"…do you mind if we continue this heart-to-heart once we're out of here?"

And then there are things happening all at once, Amy shifting expectantly on her feet as she watches them, that damn door swinging open a second time and bringing Madani back in with it. But the only thing Frank can see in that moment is Karen, Karen dropping her hand from his chest, Karen turning her head, Karen walking away from him for good this time.

Frank hears the soft padding of bare feet across the linoleum, a whisper of fabric that must be her coat, and he stares blankly at nothing in front of him, at all the nothing she's just left in her place, and he takes it all in, shoves it down deep.

He did this. He did this.

Somewhere, vaguely, comes Madani again, a quiet, determined "I have an idea," as she strides over to the cop on the floor. O'Rourke. O'Rourke, his name badge had called him. "Help me turn him around and get these clothes off of him."

Amy's marching past Frank to join her, helpfully wedging her shoe beneath the body and kicking him over with a contemptuous expression. He flops onto his back, Madani already loosening his tie and reaching for the top button.

Amy pauses above her, cringes a little, hesitates just long enough that Frank can't – she's just a kid, for chrissakes, he won't let this—

Before it's even fully registered in him to try and stop her, Karen's suddenly by his side again, purse sliding off of her shoulder as she rests a placating hand on his arm.

It's brief, but Frank feels as though he's moving underwater, everything slowing down to just a breath of space between heartbeats, and it should terrify him (it does – it does), what she can do with one simple touch of her hand.

"Hey," says Karen, but she's looking at Amy, stepping over to her and gently pulling her back a few steps. "I'll take care of it, okay?" and all Frank can think is that he should've kissed her when he had the chance.

"'Kay." Amy looks more relieved than she'd probably ever want to admit. "I'll just go…stand watch," and then she's wheeling that monitor back over to station herself solidly in front of the door, keeping an eye on the hallway, making a show of typing up rubbish with her back turned to them.

The cop's shirt is off, and Karen wordlessly gives it to Frank before bending to undo the belt buckle, Madani with O'Rourke's holster in hand. The pants are last to go, stripped down to the ankles with brutal efficiency, and Frank can only stand there, hating his own uselessness, the too many goddamn steps involved in putting a shirt on without some kind of new pain tearing through his whole body.

"I'll take the head," says Madani.

They're hauling him onto the bed when Frank finally snaps out of it, the sight of Karen's hands wrapped around that asshole's pasty white ankles just about doing him in.

"Wait. Lemme—" He starts forward, but it comes out more like a pathetic sort of shuffle, and Karen boxes him easily out with one clean move of her shoulder.

He nearly collides right into her back, has to brace a hand against the bed railing until his knuckles turn white with the effort of holding himself away from her.

"Don't." She's half-breathless with what he thinks might be anger, all this hell-raising fire and light in her wasted on some piece-of-shit lost cause like him, and he curses himself for it. "Frank, just, don't."

"You – you shouldn't be here. Gonna get yourself hurt."

She looks at him like he's lost his damn mind.

And maybe he has, for all that he sounds like a broken record with her, and maybe, just maybe, he's let her break his mind too.

"I've had worse." Karen pushes the legs toward the center of the bed, grabbing up and rearranging blankets while Madani clears away wires, pulls a bunch of masks from the wall. "I'm not as helpless as you think I am."

"That's not – Karen. You know that's not what this – it's not about that, it's not even a question of that, okay?"

"I can handle it. Trust me." She turns to face him fully, voice hard as fucking steel, but the look that she gives him, that look could bring a man to his knees in so many other damn ways. "I'm going to be needing that hospital gown now."

He shakes his head, throwing a desperate glare in Madani's direction, but she's either gone selectively deaf or become real invested in picking the right-fitting mask for their guy.

Goddamn it, Madani.

Amy's still clacking away at the keyboard, the sound of it seeming to amplify all the silence rather than covering it up.

"By all means, keep taking your time," shrugs Karen. "I doubt the men who want to kill you will care that you have your shirt on backwards."

Frank looks down at his half-assed attempt to get dressed, one hand jammed through the wrong sleeve, the rest of the thing up around his neck where he'd gotten it twisted with the ends of his gown.

"You sure you still don't want my help?" The corner of Karen's mouth goes soft, like she knows she can pull him back from the edge with that smile, and he can't have that, he can't.

It's too dangerous, staying this long with her here, and he can no longer trust that he'll do right by her, if he has to watch her walk away from him again.

Frank looks past her. "Already told you what I want."

He thinks that if she ended him right then, it wouldn't be half of what he deserves.

Instead, she reaches over, gingerly freeing his hand from the railing. "Come on, Frank." Their fingers twine, and if he'd figured out some way before, he sure as shit doesn't know how he's supposed to let her go now. "You don't have to do this alone."

…

Frank wonders, sometimes, what might've happened if he'd done things differently. Bit the goddamn bullet, so to speak – though when it comes to this woman, taking on a more literal form of the phrase is never out of the question as far as he's concerned.

If he'd just. Come out and said it, instead of – caving into the fear. Not the fear of blood, or some measly bullet holes, but of drowning in blue when Karen Page looks at him the way that she does. All that faith, that trusting warmth, that glint of a thing that might just be love in her eyes.

Not of death, but of being brought back. Of holding on. Of letting go.

…

What he should've said was—

…

"Okay."

Karen's expression is firm and unblinking when he finally lifts his gaze back to hers. "Okay?" she says.

"Yeah." He nods, and keeps nodding, breathing out hard through his nose. "Okay."

She doesn't wait for him to change his mind, liberating her hand from his, and that – that wasn't part of the plan, he can't help but think as he tries to find some kind of balance without it – but then both arms are going around his neck, sending him off-kilter again.

She untangles the shirt from his gown before scooping up the rest of the clothes, sliding an arm around his back and carefully urging him forward.

"Bathroom," she says, and he grunts in response, leaning his weight onto his good leg to avoid crushing her with it as he hobbles his way to the door.

But Karen's making it ten kinds of harder for him, her shoulder snug under his arm, that hand of hers pressed tight to his waist and heating his skin through the hospital gown. He clamps down on his jaw so hard that he starts to taste copper, tries not to focus on anything else.

The typing has stopped, and Amy's swinging the bathroom door open for them, biting her lip with a worried expression as he heaves himself off of Karen and collapses into the wall with a groan.

"Kid, you good?" he rasps at her.

She and Karen exchange a look, like this is somehow amusing to them, and Christ this was not what he'd signed up for.

"All right, all right." He shoves himself away from the wall, lurching slightly into the sink for support, but Karen's already right there to steady him, hands closing over his shoulders. He grips her elbows, doesn't let go. "Get this thing off me."

They both glance at Amy, who's still hovering in the doorway, and with a deeply aggrieved sigh she steps obligingly back and releases her hold on the knob.

"It's not like it's anything I haven't seen before, you know," Amy calls through the closing sliver, and Frank blows out an exasperated breath, stealing an occasional glare at the door as if she could feel his aggravation on the other side of it.

He slumps into the sink again as Karen retrieves the pants, rucking one leg down waist to ankle and coaxing his foot up and through.

"Dare I ask what that's all about?"

Frank skims his gaze across the sterile white walls, tripping over cracks in the plaster, some paintings of a vase, and a road leading to nowhere that's hanging slightly askew. Easier, this way, to try and forget what it looks like to have Karen on her knees in front of him. "Better not."

She's gotten the pants over both his legs somehow, despite his complete inability to tell so much as right from left anymore. She's working on tugging them up beneath his gown, her hands making it somewhere mid-thigh when Frank grinds out a rough "Got it, I got this," brushing her aside.

She turns away for the rest, and he can't read her face but he knows her, that stubborn, impenetrable square of her shoulders, the stiffness in her back. He feels like he wants to give her something, anything, like he owes it to her to try after all the trying she's done for him.

So Frank clears his throat, and he tells her, "Kid dug a piece of shrapnel out of my ass and then sewed it back together, day after we met."

He can hear the wan smile in Karen's voice as she picks up the uniform and says, "You sure know how to win them over."

"Guess so."

Frank rotates himself toward the mirror, fumbling around with the zipper without much success. He glances backward every two seconds while she shakes out some wrinkles, like watching her this way is somehow safer when she's not looking back.

"Karen," he says.

"Yeah." She's turning the shirt, reversing the sleeve he'd left inside out.

"Where're your goddamn shoes, Karen?"

"Don't worry about it, Frank," she tells him, and he snorts.

"'M always worrying, with you." The words drop lower and lower, until he can barely hear them over the sound of his own heavy exhale. He shifts his weight around, rolling his shoulders if only to feel the pain in his back sharpen. "Don't you know that by now?"

"Yeah, well." He watches her movements in the mirror, approaching him from behind with her eyes cast down at the shirt in her hands. "I never asked you to."

"I know that. I know."

She reaches around him, sets the tie and uniform onto the sink before turning to unfasten his gown, with an attentiveness that he almost wishes he could save her from – save her by shutting her out, when he's already shown her the ugliest sides of himself and she barely even flinched at him.

The room is quiet when she opens the door to hand Amy the gown, exchanging some brief words before she's closing it again.

He's not looking anymore, but he hears the soft hitch in her breath as she comes back to him, and then he's the one shuddering, blinking hard at the ground when he feels her palm sliding gently over his spine.

"Oh, Frank." She sighs out his name, and he still doesn't know how to look at her, to see on her face how badly he can't seem to quit breaking her heart.

His body's restless, too much always simmering, fighting to rip itself out, but she – the way that she's touching him now, feather-light over every scar and bandaged surface of skin, God he wants to stand still for her, just this once.

But then she's gone, stepping away before he can bring himself to give it a good honest shot, and ain't that always the way, with them?

"Here." She holds out a sleeve, easing it up to his shoulder before switching to the other side. He twists his arm through with a slight wincing groan, shaking his head when Karen looks at him in concern.

"S'okay," he tells her, "keep going," as she folds the collar down over the back of his neck.

"Turn around?"

Frank swerves a little, swaying in place as he faces her. She's so close that breathing's not really an option, not if he wants his head to remain anywhere close to half-sane – he's been here before, with her within reach, and it's becoming harder each time to stay the dead man he keeps claiming to be.

There's nowhere safe to rest his eyes, she's so painfully beautiful to him, and he settles for watching her hands as they work instead, carefully buttoning their way down his shirt.

Her fingers graze skin more than once, light and cool yet still somehow setting his body on fire, and he doesn't bother to hide the change in his breathing, the way that it catches on its way out.

Karen's tucking the hem down into his waistband before he's fully come back to himself, brushing over his stomach and making the muscles there clench. He can feel his heart stumble, jumping straight into his throat when she tugs on both ends of his belt.

Frank tightens his hands on the sink behind him, hard enough to shatter something, and he wonders which of the two will break first.

"Almost there, okay?" Her tone is quiet, reassuring, but there's something underneath it, a hint of exhaustion spreading her thin, and he doesn't miss the way she picks up the tie and then pauses, staring down like it's suddenly foreign to her.

"Hey. Karen. I can…"

But then Karen blinks, and she's recovered, looping it around the back of his neck in one practiced motion. He thinks of Maria, teasing him into an early grave the few times he'd attempted to tie one himself. And then he sees Karen again, her movements short, and studied, like she's done this a thousand times before Frank, and it hits him, just hits him, takes him down more powerfully than any bullet ever could.

He wants to ask her, about all those other thousand times. He wants to ask her, to know her, in all the ways that hadn't seemed crucial until now. Here, in this bathroom, where he could be just some guy, and she's just his girl, getting him dressed before work while coffee brews in the kitchen downstairs.

The thought has him reeling, and he thinks she feels it, too, the could be, the what if. The knowing it can't. The wanting it anyway.

Karen smooths it all out when she's done, adjusts his collar, runs her palms over his shoulders and chest before coming to pause near his rib cage – and then she's ducking her head, fingertips pressing, a small shaky sound coming out of her throat.

God.

He swallows, hard.

Slowly, like something inevitable, Frank leans in the rest of the way, and touches his lips to her forehead.

Something gives out in her shoulders, and she sighs into him, strands of her hair getting caught in his stubble. He reaches for her with both hands, only to find that they're already there, gripping her hips like it's the most natural place for them to be, fistfuls of silk anchoring him there.

He doesn't know how long they stay this way, him falling and falling and pulling her with him – could be forever, and he'd still want more – but Karen's gathering herself again, a deep breath and then she's looking up at him with a tired but steady expression.

She raises her hand, fingers tracing out the path of her gaze. The cut below his lip, the angry color around his eye. She finds the edge of each bruise, every inch of his skin that's been split open, without blinking or backing away.

My girl, he thinks.

Her palm finally settles warmly over the side of his neck, the madness that lives there in his pulse, and still she's close as ever, close enough to cut herself on all these broken, messed up pieces of him.

If she – fuck, if she could just sink her nails into him instead, hard enough to draw blood, for all that it would hurt him less.

"I worry about you too, Frank."

"Yeah." It comes out hoarse, his eyes burning to take her all in, and he doesn't trust himself to speak anymore but still he's got to say it, can't let her walk away thinking he doesn't – that he – "Karen, I…"

His jaw works furiously over the words, breath coming out ragged in his frustration. "I—"

Karen presses her hand to his mouth to silence him.

He drops his forehead back to hers with a shuddering sound, lodging somewhere in his throat. His lips part slightly beneath her touch, and he knows, he knows with a terrible certainty, that when he opens his eyes to gaze down at her, he won't be able to hold anything back from her anymore.

He feels halfway delirious simply from standing there, and then she's looking at him too, lashes growing heavy as her eyes drift down to his mouth, and he's just. Gone.

He moves over her, crowding their bodies together, pushing back with his mouth against the pads of her fingers until her lips are pressed to the other side. He can feel her swallow, the softness of her breathing while his goes deeper, more uneven, and this is it, he thinks, this is – there's no coming back from something like this.

Her fingers slip, catching on his lower lip for one endless second before finally falling away.

He'll never know who makes the first move. Doesn't matter. All that matters is—

…

There are few constancies in his life, and for whatever it's worth to her (he already knows what it means, to him), Karen Page will never not be one of them. Karen, and all the moments she's tested what kind of a man that he is, the moments she's given him chance after chance, the moments he's wanted to kiss her but didn't.

Because he's a coward. And he's the kind of coward who lies to himself about it, claims it's to be the better man and save her when, in a way, he thinks it's because he doesn't want to be the one who gets saved.

He can't kiss Karen and then just – not kiss her again, every day, for the rest of his goddamn life. He can't kiss Karen and think that nothing – not the blood or the bruising or the spray-painted skull – is going to wash out, that nothing will have to change. He knows this. A better man would walk away, for the right reasons this time.

He was never meant to be the better man.

…

Their lips press together, softly, at first. Her fingers are still at the corner of his mouth, thumb cradled beneath his jaw, and there's so much gentleness there that for a moment Frank can't help but take his time, learning all the different ways her lips feel against his, as he kisses her again, and again, and again.

And then her fingertips are curling into his skin, applying just the slightest bit of pressure as her her whole body shifts upward to slide along his, and a groan wracks through him, lips parting over hers with a greater sense of urgency this time.

She makes a noise in the back of her throat that just about destroys him.

He's got his arms wrapped all the way up her back beneath her coat, but he frees one of them now, folding it solidly around her shoulders and cupping the nape of her neck in his hand. The sink digs up against his spine as he hauls her body into his, ignoring all the new fissures of pain splitting his nerve endings open.

Doesn't matter. None of it does, anymore.

He's slanting his mouth over Karen's, going practically sideways as she opens up for him, inviting him in with lips, and teeth, and tongue. He hasn't – Christ he can't remember the last time he felt this kind of hunger, this raw kind of need, he wants her, he wants her – and she wants him, too?

Frank lets out a low growl, the animal in him rising up in his chest, and for this one heady moment his senses take over, devouring every small moan that comes out of her, the sounds their mouths make moving together.

She drags her nails lightly over his scalp, running through the shorter hair in the back before resting both hands around the sides of his neck. There's something sweet about the gesture – tender, despite how he's let himself go, the almost callous way he's surrounded her body with his – and he eases up on the kisses, capturing her upper lip between his instead and slowly working his way over to that beauty mark in the corner.

The look that she gives him, though, when he pulls away for a breath, that look is the furthest from delicate, all fierce and irresistible, dropping warm things in his belly and twisting up his insides with the desire to kiss her again.

You can't. The words pierce his skull like so many daggers, slicing in deep until they've embedded themselves there. You do this and you're both good as lost, you hear me?

Karen deserves – everything, to be everything, to someone.

And he wants – he wants, more than anything, to believe he can be that someone, for her. But he doesn't know how to do any of that outside of this moment, beyond this hospital bathroom, where the rest of the world's waiting to get at him, with him trying to get at them back.

She stays, and Frank could go down in one of two ways – with Karen following him into the fire, or the fire finds its way here, and then they're burning all the same.

"Hey." But his voice is all wrong, still rough with this need, this longing he has to hold onto her, and he clears his throat, tries again. "Karen."

She bites her lip and looks away, like she already knows what he's about to tell her. "Yeah."

"You gotta get out of here, Karen. Go."

He bumps his nose against her cheek, pressing unsteadily into her as she lets out a sigh, sliding her palms back down to his chest. He moves his hand away from her hair, coming to rest over the side of her throat, thumb notching into her collarbone.

"Hey."

She shakes her head, but there's nothing else for her to say, no fight in her left to demand more from him, and that, Frank thinks, might rip him apart more than any other thing she could do.

"Please," he says, barely above a whisper, feeling their breath shake together as he struggles not to move closer, mouth drawn back to hers like some primal instinct, and he hardly knows what he's asking of her anymore.

She could kiss him right now, and he would forget why it was even a question.

He wets his lips, sucks in another hard breath. "Please. Karen."

She closes her eyes, nudging her forehead into his. Breath in, out. Back in again.

Slowly, she lifts her hand, touching her fingers to his mouth one more time. His vision tunnels black for a moment, the ground swooping low and taking everything with it as she pushes herself gently out of his arms.

"It's okay, Frank," she tells him, and he wants to believe her, but doesn't.

…

He'd promised her, once, that he'd never lie to her. He hadn't come right out and said it, but – it was something understood, between them. Over coffee at some run-of-the-mill diner that wouldn't be standing by the end of the day, she'd said to him, halfway to broken herself, "You're honest. You never lie to me."

And she hadn't been wrong about that, until now.

"Okay," he'd told her. Okay. Okay.

"Okay" was such a fucking lie.

…

What he should've said was—

…

"Come on, Frank. You don't have to do this alone."

He looks down at their hands, his fingers gripping her hard, the pale white of her thumb tracing patterns over his red, battered knuckles. Madani's still biding her time, moving pillows around his periphery to obscure O'Rourke's face, while Amy's typing recedes to a kind of dull white noise in the background.

All he sees is Karen. Karen, who would ruin her life, who would throw away her own goddamn after, for him.

Karen, who could tear up his insides simply by looking at him, strip him down to nothing but bone and whatever's left of his soul – and then take his wrecked heart and hold it close to her own, like she can just kiss it all better.

Maybe she could. Maybe she could.

But it wouldn't stop him from getting his blood on her hands.

He'd told her, once, when you find someone with that kind of power to annihilate you, you hold on with two hands, and never let go.

It hadn't been a lie, at the time.

Frank reaches over with his other hand, covering hers where they're joined. Carefully, without letting his gaze leave hers, he loosens her grip. Their fingers snag together, only for a moment, before she takes her hand back, arms crossing, and the distance between them gapes and gapes into an abyss.

What he should've said was—

"I'm not alone, Karen."

She shakes her head at him, lips thinning together. He thinks he's never seen her so angry with him.

Frank makes a jerking motion with his chin. "I think Madani's got it covered, yeah? She can take it from here." He shrugs the uniform off of one shoulder, grasps at the collar and yanks down. His eyes are still fixed on Karen. "Ain't that right, Madani."

"Frank…" sighs Madani, somewhere beside him.

He can't tell if she's trailed off, or if he's just blocked everything out, but after a pause he feels her taking the shirt from him, and that's good, that's—

Karen's the first to look away, her profile unreadable save for the rigid lines of her anger with him, and it's easier, feels almost like cheating somehow, to keep pushing her away when she's already on her way there.

"You need to go now, Karen." The words are thick, and he hopes to Christ she can't hear what's building beneath them, the sting behind his eyes, the way his body's practically trembling to hold everything still.

She doesn't address him, glancing back toward Madani to say, "Five minutes. Does that give you enough time?"

Madani considers this, and replies, "We'll make it work."

Karen nods at her, some understanding passing between them, and then she's tilting her head back at Frank, her expression softening into something resigned. Disappointed, in him.

And he can take it, the hardness, the fury, the fire. He'll burn ten ways to Sunday for her, but he'll never know how to handle her like this, he'll never know, and the thought that he may never get the chance to find out, or even to go down trying—

It should not comfort him as much as it does.

She's always been the braver one.

"Take care, Frank."

And then she's gone.

…

It would've been easier, not knowing. Not kissing her, holding her. Not fooling himself into thinking that for even a second he could do any of these things and survive.

That he could use these hands to pull her closer, and they wouldn't be the same hands to turn around and break her heart right after.

That she could love him and it wouldn't kill him not to say it back.

That after all that, he couldn't still walk away.

…

It would've been easier, but. It wouldn't have made any difference.

Story still ends the same, either way.

…

The room's silent as death when they make their way out of the bathroom. Karen's in front of him, so he can't see her face, but Amy takes one look at them both and swivels around, pinning him down with this strangely devastated expression. Like she'd been holding out hope that things would turn out…not like this.

Maybe he'd hoped for those things, too.

"Here, Frank."

He sways in the doorway, watching Karen reach for the hat propped beside Amy's computer. She stretches briefly onto her toes to place it over his head, exposing the curve of her throat as she does. He goes hot and cold all at once, and he longs to sink his mouth there, taste every last mark on her skin, make her sigh into his body again and again.

Make it mean something.

It already does, she means everything and more to him, and still it means nothing because he'll never know how to tell her.

Karen finishes straightening his hat, rocking slowly back onto her heels. But her hands linger, lightly touching his temples, each cheek in that gentle way that she does, and he clenches his jaw, turning into her palm on a sharp exhale.

His lips graze her hand in not quite a kiss, another deep breath shaking out of him as he gazes into her eyes. She's not asking anything of him, not anymore, but he wants to tell her anyway, tell her all of the batshit hopeless things he's too lost to ever bring himself to say aloud—

"'M sorry, Karen." Feels like he's swallowing pieces of glass. "I want—" But he can't go on, any more than she can go with him. "I do." He whispers the words like a confession. "I do."

"I know." Karen strokes her thumb over his mouth, until his breathing starts to make its way back to something steady again.

She lets go. Both hands.

He's grasping at nothing but air now.

"It's okay, Frank." She would never lie to him. "I know."

—and for now, it has to mean enough.

title taken from the song "from now on" on the greatest showman soundtrack.