Chapter Text
The sky looked different in the city. Light was pollution, here: neon signs that burned all night, rows of cars travelling along dark roads, street lamps one after another. It created a greenish glow, a sickly halo that descended over Manhattan as soon as the sun set. You could see the city from space, Karen had been told.
She would say she missed the stars, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had looked for them. Not in New York; not in Vermont. When she tried there was always something in the way. Or maybe that was her eyes.
Karen worked late. She didn’t sleep well most of the time. The doctor gave her pills but the pills gave her dreams. Most evenings she stayed at the paper until the screen blurred and Ellison forced her out, practically stuffing her into her coat and throwing her out the door. “You’re no use to me if you’re falling asleep over the keyboard,” he’d say, without acknowledging for a second that he was also burning the midnight oil. He made up an excuse to walk her to her car, every single time.
She wore flats instead of heels now, because she might need to run. Her new apartment wasn’t even in Hell’s Kitchen. She checked her backseat before she got into her car, and started it by remote. Just in case.
She never called Matt, and he never called her. There were times she thought she saw a streak of red along a rooftop out of the corner of her eye, but it was always gone when she turned her head.
Foggy stopped by her office. Ben’s articles were still on the walls - she would never take them down. She hadn’t put any of her own pictures up, either. There weren’t many that she wanted to look at.
He walked slowly around the edge of the room, hands in his pockets. The suit was one she hadn’t seen before; dark gray with a subtle pinstripe. There was no way Foggy picked it out.
“He was kind of a bigshot, huh?”
“The biggest.” Karen leaned back against the edge of her desk. The inside of her mouth tasted bitter, the way it usually did when someone mentioned Ben.
Foggy came over and sat next to her. His suit may have been new but his cologne was just the same. “And now so are you. I knew you had it in ya, kid.”
Karen tucked her hair behind her ears. “Thanks, Foggy. But I don’t think I can make any claims to fame yet.”
Ellison liked her, but overall her reception in the newsroom was cool. It wasn’t like she could blame them. Ben’s office was prime real estate and she was a nobody. Sometimes she thought about asking for a cubicle instead, but it seemed so ungrateful.
Foggy nudged her with his elbow. “Want to catch me up on the latest gossip? You must know everything by now.”
She smiled. “Guess you’ll have to read the paper to find out.”
“You think I don’t?” Foggy asked, putting a hand on his chest. “I’m wounded. Why, only last week you wrote about - you know, that thing - I swear I’ll remember in a minute.”
Karen swatted at his knee. “Stop. Did you come up here just to distract me? Hogarth must not be keeping you busy.”
“Nah,” he said. “I came to invite you out for drinks with me and Marci. I promise it won’t be at Josie’s.”
“I’d like to,” she said. “Sometime.”
It wasn’t him - Foggy was as comfortable and welcome a presence as any person could be. It was her. She was jagged and strange, so different than she used to be. The only thing that blunted her edges was throwing herself into the minutiae of investigating. Not because it was a thrill, but because putting a story together properly was careful, methodical. A cellphone picture here, a name dropped by a source there, an email sent to the wrong person, a signed credit card receipt. She knew better than anyone what the right list of numbers could do to a human life. Her job was to stitch it back together, to recreate a sequence of events so that the reader could understand. Could see what she did.
Otherwise she was trapped inside her own head. It was like living with a chainsaw whirring next to her ear. Last week a car had backfired while she was walking down the street and she’d slammed, full-body, into a complete stranger in her panicked efforts to get away.
Foggy pressed his lips together and nodded. He didn’t look angry with her, though. He was worried, and that was worse. “The invitation is a standing one, so keep us in mind next time you feel like painting the town red.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I will.”
They went quiet, but the silence wasn’t awkward. It was Karen who broke it.
“Do you ever see him?” she asked, and then wished she hadn’t.
Foggy blew out a breath. “Wow,” he said, “she does ask the hard questions.”
“Forget about it,” Karen said. “I - it doesn’t matter. Forget that I asked.”
“No,” Foggy said. His voice was steady and his suit was expensive but he looked tired around the eyes, had as soon as he’d walked through the door. “It’s okay. And I don’t. I haven’t seen Matt in months.”
She realised she was being followed on a trip to get toilet paper, of all things. It was late, and Karen tried not to go out after dark unless she had her car (doors locked, doors always locked) but she wasn’t going to drive to the corner bodega for an emergency Charmin run, for christ’s sake. It was all of three blocks away.
It was nice out, still warm but not so much that it would amplify the garbage day smell. Someone was playing salsa, loudly. There were a lot of people in the street; they piled up on the steps outside their buildings or dangled out of convertible windows, yelling over the music and enjoying the last of the summer heat. Karen wore a lavender dress and silver sandals, her hair in a messy bun.
She didn’t feel the tingling on the back of her neck until after she left the store. There was no point in second-guessing herself or debating if it meant anything; Karen slid one hand into her purse and gripped her pepper spray. The other held on to the plastic bag with whitening knuckles as someone moved up behind her.
“Two guys on your tail,” said Frank, falling into step next to her. “Grey hoodie and red shirt, ‘bout ten feet back.”
“Armed?” Karen asked. She barely moved her lips when she spoke and didn’t look at him.
“Don’t think they’re carrying,” he said. “You want to find out for sure, let me know.”
“Wherever it is you think we’re going, the answer is no.”
“Only place I want to go is your apartment,” he said. “I’m just gonna take you home, come on.”
“You mean you don’t know where it is?” Karen asked. She shook her head and met his eye for the first time. His face had healed up, and he hadn’t acquired any bruises any bruises fresh enough for her to notice. “Wow, Frank. You must be slipping.”
“I know where it is,” he said. “I never said I didn’t.”
“I guess I shouldn’t have given you the benefit of the doubt,” Karen said. In her purse her fingers slipped away from the pepper spray.
“Told you that you should’ve shot me,” he said, and that made her want to laugh, which made her angry again; so she didn’t.
She glanced in the side view mirror of a parked car. Now that Frank had pointed them out she could spot the men easily, the quick and focused way they walked without ever closing the gap between them. One of them was watching Frank, not her.
“Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were stopping by?” Karen said, loud enough to carry. She grabbed Frank’s hand and smiled broadly. His fingers twitched in hers. “I would have picked up something nice for dinner.”
For a moment he looked entirely thrown, but he covered it fast. He was a quick study. “We’ll order Chinese,” he said. “No dishes to clean up.”
God, she hoped nobody recognized him. But people were good at explaining away the impossible, she thought, and if someone noticed it could be played off as an unfortunate resemblance. Nothing more and nothing less, and didn’t everyone know that the Punisher was six feet under?
Karen was much better at lying than she used to be.
He tugged her along as they approached the door of her building. To anyone watching it would look eager, a guy trying to get some time alone with his girl. Yeah, Frank knew exactly what he was doing. But so did Karen, and she leaned into him while digging for her keys. It put her in whispering range. “Where are they now?”
“Back by the fire hydrant,” he said. “Pretending to talk to some kids standing there. Asking for directions, I think. Don’t look.”
“I’m not,” she said. Instead she pulled out her makeup mirror and aimed it behind her. Both men were white, about thirty. One a little heavyset, the other slim. Not the most distinctive faces she’d ever seen but she could identify them again if she had to.
Frank almost smiled. “Nice trick, Miss. Page.”
“Not my first rodeo,” she muttered.
He went through the apartment the same way the cops had. Sweeping the closets, the bathroom, under the bed. He didn’t draw a weapon like they had, though. Maybe he didn’t have one on him, or maybe he didn’t need one - Frank was more dangerous with empty palms than most men would be with an assault rifle. And he did other things, like listening at the walls and running a hand along the undersides of the furniture.
Whatever threat he was looking for didn’t materialize. Karen sat at her kitchen table and watched him until he got back on his feet, apparently satisfied.
“You’re good,” he said. “But keep an eye out. And stay away -”
“From the windows,” Karen finished. “Thank you for your services, but I get the point.You can leave now.”
He nodded, tensing up as though he’d been expecting it. Bracing for it. “In a minute,” he said, and on another circle of the room closed all the drapes. When he got the door he paused with his hand on the knob.
“Hey, Frank?” Karen asked. “What was your plan for after?”
“After,” he said, like the word itself was a question.
“After Schoonover,” said Karen. “After the Blacksmith, or whatever else.”
Frank didn’t answer at first and she thought he would go without saying anything at all. He slid her deadbolt open, closed and then open again. “This lock is shit,” he told her, voice clipped. “You should get a new one.”
“How about we make a new rule,” said Karen. “The rule is that you don’t get to give me advice anymore.”
“Yeah,” he said, quietly, and left.
Karen pushed her hair back from her face, her elbows on the table and the toilet paper still in its bag at her feet. She was drained; all those late nights catching up with her. “Frank Castle is dead,” she said to no one in particular. “Long live Frank Castle.”
She slept better knowing he was out there, and hated herself for it.
A few days after a package arrived for her at the Bulletin. It had been shipped from a hardware store, but there was no customer name on the label. One heavy-duty deadbolt lock, complete with installation instructions.
“Asshole,” Karen said, and threw it in the bottom drawer of her desk.
He showed up when she was trying to have a peaceful morning coffee - with plenty of cream and sugar, thank you very much. She’d been waiting outside the shop before it opened. Those dreams again.
(She was sitting across the table from Fisk and then he had his hands around her throat, she was sitting across the table from Wesley and his eye sockets were empty except for the worms crawling out, she was sitting across from her brother and a gun was in her hand and she shot him, she shot him over and over.)
Frank had a black baseball cap on, as though it would disguise anything. But he had an ability to disappear in public. She envied him that.
The chair scraped the floor as he pulled it out. An employee wandered over to see what he wanted, but Frank waved him away.
“You’re supposed to order something,” Karen said. She inhaled the steam from her coffee, tapping the edge of the mug against her lips. “It’s rude not to. They can ask you to leave.”
“You put that lock on your door yet?”
“Remember our rule?”
He leaned forward, dead serious. She didn’t pull back. “This is more important than you being mad at me.”
For a terrible second she wanted to throw her coffee in his face. Because she thought that she could get away with it. No, because she knew she could. She could have tossed hot coffee at him and he wouldn’t lift a finger to defend himself. There was a kind of power in that, a sick temptation that she didn’t quite understand. She wasn’t a violent person. She wasn’t.
Karen’s fingernails pressed against the porcelain of her cup. “Mad isn’t the word I’d use.”
Frank rubbed the side of one knuckle along his mouth. There was a cut on his bottom lip that hadn’t been present the last time she saw him. And his hands were raw again, red from fighting. “No, you said done.”
Karen drank her coffee, briefly closing her eyes to better appreciate the rush of caffeine. “I said dead. But so did you.”
He sat back and looked to the side, away from her. His hands were on the tabletop, fingers spread out like he was proving he was unarmed. “Look, you want me to go and I’ll go. Just say so.”
“Why are you here in the first place?”
“The guys who followed you home the other night,” he said, “they work for Wilson Fisk.”
Karen could actually feel her face drain of color. She must have looked like she was coming off a week of the flu; her hair pulled back because she was too exhausted to do anything about it, bags under her eyes. She set her mug down too fast and slopped coffee onto the table. “Nelson and Murdock helped take Fisk down,” she said. “You must know that. It’s not a surprise he would be checking into everyone who worked there.”
“He ever threaten you?”
Karen licked her lips. Suddenly she was regretting dumping coffee on top of an empty stomach. “I have never spoken to Wilson Fisk.”
He couldn’t possibly know. Nobody knew.
“Never at all.”
“No,” she said, “no, never at all. Not - I was a secretary, okay? I wasn’t even working as a legal assistant back then. Why would he pay attention to me?”
“He is now,” said Frank, and the way he said it made her look at him instead of the swirls of cream in her drink or her chipped manicure. “And he don’t strike me a guy who forgets very easily. Hey, you remember how I looked when I got out of jail? A parting gift from him and his buddies. So you can see why I’m a little -” He stopped and set his jaw. A muscle in his cheek jumped. “A little bothered by the thought of them getting their hands on you.”
“But what am I supposed to do?” Karen asked. “I mean, I could use my job - but Fisk is already in jail, that won’t reach him. And they don’t give you police protection for vague threats.” Brett would listen, if she told him. But he wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Frank’s flat, challenging expression told her everything she needed to know. He didn’t have to say a word. If she let him loose -
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “No. No, okay?” She dropped her voice and leaned in. “You are not shooting anybody over this. We do things my way or not at all.”
“Your way is more dangerous than mine is,” he said. “I wish you’d let me take care of it.”
There was leeway in that ‘let me’. She took advantage immediately. “You came to me to find out what I wanted. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here at all; you’d do whatever it is you have in mind and I never would have heard about it. Don’t bullshit me.”
“Alright,” he said, and she thought she heard some warmth there or saw it in his face; she was reminded of when she told him he could rot in his jail cell or he could deal with her. Apparently ultimatums were the way to go with Frank. “So you want to ask ‘em nicely?”
“No,” said Karen, offended. “We don’t ask ‘them’ anything. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
“I know the kind of shit you get yourself into,” he said. “I saw it up close. Here’s my end of the bargain: you don’t make a move without telling me. I want to be there, understand?”
There were worse things than Frank Castle offering to be her bodyguard, she guessed. It was a compromise she could live with. “Fine,” she said. “Unless you’re too conspicuous - then you have to, I don’t know; lurk outside or something.”
“I can do lurking.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Then we got a deal,” said Frank, so placidly that Karen immediately regarded him with a suspicious eye. The barista went past, pushing a broom along the floor, and Frank leaned over to tap the guy on the shoulder. “Hey, does she look hungry to you?”
“Frank.”
“Uh, maybe?” The barista shrugged. “We have a pretty good breakfast sandwich. You want that?”
“Shouldn’t start the day without a good meal,” Frank said. “They taught us that in the marines.”
Karen shot him a glare and then sighed. She might as well free the poor kid. “Sure. I’ll have the breakfast sandwich.”
He escaped and left Frank looking far too pleased with himself. Notably, he wasn’t eating. He didn’t even have a coffee yet and Karen felt like demanding he order the sweetest most ridiculous thing on the menu. “You’re a pain in the ass,” she said, and in a fit of childishness reached over and yanked his hat down over his eyes. “And you’re paying.”