there to talk about?” She asks, twisting her fingers together - winces as she remembers the broken one.
“This thing -” Frank gestures between them with a knowing glance, “it doesn’t work if one of us has a death wish.”
Karen laughs. “And that one is supposed to be me?” She asks, incredulous.
The corner of Frank’s mouth twitches up. “Yeah, yeah.”
He runs a hand over the place where he stitched her up. “You know what you mean to me,” he tells her quietly. “You know that I can’t lose you, Karen.”
(Later she’ll sit with him outside on the fire escape and trace his scars with a finger. That one hurt, she’ll say, or this one made me miss my freaking chem final. He’ll tell her how he got each one, and she’ll wait however long he needs before he speaks.)
“I know,” Karen tells him, placing a hand gently over his. “I can’t - I can’t lose you either.”
(They’ll stay there until they hear the birds chirping and see the sunrise brush the city skyline. Until he whispers you’re home for me now, Karen, and she can almost believe it.)