Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Here’s the thing: it didn’t start with Union Allied.

Waking up bloody, a knife in her hand and a body laid out on the carpet in front of her, terror so thick in her veins she couldn’t breathe, some days it feels like that was inevitable.

She learned how to get blood out of carpet when she was eleven. Cold water and elbow grease. Hydrogen peroxide sometimes, if the stain is bad enough.

There’s just so much—

Karen’s been scared for as long as she can remember. She’s been scared her whole damn life.

She tried to explain it, once, to Foggy. Talked about the dark corners, the way everyone felt like a threat. Got falling down drunk and tried to laugh it off, hoped he wouldn’t take her seriously when they sobered up. Hoped he would.

What she wouldn’t have given for him to have just asked, once they both dried out.

Foggy is a good person. He offered to fix her drywall, walked her home a few times, tried to make sure she laughed at least once a day. Her time at Nelson & Murdock seems weirdly surreal now, a thin string of moments that can’t possibly belong to her. Some other Karen Page was paid in baked goods. Some other Karen Page thought she could tuck the past away and be happy.

She hasn’t seen Foggy in months. Matt— well.

The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is dead, and New York doesn’t care. The city doesn’t feel any different than it ever did. It’s just as ugly, just as corrupt and menacing. She covers the crime beat, follows her gut and digs up leads, pokes her nose where it doesn’t belong. She tugs a thread here that uncovers a scandal in the foster system there, investigates a drug ring that leads to a corrupt city councilman, gets a cop or six busted for tampering with evidence. Her articles are making waves. She’s proud. She’s terrified.

The Bulletin gets a lot of angry letters addressed to Karen Page.

Calls come through too sometimes, short, clipped conversations that leave Ellison pale, trying to warn her away from a story. It rarely works.

“You’re a hell of a reporter, Karen, but you might live a little longer if you listen to your lizard brain when it tells you that you should be afraid.”

It makes her want to laugh. There’s no should about it.

“I’ll have the revised version of the Van Lundt story on your desk by 2:00,” she says instead. Ellison nods, looking down to frown at something on his phone, and she ducks out before he can realize she’s shaking.

Ben’s office is a safe haven some days, a place where she can take a breath and get her bearings and shove down all the fear. The headlines on the wall are a roadmap: this is how you make a difference. This is how you make things better.

Other days, it’s a corner she’s painted herself into, a trap she set and baited and walked into like a goddamn idiot.

The gun lives in her purse now. Maybe Ellison would give her different work if he knew. Maybe he’d finally ask her if she’s okay. She’s not sure which option would make her feel better. She’s not sure either option would help.

It doesn’t really matter one way or the other. She gets the shaking under control and gets back to her draft. The city carries on the way it always does, and so does she.

She’s a writer, and a journalist on top of that. She’s careful with her words. She knows what they mean—root and origin and part of speech—and she means them.

When she says dead she means: this is over. She means: there is no coming back from this. Nineteen years in Vermont hammered that lesson home, and New York’s made sure she can’t forget.

And yet, as it turns out, dead doesn’t mean all that much, not the way she intended it to. Not the way it should. She shouted it at Frank, voice cracking as she struggled to hold back tears. It was like screaming at god: all it did was make her feel small and stupid.

You do this and I am done. That’s it. You’re dead to me.

She meant it. She did. But then Matt handed her a red mask and a paltry excuse, guilt painted across his face clear enough for a blind man to see, and everything fell apart. He lied to her from the very beginning, turned Foggy into a liar too, and they just let her flounder around alone in the dark—

She throws Matt out of his own damn office after he tells her, stops answering Foggy’s increasingly infrequent calls. It hurts, but so does the idea of seeing either of them. Talking to them.

Cut adrift from even the wreckage of Nelson & Murdock, she doesn’t have a lot in New York. Just her still-new job at the Bulletin, which is rewarding and isolating in equal measure. She works herself into the ground, chasing leads, digging up sources, writing and rewriting and rewriting again. She talks to Ellison and that’s pretty much it. It’s easier than dealing with the thinly-veiled hostility from most of the other reporters. Cushy office, head editor’s pet project, new kid on the block; friends aren’t exactly thick on the ground.

She goes home at night to an apartment without blood stains or bullet holes, lonelier than she’s been in years, and buries herself in research. More edits. Sometimes she’s tired enough that she can fall in bed and sleep without dreams.

Other nights, when she’s given up on sleep, she puts aside her actual work and looks for Frank.

Foggy said nothing would change, Matt said he wouldn’t hurt her, she shouted a promise she’d give anything to take back; seems like they’re all liars.

It’s ugly work, wading through the bodies, sorting through the carnage, but she doesn’t let that stop her. Everything’s ugly if you dig deep enough.

There’s a small part of her that isn’t entirely horrified by the violence. It’s the part of her that pulled the trigger, emptied the clip, doesn’t regret it. The part that can’t see angels but believes wholeheartedly in hell. It got her out of Vermont; it put her in Frank’s path.

It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but she’s done lying to herself about it. She’s done pretending that it doesn’t exist. She’s put bullets in two different bodies, knows the sound of her own bones breaking. She can scrub blood out of carpet, put men in jail with nothing but a pen and her own stubborn grit. At night she dreams of gingersnaps and jail cells and car accidents, and every morning she faces herself in the mirror and does what she can to make things right.

Making things right sometimes means weighing two truths against each other, and letting go of the one that comes up empty. You’re dead to me pops like a soap bubble, makes her eyes sting and her breath catch in her throat. Damn him, but she cares. She’s invested. Frank can throw dead around all he wants; he isn’t a dead man, not to her. She won’t let him be.

She looks for Frank, and works her beat, and almost by accident, she makes a friend.

Liz is cool. She covers sports for the Bulletin, and she spends a lot of time shouting about the Rangers, but her desk is near Karen’s office, and she’s always around. After a few months of small talk at the water cooler, they start grabbing coffee a couple times a week. It’s a friendship grown out of mutual necessity—two women commiserating about the realities of a male-dominated office in an ugly, dying field—but Liz is smart and funny and has an incredible nose for cheap cafés that aren’t overrun with hipsters. She’s a work friend. Karen hasn’t had great luck with those but for now, it’s alright.

They stick to safe subjects. The jackass covering the mayoral race who doesn’t seem to understand implicit bias, the Rangers and their power play woes. The weather. Sometimes Liz complains about her girlfriend and Karen makes sympathetic noises. She’s a good listener. If she bites her tongue hard enough to hurt when Liz laughs and asks her if there’s anything she wants to complain about for a change, well, that’s a small price to pay for clean conversation.

No vigilantes. No blood. They don’t talk about Fagan Corners, or the car accident, or why she walks away, heels clicking too fast, click click click clickclick on the sidewalk whenever she hears a street preacher, Bible thumper, repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand—

Coffee sloshes across her wrist and onto her sleeve, not quite hot enough to scald but enough to scare Liz.

“Jesus, Karen, slow down! Are you okay?”

She glances down at the spill, looks away again immediately. She’s been staring at too many crime scene photos. The Gnuccis, the Chechens, Frank; all she can see is arterial spray.

“Yeah,” she says, pasting on a smile. Liz is great. Karen gets coffee with Liz because she’s a work friend and she doesn’t push. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Matt called her a saint once. She flinched, and then was immediately, profoundly grateful he couldn’t see it. It makes some wounded, angry thing in her chest clench even now to know that he did see it, however it is that he sees things. The faint rustle of cloth, a hitch in her breathing, whatever. He saw it and he never said a goddamn word.

He built her up into something she wasn’t, patinaed with gold and goodness, all light, no shadow. And she let him. A few tense conversations, a moment or two where she pushed back, but mostly she just let him. Let him say it, let him believe it, hid her flinch and her past and the blood on her hands, all because she needed someone to tell her there was still good in her; now she’s living with the consequences.

She doesn’t believe in god. Doesn’t believe in saints. She’d make a shitty one, anyway, because she shut the door in Matt’s face and refused to open it again, no matter how broken he sounded when he asked.

He gave up eventually, walked away on quiet feet. She watched his shadow through the textured glass of the office door as he left, no cane, no help needed.

Good, she remembers thinking. Good. Just go.

Three months later he was dead, and the last thing she said to him was, “I don’t know if I can forgive this, Matt. I think you should leave. You— you need to leave.”

Everything she felt for him, everything she thought she knew, it’s all snarled into a hopeless mess, tangled up with her anger. At Matt, for lying. Herself, for being that goddamn naive. For hiding the ugliness so well she fooled them both, at least for a little while.

Saints suffer, and it sloughs off all their darkness. Turns them holy. Makes their pain mean something.

Karen’s pain is just pain. She never did know how to explain that.

Behold, the blind their sight receive!
Behold, the dead awake, and live!

She has the hymn stuck in her head for weeks after the news breaks. It follows her into her dreams, worse than her usual nightmares, the sound of her father’s rich tenor mocking her night after night after night, chasing away any chance of rest.

Her arm throbs along the old break. Whenever she looks down, she half expects to see handprints.

It’s another thing she’ll never be able to explain to Matt now, the way religion terrifies her. She walks past his church every day on her way to the office. It’s old, and Catholic; the waft of incense from the doorway is nothing like the plaster and pine smell of her father’s church, but it’s enough to make her sick, every time.

Sometimes she can hear singing.

She swallows down bile and walks faster, trying not to let guilt eat her alive.

Between the news and the memories and the damn hymn, her work starts to suffer. She can’t make sense of the explosion, can’t figure out how all the pieces add up to Matt’s death. She can’t unravel the web, and it eats at her. She loses contact with a source. Misses a deadline.

She’s exhausted, and she looks it. Ellison tells her to take a few personal days—not up for debate, Page—and Liz ducks into her office as she’s packing up her computer. The hug is entirely unexpected; the sob that catches in her throat at Liz gathers her in less so. She can’t remember the last time someone tried to make her feel better like this. Probably Foggy. Probably ages ago.

Work friends, she thinks, Foggy and Matt both flashing through her head like warning signs, but she hugs back anyway.

She tucks the .380 under her pillow that night, the cold lump of it stark and reassuring, a talisman to ward off dreams. It shouldn’t help as much as it does, but she’s too exhausted to care.

Maybe this is how Frank feels: soothed and agitated all at once, leaning on the promise of violence to find even a moment’s peace. The thought makes the world seem brittle and sharp, heavy somehow. She closes her eyes and tries not to picture the bruises smudged across Frank’s face, the way his trigger finger tapped out a pattern against his coffee cup, one-two, one-two, one-two-three.

Double tap, double tap, triple tap. It’s simple math: seven shots in the magazine, three bodies dropping dead. Frank knows what he’s doing.

Seven shots in the magazine. One body slumped over in a chair, face a rictus of shock. She had to be sure.

She focuses on the pattern, holding it in her head until the mindless repetition of it blots out the memory of Wesley’s face. Her dreams are filled with gunsmoke and the rattle of handcuffs, punctuated by the wail of sirens, but she sleeps. It’s better than the hymn.

I bid my doubts and fears depart,
oh, I bid my doubts and fears depart.

As soon as her mandatory personal days are up, she goes back to work.

She’s digging into some nasty stories, but that’s par for the course. Industrial runoff in the water, rumors of a new cartel muscling into town. Homeless kids disappearing— maybe a sex trafficking ring? It’s an ocean of shit on her desk every day, but she’s sleeping a bit better now, and she’s damn good at her job. She keeps tabs on Frank as best she can, a side project on top of all the other work she’s doing.

Ellison doesn’t seem to know. If he does, he doesn’t mind enough to say anything, content to let her chase a ghost. Maybe he thinks it’s a story that can’t hurt her. After all, the world believes The Punisher is dead.

For a dead man, Frank does a lot of killing. His trail is easy enough to follow once she starts looking until, abruptly, it isn’t. New York, then Alabama. Juarez. Back to New York. He hunts down the remnants of the gangs, one by one, until every last man is in the ground, and then he just— vanishes.

Karen wastes nearly three weeks looking for him after the final hit before she has to admit there’s no one left to kill. Frank’s mission is over. She should be relieved. Instead, if she’s honest with herself, she’s terrified of what that might mean.

I’m already dead.

Even in her memories, the absolute certainty in his voice hurts. Frank Castle, truth-teller. Frank Castle, murderer. Frank Castle, dead man.

He was talking about his heart, buried six feet under in a goddamn box. All the best parts of him—Maria and Lisa and Frank Jr.—shot dead and laid to rest, nothing but darkness and dirt. Just a shell left above ground.

It was a metaphor, as dark and brutal and unbearably painful as the rest of him. He’s been in the wind for eight months. Nearly a year.

She’s afraid it isn’t a metaphor anymore.

She’s afraid, until she’s isn’t.

Karen goes back to work early the next day, too keyed-up to sleep, too acutely aware of her empty apartment to stay home.

It’s good to see you.

The tiny foyer feels cavernous without his shoulders to fill up the space. Even alive, Frank is one hell of a ghost.

The research is easy enough, despite the snag with the missing article. Ellison has a soft spot for her, one she exploits with delicate efficiency. They both know what she’s doing, but she’s in Ben’s office for a reason.

Once she gets ahold of the article, it doesn’t take long to verify Micro’s story. She gathers up her research and waves Liz away when she pokes her head in to ask about coffee.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” she says. Liz gives her a concerned glance but doesn’t push. Jesus, what she wouldn’t give for someone to push.

She goes to a shitty diner instead of a café and intentionally conjures up the memory of the last time she was in a little hole in the wall like this. It makes her shake, even though the incident was months ago, and she was never actually in danger— she was safe. Still, she can’t help it. Even clenched around the menu, her fingers are trembling badly enough that the waitress notices.

Tanya reeks of hairspray and cigarette smoke, but she gives Karen a gentle pat on the back and a free mug of tea. The packet is old, the tea watery and nearly tasteless. There’s a generous drizzle of honey settling in golden swirls at the bottom of the cup. It’s kind.

She appreciates it; she doesn’t think she could stomach any coffee.

Hands curled around her tea, she walks herself through the violence, point by point. Hit by hit, bullet by bullet. She gets to the end—pools of blood on cheap linoleum—and doesn’t stop there. Face it, she tells herself. Stop running. Remembers the sharp crack of her arm breaking, the jab of recoil from the .380 she threw in the river. Thinks of the one tucked carefully into her purse.

By the time the mug is empty she isn’t shaking anymore. There’s an address waiting in her voicemail, and she’s made her choice.

Frank meets her by the water. It’s picturesque. Romantic, even, a distant part of her mind catalogues. She thinks of white roses on her windowsill, the way Frank’s always seen her, all her fear and her anger and her desperate desire to do some good. The care he takes with everything he does, violent or gentle.

He smelled like cordite and roses when she hugged him.

She gives him the information. It should feel dangerous. It should scare the shit out of her, getting involved like this. He’s a killer. He belongs in jail. She’s been chasing him for a year, and nothing about that has changed.

“Just be careful,” she tells him instead, and tries not to ache when he doesn’t respond.

Maybe she’s the thing that’s changed.

Here’s the thing: Frank’s never lied to her. Never pretended to be anything other than what he is. In the end, that matters more to her than the violence.

“I will come for you.”

Lewis Wilson’s breath is frantic in her ear, staccato and manic. Her own heart is no better, thudding against her ribs, heavy, relentless. It’s easy to say you’re done with fear before you end up plastered against a suicide bomber. She can hear air whistling in and out of her mouth in useless, wheezy gasps, making her dizzy. She can’t afford to be lightheaded, she’s been telling herself that since he grabbed her, she has to be ready to move—

Adrenaline, panic, a dead man’s switch, a fucking bomb, and five words from Frank are all it takes for her to remember how to breathe.

The elevator doors close in slow motion. She doesn’t look away from Frank, and he keeps his eyes on her, dark and steady and sure. It’s a promise. She can hear gunfire as soon as the door closes, and a sound like Frank yelling, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t lie. He’s never broken his word to her before. The hospital, the diner, the fucking cabin. Frank is brutally honest, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

That honesty is why she spent a year looking for him, why she gave him Lieberman’s name. Why she hugged him and held on, breathing in gunpowder and flowers, savoring the sheer warmth of him, alive, alive, alive.

If he says he’ll come, she believes him.

She sucks in a breath, as deep as she dares with Wilson’s arm still around her. In, out. The gunfire is distant now, the whine of the elevator drowning out any trace of Frank’s fight to reach her. Another deep breath. In, out. Not dizzy anymore. Wilson shuffles her out into the kitchen, and in the gleam of the stainless steel, she can see his hand on the switch. It’s shaking.

Karen looks away and keeps breathing, holding tight to the memory of Frank’s voice.

I will come for you.

Frank doesn’t lie.

He makes it. Battered, bleeding from a head wound, limping, arm hanging loose like he’s dislocated his shoulder somehow, but he’s here.

Her heart’s still pounding, adrenaline flooding through her in huge, awful waves, but this isn’t her first rodeo. Her hands are steady when she reaches for the wires, scrabbles for the gun in her purse, pushes away from Wilson and toward Frank.

Please no, is all she can think, please and then, Frank—

“Go to your God like a soldier—”

—the blast is a small flash of hell. Heat, sound, furious pressure. The smell of blood and cooked meat. Her throat works, trying to gag, and instead, all she can do is moan.

Her lungs are burning. Her chest aches, wind knocked out of her when she hit the floor. She rolls to the side, reaches for Frank, tries to pull in a breath. Tries not to think about the taste.

“Hey,” he says, hand coming up to cradle her face, huge and gentle. “You okay?”

There’s a piece of shrapnel buried in the meat of his bicep. Gore all over the stainless steel. A shell casing rattling around somewhere inside her purse, cops waiting for them outside.

They don’t lie to each other.

“Yeah.”

He rests his forehead against hers for one heartbeat, two. It’s quiet. Just his breath, hers, slow and ragged as he draws peace from her like a well. Then Frank pulls himself away, and it takes everything she has left not to reach for him, draw him back in, hold him close. Hold him safe.

“Take care,” he says, and hoists himself up. She can hear his shoulder crunching.

They don’t lie to each other. She bites back all the things she can’t say to him, all the questions he can’t answer, because they don’t lie to each other. She doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. If she’ll see him again.

They don’t lie to each other.

Alone in the elevator, that’s a thin comfort at best.

It takes a while for the smoke to clear. When she finally makes it back to the office after hours of police questioning, Liz is waiting to read her the riot act.

“What the hell, Karen? A routine interview and you somehow managed to end up dealing with a suicide bomber?” Her voice is shriller than she’s ever heard it, but Liz follows up the yelling with another hug. “Do you need a place to say tonight? I know Jiya would be okay with you crashing on our couch if you don’t want to be alone after all this.”

She should probably stop calling Liz a work friend.

“No, no,” she says, pushing her hair out of her eyes, wincing a little when she brushes against one of the cuts on her forehead. The paramedics cleaned her up before she was allowed to leave the scene, but the painkillers haven’t kicked in yet.

She shoves the memory of shrapnel away. Frank’s in the wind again. He’ll be fine.

“I think I’m gonna stay here for a while. Someone’s gotta cover this whole...thing.”

“Nope,” Ellison says from somewhere behind her. Liz may have beaten him to it, but he’s clearly been waiting to lecture her. He pins her with a hard look. “Someone will cover this story, but it sure as hell won’t be you.”

“I was there—”

“And that’s why you’re not doing it. You’re all banged up, Karen, and from what the police tell me, you were taken hostage not just once but twice today.” He refrains from saying anything about how Karen seems to keep getting tangled up with The Punisher. Instead, he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, like the whole thing is giving him a headache. “I’m glad you’re okay. Now go home and get some rest.”

She doesn’t want to go back to her apartment. She let Frank in once, and the dimensions have been wrong ever since. Too big, too empty.

Still, Ellison’s grimace is firmly in place; no wheedling her way out of this decision. She turns back to Liz.

“You’re sure Jiya won’t mind?”

Liz shakes her head and gives her a genuine smile, and Karen’s caught in a moment of sheer disbelief, the loneliness that Frank left behind crashing up against the unexpected warmth of Liz’s friendship. She stands there for a long moment, dumbstruck, while Liz starts gathering up her things. She doesn’t deserve this. Still, the loneliness ebbs by the time they hit the parking lot.

In its place, the afternoon flickers through her mind like a movie playing at double speed, little flashes of action that seem too real to be anything but fake. The smoke. Ori running. Wilson’s breath against her neck. The ache in Frank’s eyes before he hefted himself through the access hatch. The softness in them.

She all but collapses into the passenger seat, leaning her head against the window and listening to Liz call her girlfriend. That’s solid enough to hold on to. Jiya’s going to order some Thai food and make sure the couch is made up.

“You good with Thai, Karen?”

The smile she pastes on is tired, but real. “Thai sounds great.”

She can start picking up the pieces tomorrow. For now, she’s not alone.

She wakes up in the darkness of an unfamiliar apartment with a scream clawing at the back of her throat. Dizzy, disoriented, she reaches for the .380 and nearly cries when she comes up empty.

Calm down, she tells herself, trying to place why she’s so panicked, why she feels as if she’s on the verge of shattering into pieces.

It’s quiet. Slowly, the room starts to make sense. She’s at Liz and Jiya’s. The dull pain in her forehead is that cut, open again and slowly oozing blood.

The bomb. The elevator. Her finger on the trigger, yanking on the wire—

The green glow of the microwave clock, just visible from the couch, reads 2:49.

Four hours or so; more sleep than she was expecting, but there’s no chance she’ll get any more tonight.

A quick look at Twitter, the various news apps, even the TV—volume muted so she doesn’t disturb anyone—does nothing to settle her. There’s no new information about Frank, just an endless cycle of that dashcam photo, talking heads rehashing his brutal crusade against the gangs, speculating about how he got to Wilson.

She changes the channel, once, twice, again and again until she lands on something that doesn’t make her blood boil. An infomercial. It’s an anti-aging miracle! The text scrolling across the bottom of the screen makes her bite her lip, smothering a vaguely hysterical laugh.

Without the sound on to grate against her nerves, the ad is easy enough to tune out. It loses all the weirdly captivating annoyance that seems to define infomercials. Silent, it’s just light and nonsense, flickering against the darkness of the living room.

No news is good news. It means he’s still out there, hopefully getting stitched up. Getting his shoulder fixed. No news is good news, but beyond the memory of her own panic, of the ugliness in the kitchen, all she can see is Frank and his pain.

He put himself through hell to get to her, and she doesn’t— fuck, she doesn’t even know if he’s okay.

It’s different than any of his other vanishing acts. Her mind runs through the catalogue of his injuries, relentless. Head wound. Dislocated shoulder. Something wrong with his legs, his back maybe. He was limping.

He— he trembled when he held that gun to her. Magazine tucked into his pocket, no chance he’d hurt her, and still, it felt like it was killing him. All the pain, all the blood it took to get to her, and that’s what made him shake.

She can’t help it. She checks the news again, refreshes Twitter. Thinks about calling Ellison, then thinks better of it. She settles back against the couch, straightening out the twisted mess of blankets her nightmare left behind. She’s patient: if something pops about Frank, about Madani or Lieberman or any other part of what’s shaping up to be a truly horrific story, she’ll know about it.

The infomercial is still going, silent and ridiculous, painfully surreal.

Morning is a long time coming.

She’s eleven and scrubbing her own blood out of the carpet. She’s twenty-eight and scrubbing her own blood out of her blouse. Cold water and elbow grease: works every time.

She could throw the shirt away, but it’s salvageable. Matt is dead and Foggy’s a stranger and Frank is a ghost again. Alone in her apartment, standing over the sink in the dim light of her empty kitchen, it’s suddenly very important that she get the blood out.

There’s a carton of leftover curry in the fridge, but she couldn’t hide with Liz and Jiya forever. The loneliness was waiting for her as soon as she walked back through the door, and the fragile, shatterglass feeling never went away in the first place.

Cable news is still stuck debating how The Punisher radicalized Lewis Wilson. The roses on her coffee table are starting to wilt.

If she can salvage the shirt, she can salvage something from this mess. Find Frank. Figure out why the hell Homeland is gunning so hard for him, how Billy Russo fits into all of this. Reconnect with Foggy, maybe.

Thank you, sweetheart.

The blood washes clean.

She wears the blouse to the office the day she gets back, the blue of it as vivid as ever. Liz asks her where she gets her dry cleaning done, and Karen can’t help it. She bursts out laughing, loud and raucous, just the faintest tinge of hysteria to it. After a startled beat, Liz joins in.

The smile vanishes as soon as she shuts the door to her office; no levity now, just brittle determination. She starts digging. Lieberman, Homeland, NYPD— someone has to know where Frank is. If he’s alive. If he’s okay.

All she has to do is find him.

Instead, she dreams the past:

He was sixteen.

He was sixteen, and drunk, and he had a black eye.

It was easy enough for the police to explain away the accident. Under the influence, impaired vision. A younger driver on an icy Vermont road. A terrible, tragic accident.

She went to the funeral with her arm in a cast, off-white, stark and ugly against the black of her dress. She listened to an unfamiliar voice give the sermon, her father sitting beside her instead of up at the pulpit, and tried not to think about fear, or liquid courage, or how sixteen and terrified felt.

Nineteen didn’t feel much better.

She wakes up cold, clammy with sweat, mouth dry with fear, and thinks about how far she’s come and how little it matters.

New York is not Fagan Corners. Twenty-eight is not nineteen. The dreams don’t care.

More than anything, she wants to stop being afraid.

Pieces.

That’s all she can find. She works for weeks to dig up a scrap here, a detail there, and she’s still left with more questions than answers.

There’s a shootout by an old warehouse, then a massacre that gets quietly cleaned up by men in suits. She’s got even odds on CIA and DHS. David Lieberman’s family vanishes, then reappears, and then the man himself comes back from the dead. Everything is so goddamn hush-hush that it’s difficult to piece together even the bones of a timeline. The only thing that stands out vivid and clear is the carousel.

The police worked with Homeland to keep the incident from the public, but Karen knows Frank. When the carousel is mysteriously vandalized the same night that the newly-minted ‘dangerous fugitive’ Billy Russo is apprehended, she zeroes in on it. Agent Madani turns up at the same hospital as Russo, both of them under DHS and police protection, and that’s all the confirmation she needs.

Frank’s military file is sealed, but she still has access to some of the documents from the trial. Billy Russo was a name that popped from his time in Force Recon. A close friend, possible character witness. They never called on him.

Russo’s file is sealed, same as Frank’s, but something about it doesn’t add up. He’s in some of the photos she salvaged from the Castle house— before. Yet, the way he attacked Frank after the shit with Wilson...no one who actually knew him would buy Frank Castle, domestic terrorist. And the carousel. She can’t prove it, but Russo was admitted to Metro General by the same doctor who admitted Madani. He was there. He was involved.

An ugly sort of rage starts to build in her chest at the realization. The only explanation that makes that any sense is that Russo sold him out somehow. That kind of betrayal— she can’t think about what it would do to Frank. She just can’t.

She shelves the Russo issue. She’s stonewalled as soon as she tries to get access to Madani, but a pair of teenagers pop in the sole copy of the police report that manages to escape Homeland’s grasp. Per Ellison: god fucking bless bureaucratic redundancies. The kids are shaken up, terrified into silence by the threat of federal indictments if they talk to the media, but she promises them she’s not after the info for a story.

“Please,” she says. “I’m looking for— I’m looking for a friend. I need to know if—” she takes a deep breath, hopes like hell she’s not making a mistake, “If The Punisher was there. If he’s alright.”

“He cut us down,” the girl admits, voice small but determined. “The other man—Billy, I think—he had us strung up, and he shot—” she stops there, choking on memories of horror.

The boy takes over, walking her through the firefight. He breaks off, struggling for words to describe what happened after Frank and Russo switched to hand to hand, but his expression turns fierce.

“It was awful, but I don’t care. The Punisher, Castle, whatever you want to call him. Your friend. He saved us. Cut us down, tried to take care of that woman. He could have left, but he didn’t. He’s not— not quite what people think he is.”

“So he’s alive?”

“Last we saw of him,” the kid confirms. “The police took him. I think he went to the hospital, but they shoved him into a squad car. We were in an ambulance.”

She can’t disguise the naked relief on her face, and that seems to reassure them more than anything that she won’t get them in trouble. She thanks them profusely and slips away as they huddle together, clearly not over whatever they saw that night. The information doesn’t tell her anything about where Frank might be, but she doesn’t care. He’s alive.

He’s alive.

Try as she might, there’s no way to find out what happened to him afterward, whether he’s in custody somewhere, if he’ll ever see the light of day again, but it’s enough to pin her hopes on. Madani didn’t take him down. Whatever bone Russo had to pick with Frank, he didn’t kill him.

Micro, Frank, Russo, Madani, they’re all connected to each through something bigger, something ugly. That much is obvious; she just doesn’t have any details, no way to pin down exactly what it is.

Another fruitless try at Madani, and then she goes back to the Russo angle. It was swamped by the blistering relief that Frank left the park alive, but something about the kid’s description of the events at the carousel doesn’t sit right. She burns another favor from a source at Metro-General to get a look at the medical report, pre-op photos included, and once she has the file open, it takes a concerted effort not to vomit.

It was awful, but I don’t care.

Hand over her mouth, she tries to remember that Frank has a code. He’s brutal within defined limits. There’s a reason behind what he did to Russo, something darker than insults on a shitty news segment.

She fights down another surge of bile. She made her choice. She gave him Lieberman’s name. Let herself care.

Eyes open, sweetheart, her memories say. Don’t look away.

“I’m not,” she snaps back, words sharp in the silence of the records room. The ghosts can’t hear her, but it feels good to say it.

Karen pulls her hand away from her mouth and takes another deliberate look at the pictures before she closes the file. She doesn’t have all the facts, but she needs to remember this. There’s a burning certainty in her gut that tells her Frank had a good reason, but she needs to know for certain. Needs to hear it from him, not thirdhand from photos she’s bribed out of an overworked nurse.

She can’t get to Madani right now, that much is clear. Short of harassing the Liebermans to see if Frank got the same clean slate Micro apparently did, there’s nothing else she can do. If Frank’s alive, if he’s free, all that’s left is to wait for him to come in out of the cold.

If— when he does, she’ll ask him about Billy Russo.

She catches a cab back from Metro-General, steadfastly refusing to think about after. Her apartment is empty; she kicks off her heels, drops her coat on the couch, and lets herself just breathe for a moment.

In, out. Then she gets up. Waters the roses, moves them from the coffee table back to the windowsill.

Settles in to wait.

The news cycle finally gets tired of The Punisher and moves on to other stories. Liz invites her over for Friendsgiving. Karen spends the day running down a source, but she makes sure to meet them for drinks that weekend.

The roses are hanging on.

Her brother’s birthday comes and goes. The city slides deeper into winter, and her dreams turn ugly, tinged with old violence. The hymn comes back.

He’d be twenty-five.

She has to do something, so she goes out and liberates an old police scanner from a very questionable pawnshop, falls asleep listening to the low crackle of it when the memories are too much to handle. It should make the dreams worse, but instead, it turns them to static, formless and blurry. No news is good news; there’s comfort to be found in radio silence.

If she tells herself that lie often enough, maybe someday she’ll believe it.

The Bulletin breaks the industrial runoff story. It runs under her byline, nearly identical to the exposé Ben wrote years ago. Ellison gives her a thin smile as it goes to print, equal parts proud and cynical, sick to death of the way the city never seems to change.

There’s snow in the forecast. She’s never had much of a green thumb, but she babies the roses as best she can, wraps the pot in a tea towel so it can stay near the window even as the temperature dips below freezing.

It’s been nearly a month. She’s still waiting.

New York doesn’t care about snow.

The city doesn’t fall quiet the way Fagan Corners did, hushed and holding its breath under a soft layer of white. Instead, sirens keep screaming and taxies keep honking. Plows rumble out and people complain about the slush and the ice and the way the chemical salt eats away at everything it touches.

Karen hasn’t been back to Vermont in nearly a decade. Still, she can’t help but stop for a moment when it first starts snowing.

The pause lasts long enough that her screen goes dark, laptop slipping into sleep mode. It’s late. The piece she’s working on isn’t due tomorrow. She puts the computer aside without too much guilt, exhausted enough to call it a night.

The roses are in the window. They’re beautiful against the darkness beyond the glass, thick flakes shivering down from the sky behind them, illuminated in the glow of the streetlights, white and white touched with gold.

Something about the scene reminds her of a painting. One she saw in college, maybe. Turner? Whistler? Some kind of oil painting, deep and rich and a little ragged. She huffs out a laugh. It’s a cheap pot of flowers sitting in front of a window she could probably stand to clean. There’s a cab horn blaring outside. If she’s tired enough to think of nineteenth-century art when she looks out her own damn window, it’s well past time to try and sleep.

Flights of fancy aside, she’s not too tired to flinch when her cell phone rings, shrill and startling in the relative quiet of the apartment. Caller unknown. That’s not unusual; plenty of sources call her on burner phones.

“Hello?”

“You hung on to the roses.”

It’s not a source.

“Frank?”

“It’s Pete, now. Got the papers from Homeland and everything. But yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

His voice is— it’s good to hear his voice. Frank’s alive. She closes her eyes and lets the sound of it wash over her, holding onto it. It’s low and gravelled like his voice always is, but some of the edge is gone. He sounds rested. God, she wants that for him. He deserves to rest.

“It’s good to hear from you, Frank.” She pauses. Takes a breath, tries to shore up her own voice, suddenly shaky. Every scrap of information she found made it seem like he got out alive, but she didn’t know. He’s been in someone’s crosshairs for as long as she’s known him. The government. Criminals and police. The military, maybe.

She’s been afraid a body would surface: Frank Castle, dead for real this time. Afraid one wouldn’t, story buried as deep as his bones.

Karen clears throat, tries again. “It’s been a while.”

“Couple months. Had to let things die down.”

“Give your beard time to grow back?”

He laughs, and the warmth of it spills through the phone and into her veins, pooling behind her breastbone. It chases away her exhaustion, scatters her worries like motes of dust. Frank’s alive. He’s laughing.

“Somethin’ like that, yeah.” On the other end of the line, she knows he’s grinning. “Listen, Karen. Those roses in the window. You— you got time to talk? Grab coffee?”

Her heart thuds, anxious to see him. “Right now?”

“Tomorrow, maybe? That is, if you’re not too busy taking down a CEO or busting up a cartel, I don’t know, something else for that paper of yours.”

She’s smiling too. “You’ve been reading my articles?”

“Maybe. Hard to miss ‘em, big front page stories like that. Tomorrow?”

She’s got nothing on the docket that she can’t reschedule. Even if she did, she’d say yes. “Tomorrow sounds good.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” There’s something achingly soft in his voice. She half-expects to look up and see him in the room, eyes wry, shoulders filling up all the empty space. Slotting into place like a puzzle piece. “Take care.”

“You too, Frank.”

There’s a faint beep as the call disconnects and then she’s alone again, staring blankly at the window with a smile lingering at the corner of her mouth. She’s not tired at all anymore.

The roses still look like a painting.

He calls her just before lunch. She’s in her office but the door is open and Liz is probably going to drop by at some point. It’s a genuine fucking struggle to keep her voice from turning unacceptably fond as she agrees to meet him at a nearby diner.

It’s not far; ten, maybe fifteen minutes away. A little hole in the wall, the same one she went to before she gave him the information on Micro, though he doesn’t know that. Most of the snow is already gone. She doesn’t bother with a cab, just walks carefully, resigned to the slush and salt, splattering her shoes and turning the sidewalks gritty.

Frank’s waiting for her when she gets there, tucked away in a booth toward the back. He stands up as she approaches, whole and solid and here, and all her careful reserve goes up in smoke. Something in her face must give it away, because he opens his arms and she hurries the last few steps, practically running. She crashes right into him, folding herself into a hug just this side of desperate.

He’s warm. The flannel of his shirt is soft against her cheek, and he smells like coffee and detergent. No gunpowder. She holds on long enough that people are probably starting to stare, but it doesn’t matter. Frank doesn’t pull away, arms wrapped as tight around her as hers are around him.

They stay like that for a long time. When she finally steps back, the desperation easing into relief, he’s grinning at her, familiar and crooked, somehow sly and self-deprecating at the same time.

“Woulda visited sooner if I’d known you were gonna make a scene,” he teases.

“Shut up, Frank.”

She takes off her coat and settles into the booth as he signals to the waitress for some menus. She should probably open one, figure out what the hell she’s eating for lunch, but all she can seem to do is stare at Frank.

For all the jokes about the hipster beard, he’s clean-shaven. His hair is still in that high military fade, but he’s let it grow a bit. Still short on the sides, but starting to curl on the top. It should look ridiculous; instead, it’s weirdly endearing. She wants to run her hands through it, touch the fresh scar over his ear that was still bleeding when she saw him last.

His face is clear of bruises. The shadows under his eyes are still there, but lighter than she’s ever seen them. He looks good.

She wants to hug him again. Instead, she orders a sandwich when the waitress comes by, and wraps her hands around her coffee cup so she won’t give in to the urge to reach for him.

“So,” she says. “You wanted to talk?”

The grin fades, his face turning serious.

“Yeah. Figured you’d want some answers.” He doesn’t smile, but there’s a brief flash of humor in his eyes. “You’ll go hunting them down eventually, so I might as well save us both the trouble and just tell you.”

“Frank, you don’t have to tell me—

“It’s fine,” he interrupts her. “You’ve always— you helped. I wouldn’t have found Micro without you, and this shit’s ugly, but you deserve to know. You shouldn’t have to dig for it.”

The diner is quiet, just the scrape of utensils on plates, the sizzle of grease in the kitchen. The waitress is behind the counter, and the booths near them are empty. Still, his voice is careful when he starts talking. Unhurried, but hushed.

He doesn’t tell her everything, but he tells her enough. He gives her a rough sketch of what happened after the hotel, filling in the pieces she couldn’t find. He mentions a video, a conspiracy. Gives her a name.

Not everything, but enough.

She knew there was more to his family’s death than just gangs, just Schoonover. Too many coincidences, too much carnage to be anything but a smokescreen. Still, the framework he’s laying out—the architecture of why his life was torn apart—is devastating.

“It was some ugly shit from Afghanistan,” he tells her. “Shit that followed me home, wouldn’t stay buried.” His voice is steady, but worn. His fingers start tapping out that rhythm, one-two, one-two— before he flexes his hand, forces himself to stop.

Better, but never whole.

Just another body, he says, like a quote. Like an epitaph. Clinical, as though the heart’s been torn clean out of him, because it has.

He’s quiet now. Seeing their faces, living that last moment in the park. Carousel whirling, Maria and Lisa and Junior, his family alive and smiling.

She doesn’t push for more.

The waitress comes by with their food. They let the silence stretch out between them; Frank picks at his eggs, makes a face like they’re not done quite the way he wanted them. The normalcy of it is surreal.

Karen starts in on her sandwich, turning the information over in her mind. She’s good at her job. Frank knows that. He’s read her articles, watched her dig into the dirt and guts and blood of the city and come up with the truth. He came to her to find Micro. He knows he’s handing her what she needs to find out the whole, unvarnished story. A name, some facts, the skeleton of what he was dealing with— she’s done more with less.

Frank’s never been afraid of the truth. He knows she’ll find it, if and when she needs to. Anything he isn’t telling her, he isn’t avoiding because he doesn’t want her to know. Maybe for once, he’s trying to be gentle with himself.

The thought sends her hands back to her coffee cup, gripping it like a lifeline. There’s no denying that she wants to know everything; that hunger in her bones, the one that refuses to quit once she’s caught wind of a story, no matter how dark or ugly it ends up being, is why she’s such a damn good reporter. She does her best to tamp it down. She wants to know, but it doesn’t have to be now.

The only loose end she can’t quite make herself ignore is Russo. The pre-op photos swim across her vision; again, she has to force down a momentary surge of bile.

Frank hasn’t mentioned him. She could ask.

She should ask, but then his frown deepens and he reaches for the hot sauce, closer to her side of the table than his. Abruptly, she doesn’t want to hear any more. He’s talked enough for today: Russo can wait. Right now, she’ll settle for knowing his ghosts are well and truly ghosts now, nothing else leaping out of his past to ravage him. She catches his wrist in a loose grip. It’s unintentionally awkward, their hands suspended over the table, Frank still holding the bottle.

“You holdin’ the Tabasco hostage, ma’am?”

Her cheeks burn, but she doesn’t let go. He could pull away. He doesn’t.

“Thank you for telling me, Frank. For trusting me with this.”

He lingers in her grip a moment, then tugs gently. She lets him go. He douses his eggs in hot sauce and puts the bottle back down before he meets her gaze.

“I trust you,” he says simply. It should have the air of a confession, something heavy and profound. Instead, it just sounds like a fact, something everyone knows. The sky is blue. Birds fly south. He trusts her.

The rest of the meal is quiet, but it isn’t a fraught sort of silence. They talk a little bit about insignificant things—the forecast, the music playing on the old radio behind the counter, the quality of the coffee—but mostly they just soak each other in. They’re both here. They’re both okay.

It’s good. She says as much as she’s getting ready to leave, lunch break nearly over.

“What?” he says, “Shootin’ the shit with me over bad coffee?”

“Hey, you’re the one who chose the diner. But yeah. I’m glad you’re okay.” Then, because she can’t not say it, “I’ve missed you.”

It’s too sincere by half. She expects another awkward moment, another pause, but it doesn’t come. There’s no hesitation in his reply.

“I missed you too, Karen.”

The sky is blue. Birds fly south.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, biting her lip to hide a smile as she shrugs into her coat. It’s useless.

“Yes ma’am,” he replies, crooked grin back on his face.

The waitress looks up as she heads to the door. Now that Frank isn’t the sole focus of her attention, she recognizes her— it’s Tanya.

“Good to see you feeling better, honey,” she says.

“Thanks,” Karen tells her. “I am. The tea helped.”

“Better than the coffee around here,” Tanya says, letting out a raspy smoker’s laugh.

Karen doesn’t need to turn around to know Frank’s making another face. Tanya must catch it: a peal of laughter follows her out the door and into the salt and slush of the street.

She walks back to her office like that, grinning the whole way.

Her dreams taper off.

The snow sticks around, more tenacious this year than it was last winter. She loses two pairs of tights to the onslaught of road salt but keeps wearing skirts anyway just on principle.

Ellison shakes his head and tells her if she wants to freeze to death that’s her prerogative. He’s bundled up in multiple sweaters, grumpy as hell but unwilling to turn up the heat. She can’t decide whether it’s winter masochism or if this is some latent Scrooge-like tendency she’ll have to put up with all winter. Maybe a little bit of both: he wasn’t nearly this bad about the air conditioning.

The Rangers are clinging to a playoff spot by the skin of their teeth. Karen’s trying to be a better friend; she checks the standing a few times a week, watches the odd highlight and struggles to track the puck, follows the team account on Twitter. It makes Liz grin. She kidnaps Karen from the office one evening and drags her out to MSG, fighting traffic to meet up with Jiya and make it there in time for puck drop.

It’s an experience. She and Jiya spend more time watching Liz yell than they do watching the actual game. In between bouts of shouting, Karen drinks some of the Garden’s ridiculously expensive beer and chants along with the crowd whenever the goalie—the King, Liz informs her seriously—makes a particularly flashy save.

The Blueshirts manage to eke out a win. Afterward, she and Jiya get to watch Liz ask the coach uncomfortable questions about the team’s defensive pairings and depth at center. Most of the nuance from the media scrum goes over her head, but it’s a nice change of pace, getting to see journalism that doesn’t involve corruption and conspiracy. No dead bodies, even if at one point it does look like the coach is trying to set Liz on fire with his mind.

“Oh please,” Liz says cheerfully when she mentions it, “he’s not nearly as bad as Torts.”

“Torts?”

“Do not get her started,” Jiya interjects, rolling her eyes.

“At this point, I think I’m afraid to ask.”

It’s fun. Refreshing, even if a good eighty percent of the hockey references are still lost on her. Hanging out like this is simple and uncomplicated, but maybe that’s what she needs. It’s been a long time since things were simple. Before Nelson & Murdock. Before New York, even. For a long time, she couldn’t picture this kind of happiness. For a long time, she wasn’t sure she deserved it.

Crime beats and Rangers games didn’t exactly figure prominently when she dreamed of escaping to the city, but it doesn’t matter. She’s here now, and for the most part, she’s content. She’s doing her best to savor it.

She tells Frank about the game because that’s a thing they do now. They talk. Sometimes over coffee, meeting for an hour or two at different diners when she can spare the time away from the Bulletin. He always picks where to meet. Some places they go back to, others they only hit the once. She suspects coffee is to blame. He takes it black, and very seriously; the look on his face the first time she orders decaf is priceless.

Other times they talk on the phone, easy bullshit about her work, about Liz and Jiya and the Liebermans, about whatever book he’s reading. How group’s going. If she’s getting any rest.

There are holes in their conversations, dark spaces neither of them touch. His family, hers. Matt. The way they left things in the elevator, broken and a little desperate, the moment where it would have been so easy to sway into each other—

Nothing that makes them bleed.

So they talk about other things. East of Eden. The logistics of keeping a dog in the city. The rare puff piece Ellison assigns her. Rangers games, even though Frank’s a football guy through and through.

She still has to curb the impulse to touch him, still has to grip her coffee cup too tight until it passes, but it’s okay.

It’s okay, Karen thinks, listening to Frank hum Springsteen while they wait for their food. The mug is warm against her palms. Frank is smiling.

“C’mon, you can’t tell me you don’t know this song!”

They’ve bled enough; they could use a little peace.

Christmas passes with little fanfare.

The Bulletin gives most of the staff a few days off around the holidays. Liz and Jiya go out of state to visit Jiya’s parents, and Ellison huffs off somewhere warmer. Ohio shouldn’t be more temperate than New York, but that’s 2017 for you.

Frank got an invitation to the Liebermans, she knows that much, but she’s not sure whether or not he takes them up on it. If she had to guess, she’d say no.

She spends the day curled up with a book. There’s a wreath on her door, some fairy lights strung in the window. Mulled wine, too, but that’s more about the wine part than any holiday spirit.

It starts snowing again as late afternoon slides into evening, the sky already dark. No doubt Foggy is making terrible jokes about it being a White Christmas. She summons up the nerve to call him, manages to leave a message this time when it goes to voicemail. She doesn’t think about Matt.

Carolers come and go on the street outside, but it’s easy enough to tune them out.

When she turns in for the night, she sleeps without dreams.

The mulled wine was a mistake.

Her mouth tastes like cinnamon potpourri and regret when she wakes up, but she drags herself out of bed anyway, determined to dredge something useful from two-day vacation hell.

There’s no word from Frank, but he looms large anyway. She remembers the first few Christmases without her brother with the kind of hard-edged vividness that only grief can bring; panes of broken glass, clear enough to see through, sharp enough to cut.

Nothing makes it easier. Not company, not time.

That’s what stops her from calling, from sending a text, reaching out somehow. She puts her phone down, forces herself to stop looking at it. She’ll do a lot of things for Frank, things he doesn’t like, things he outright disagrees with, but this— this is a line she won’t cross.

She refuses to trespass on the sanctity of his grief.

The phone startles her awake. Three a.m., she reaches for it blearily, squinting against the bright light of the screen until she sees Frank’s number on the display.

She answers with her heart lodged in her throat. There are only a few reasons he’d call her at this hour, and none of them are good.

“Frank?”

“Karen—”

He sounds wrecked.

“What is it? Did something happen? Are you okay?”

There’s a long pause, and her mind barrels straight into panic, flashing through every ugly worry she can think of. He’s hurt. Someone’s dead. Something happened to the Liebermans, someone’s found him and they’ve— she wrenches her thoughts off that track, tries to make herself wait for whatever it is he’s going to say.

“Shit,” he sighs. “Shit, Karen, I’m sorry. It’s nothing like that, nothing bad, just. Curtis told me to call.”

Nothing bad, okay. Okay.

“He told you to call me?” She’s never met Curtis, just knows him through Frank’s stories. Jittery with leftover panic, she can’t make her thoughts cooperate. Why would—

“No, just. Call. When the dreams get bad. Probably meant him, but I just, I just needed to know you were okay.”

His voice is still so ragged, but there’s no shame in it. Just exhaustion, bone-deep, and a grief that goes even deeper. The sound of it chases away her panic, leaves an ache behind.

She hasn’t heard from him since just before the holidays. She sent him a text or two, but didn’t press. This time of year, everything screams family. She doesn’t know what he dreamed, what was bad enough that it pushed him into reaching out for help like this, vulnerable, raw as an exposed nerve. She doesn’t need to.

“I’m okay. I’m fine.”

He goes quiet again. Now that the terror has ebbed, she can focus on the details. How shaky his breathing is, shuddering in and out as he processes the sound of her voice, alive, unharmed. There’s a faint rustling sound in the background. Sheets, maybe? For some reasons all she can picture is a bare cot.

She wonders if his finger is twitching, tapping out that pattern, a pressure valve he no longer has access to. Doesn’t seem to want, anymore.

He still hasn’t said anything.

“Do you want me to stay on the line for a while?” The question comes out soft but steady. She thinks of the warmth of his arms around her in her tiny living room. The elevator, the press of his forehead against hers. How safe she felt beyond the whirl of fear and adrenaline.

She tries to put all of that into her voice: you’re safe, Frank. I’ve got you.

“Yeah,” he says, “if it’s not— yeah.” The relief in his voice floods down the line, strong enough to break her heart.

“I’m here,” she tells him.

They stay like that for a long time, long enough that her eyes start slipping shut. A deep sigh crackles like static over the line, pulling her back from the edge of sleep.

“Thank you, Karen.”

“No need.” She can’t quite keep her voice steady this time. “I know a thing or two about nightmares.”

“I’ll let you go, then. Let you get some rest.”

That’s not—

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t sound sure at all, but before she can say anything else he thanks her again, low and rough and sincere, and then the call disconnects.

Karen Page does not pray. Still, staring down the wrong side of four in the morning, tired and heartsore, she almost wishes she could. She’d ask for a little bit of peace, just enough for Frank to sleep without dreams. But she hasn’t prayed in nearly two decades, so she stares blankly into the darkness of her bedroom, still clutching her phone, and hopes she helped.

She tosses and turns for a while, unsettled and sad, half-afraid to close her eyes, worried she’ll tumble into one of her own dreams. Instead, she falls asleep almost by accident. She blinks awake as her third alarm shrills at her, groggy and disoriented but not quite late for work.

There’s a text from Frank. Sorry about your phone bill.

Abruptly, all she wants to do is hold him. There’s no dismissing the impulse this time, no fighting it down, no pretending it’s just friendship, just relief. There’s caring, and then there’s this: a river that’s been dammed, a lake that wants to pour out, an ocean of feeling built up behind her ribs. The depth is terrifying.

Somewhere between gunshots in a hospital and last night’s phone call, her heart snuck out of her chest and left this mess behind, all ache and tenderness.

Her alarm keeps blaring. She stabs at it until it finally shuts up, then stares at the text for a long moment. She needs to see him again. Just— see that he’s okay. Everything else can wait.

Buy me a cup of coffee or three today and we’re square.

His answer comes back as she’s getting ready to scramble out the door.

None of that decaf shit.

No sir, she texts back as she locks up. She hopes it pulls a grin from him.

She walks to work with her thoughts full of Frank, and not a single goddamn idea of what to do about her own stupid heart.