It wakes her up in the middle of the night.
She'd been dreaming of Fisk again – the cold hate in his eyes as he towered above her, so sharp he could snap her in two without even moving a finger. During the day, it's easy to remind herself that he's back behind bars where he belongs. That she's safe. That even if that stops being the case, she's still nowhere near helpless; she knows how to take care of herself.
The dreams are always another story.
She squints into the dark of her ceiling, things still trying to take some kind of shape in her mind. There'd been a gun this time, on the table between them. She'd been reaching, only to find her hands suddenly tied back behind her chair…
Karen's dozing off when she hears it again.
Scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch.
It's louder this time, more insistent. Any notion of sleep has now left her, and she sits bolt upright in her bed, ears straining.
It's coming from her window.
She's halfway to the drawer with her gun when the scratching fades, and for a moment there's nothing but wind, and the faint sounds of late-night traffic below. And then—
Mew.
It's clear, and plaintive, and "You've got to be kidding me," Karen groans, throwing on a robe before padding her way over to the windowsill.
There, perched on the other side, with slow-blinking grey orbs and a thick coat of black fur, is a cat staring back at her.
"Okay," says Karen. "Hi, I guess."
She's always been more of a dog person. But the thing is so small and forlorn, it's probably freezing outside, and who can hold her accountable for bad choices made after 2AM anyway, so she unlatches the window and cracks it half-open.
"Do you want to come in or not?" sighs Karen when the cat only sits there and blinks at her some more. "Going once…twice…" She steps away from the window to give it more room to decide. A breeze works its way in, and she shivers, firmly closing the front of her robe.
The cat gazes at her a second longer, and just when Karen's about to give up and call it a night, it slinks a paw inside, patting around as though feeling things out, before leaping onto the floor. One of its hind legs, she notices, is shorter than the others, giving it an odd little sway as it walks, but its movements are otherwise steady, assured.
By the time Karen's closed her window and turned back around, the cat is nowhere to be seen, save for a blur of possible movement near the foot of her coffee table.
"Please, make yourself at home," she speaks into the semi-darkness. There's a faint but unmistakably smug-sounding yowl from the general vicinity of her couch cushions, and Karen trudges back to her own bed, half-hoping that when she wakes up in the morning, this will all have turned out to be some very strange dream.
…
"You got a cat?" asks Matt the next day, and she curses his sense of super-smell, the hint of amusement as he quirks his head in her direction.
"More like the cat got me," grumbles Karen, making a beeline for the kitchenette without bothering to dump her things off at her desk. All the coffee in the world isn't going to wake her up from this nightmare, that apparently she's become one of those people. Those people who give off the impression of owning a cat.
"I tried to get us a cat once," Foggy pipes up. "But Marci said over her dead body, so I decided not to press the issue."
"I would gladly let you take this one off my hands." Karen sips her coffee, leaning into the wall for a moment. "Matt…you seem like a cat person."
Matt's face twitches with a smile. "I don't know whether I should be insulted or flattered."
"Oh, I do," says Foggy helpfully, before turning back to Karen as she treks slowly over to her desk. "Why don't you drop him off at a shelter or something? The cat, I mean. Not Matt. Of course."
"Of course," echoes Matt, with a shake of his head.
"Seriously, though. They could help find him a good home. One that doesn't have to be yours, if you don't want it to be."
"Her," Karen corrects absentmindedly. "It's a her. I think." She sets down her mug, picks up the day's Bulletin that Foggy's made a habit of bringing in for her. She should grab some more bread from the store on her way home. The cat had gone through her last loaf earlier that morning.
"So what do you have against them, anyway?" Matt's thumbing through case files, still looking faintly entertained by the whole situation.
Karen turns to the crime beat section, her old stomping grounds. The headlines rush together, no particular names standing out. She breathes again, and shrugs to Matt, "Nothing against them. They just don't happen to be dogs."
"Fair enough," says Foggy. "Though I had this one cat growing up and sometimes I swear you could not tell the difference."
"They have zero loyalties to anything, apart from themselves. And they'll walk all over you if you let them." She frowns at the memory of trying to shoo the cat back outside that morning, the look of disdain she'd gotten in return before the cat jumped onto her bed and made herself comfortable there.
"Some might call that self-sufficient."
"And I saw a study once suggesting that most cats recognize the sound of their owner's voice over a stranger's, but only ten percent of them actually bother to acknowledge it." Not that she'd planned on naming the thing or testing out any part of this theory.
"Nothing against them, you said?" Matt asks her in an innocent tone.
"You know," says Foggy, "if I were to die suddenly, just keel over in my living room one day, and my cat had to starve – let's say, for argument's sake, that Marci's, I don't know, she actually made good on her threat if I got one – I would not blame it for eventually needing to eat both of our bodies."
"Cats wait on average fewer days than other pets do under those circumstances."
"I thought we were on the same side here, Matt."
"Doesn't matter anyway," groans Karen, dropping her forehead into her hands. "I can't leave her at a shelter. She has this gimpy back leg. Nobody's going to want to take her."
"Shame," Foggy says mildly. "Wonder how this story ends?"
…
She takes the cat to the vet. On the unlikely chance that the cat's been chipped and belongs to someone (she doesn't), and to get that leg checked out while they're at it (healed from a bad break that had never been properly tended to).
She tells herself she'll give it one week, max, to figure something out. Something more permanent, that doesn't involve cat litter strewn all over her bathroom, claw marks on the sides of her couch, and more than one broken glass that she shouldn't have left on the counter.
At least she has an excuse not to think about buying flowers for her windowsill anymore.
Karen tells herself all of this until they've left the vet a second time, with a schedule for catch-up vaccines and a two hundred dollar bill that's telling her otherwise: this cat is now hers, whether she likes it or not.
She's never been more grateful for Matt's heightened senses, when it saves her the trouble of having to admit it out loud. To his credit, he breathes not a word, though she doesn't miss the way his mouth turns up at the corner sometimes when she re-pockets her emergency lint roller, or starts cutting out coupons for Petco in the Bulletin ads.
And Foggy's only comment, after a few weeks of staying silent on the matter: "So when can I come meet your new girl?"
…
They fall into an easy routine.
The cat is the first thing she sees in the morning, sharp little paws kneading relentlessly into the blankets until Karen finally rolls out of bed with a groan. She's stationed by the door when Karen returns from the office every late afternoon – sometimes late evening, depending – winding herself around Karen's legs, tripping her up and loudly asking for food in the same breath.
She'll never admit it, but it's…kind of nice, to have this small ball of comfort, curled warmly beside her at night. Nudging a cold, wet nose in her ear when she falls asleep with the TV still on. Ignoring her, too, on days when she simply can't be bothered, sitting by the window with a prowling gaze on the squirrels and pigeons instead.
It's quiet, and the quiet is something Karen wants so badly to count on. To believe that the noise can be over, that maybe her 'after' can be something as simple as coming home to a stray that's decided it belongs with her there.
The dreams come less frequently now, and it's nice, to be able to sleep through the night again.
Karen still doesn't know what to call her, which appalls Foggy more than anyone else. But none of the things he suggests sound quite right to her, and she keeps stalling, saying she's sure the inspiration will come at some point.
"What are you waiting for?" Matt finally speaks up, without judgment, only a gentle curiosity to his tone, and Karen wishes she knew how to answer him.
…
When his name starts showing up in the papers again, Karen's running late for work. The cat had hurled up a hairband at breakfast, and as an apology for showing up probably smelling like vomit, Karen had grabbed bagels on her way in.
Something's wrong the moment she walks through the door. Matt's back is to her, but it stiffens at unnaturally sharp angles before she's even opened her mouth to greet them, Foggy doing his level best not to betray anything in his own expression.
"Did you know?" Matt asks without turning, an accusation in every word.
Karen shakes her head, bewildered. She's still standing in the doorway, bag limp at her side. "Know what?"
Foggy meets her gaze from his desk in the corner. "Frank," he says, and it feels as though all the air has been sucked out of the room, her chest burning with things that she'd long thought snuffed out. "Frank Castle is back."
…
His face is splashed all over news outlets, every bit as battered and bruised as Karen last saw it so long ago, as their bodies swayed together in that elevator stopped between moments in time. She wonders, in all the months that have passed since then, whether he's known any peace – any healing – or if the bleeding's never stopped.
He's wearing the vest as he charges down streets on CCTV, and even with the volume on mute she can feel the ricochet of his gunfire, hear the ground-out fury of his voice every time his mouth curls on a snarl.
The cat has taken an interest in the news as well, looking alert as the camera goes blurry around Frank for a moment. Her tail thwips back forth, back again, and then she's stretching over Karen's leg, resting her chin on her two front paws. She lets out a low, rumbling purr when the edges of Frank begin to sharpen again, her eyes never leaving the screen.
"Not you, too," sighs Karen, scratching behind her ears as the footage replays. Frank storms down the street one more time, face set in so much rage. She reaches for the remote, but can't bring herself to shut it off.
She doesn't sleep much that night.
When she does dream it's short, fragmented. Impossible to piece together in a coherent way. Fisk pays her another visit, but in place of the gun this time it's Frank on his rampage, his outline fuzzy with static, and no sound comes out when he's shouting at her.
"Frank," she says, and her voice sounds strong as she reaches for him, each time he gets close enough to touch her. "Frank." But then his footsteps rewind, and he's running towards her only to backtrack again, over and over without closing any new distance between them.
Karen's never been one to take stock in dreams, but it feels oddly like foreshadowing, when she un-cuffs him from his hospital bed a few days later.
So make it mean something.
Turns out it never meant anything at all.
…
Karen calls out of work for two days, after that. Hoping that's enough time to get Frank's scent out of her skin.
She needn't have bothered. They would've put two and two together, after seeing the news. The shootout on the overpass. The TV reports of Sergeant Mahoney giving interviews from his own hospital bed, staying strangely tight-lipped on the matter of Frank Castle's escape from his custody.
Karen wears flats to the office, and doesn't say much under Matt's own wordless scrutiny, the tight smiles that she knows don't reach his eyes beneath those darkened frames.
There's not much to say that hasn't already been said.
Poor Foggy's left with the task of mediating the silence between them, telling stories, cracking flat but good-natured jokes about their clientele, finally resorting to asking after Karen's "She Who Still Has No Name" cat.
"She's fine," says Karen, thinking of late nights watching the news, and the content little meow every time Frank's scowling face appeared back onscreen.
Matt breaks his silence at last, uttering a quiet, "Was it worth it, Karen?" He speaks without slowing the speed of his fingers over the papers in front of him, and the blood floods up to her ears in one deafening rush.
Screw you, Matt.
But then the image of Frank is fighting to the surface again, stumbling forward without daring to touch her in any way before turning his back on her for the last time. I don't want to. I don't want to.
It's impossible to say, in that moment, which of the two has disappointed her more.
Was it worth it, Karen?
"Always." Her tone is perfectly even, but her heart is pressed tight to the walls of her chest, and she's not sure even she knows the difference anymore, between the truth and the lie.
…
Karen tells herself a lot of things. That she can't forgive him so easily this time – if he even gives her the chance not to. And perhaps that's what burns her more than anything else, that he's always the one who decides when to show up, with flowers or a burner phone (a broken-sounding Please, and a soft kiss to her cheek that she'd felt there for days afterward). He's always the one who gets to say no. He's always the one who does the leaving.
She tells herself it doesn't matter. There is no more this time, or whatever comes next, not for them. He'd made it quite clear where he stood on the matter.
(At least one of these things is definitely a lie.)
Karen winds up so determined to make it mean nothing, on her own terms, that in retrospect she should have known.
Her cat – Karen's tentatively started to call her different names in her head, just to get a feel for how they sound – should have clued her in too.
After the newscasters start to run low on fresh Punisher material, her cat takes to sitting by the window for long hours instead, as if he'll just come strolling around the corner of her block next.
"Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath," Karen mutters, turning away as a garbage compactor rolls down the street.
Mrrow, says her cat, unblinking.
"Don't look at me like that. I don't make the damn rules." Karen sinks into the couch with coffee in hand, a book on something lighthearted in the other. She props her feet on the table, tosses a throw over her knees, and focuses on the forgetting of things for a while.
She starts back awake to a series of clattering sounds, blinking through a haze of sleep and the dim lighting of just-sunset to find her cat pawing animatedly at the window. She catches a flash of something dark in the periphery, so quick she thinks she might have imagined it.
"Oh, for Pete's sake…" Karen wraps the blanket over her shoulders and drags herself across the room, sighing all the while. She crouches down over the cat, running a hand over her back to calm her. "What did you find, hmm? Was it a big bad raccoon?"
The cat makes a chirping noise, and Karen looks up.
"Definitely not a raccoon," she breathes, heart slamming up against her rib cage as Frank eases himself down from her fire escape. He opens his mouth, the gravel in his voice smoothed out by the windowpane between them.
She would still know the sound of her name in that voice anywhere.
"Karen. Hey."
…
She can feel his eyes on her as she moves around the kitchen, trying to remember where she'd last put her bottle opener. Two beers sit unattended on her kitchen island, a bead of sweat dripping down each neck, and when had it gotten so hot in here?
She grips the edge of the counter with both hands, forcing herself to breathe for a moment.
She still can't bring herself to look at him.
The cat is purring up a storm at his feet, tail brushing over his legs, spine arching in a very clear demand to be picked up.
What did I tell them? Karen can't help but sigh. No loyalty whatsoever.
"Ah," grunts Frank, glancing down with a slightly bemused expression, and Karen finds herself holding her breath again, wondering. He'd always struck her as more of a dog person. "Hey, sweetheart."
His gaze flicks back to hers, searching for any signs of disapproval before he's bending over, scooping the cat up in one hand.
"Got yourself a guard dog, I take it?" He lets out a low chuckle, lower lip snagging between his teeth as the cat crawls over his chest, rubbing her forehead under his chin. God, what a traitor.
"Yeah." Karen crosses her arms. "Something like that."
Frank brings his other hand around to cradle the cat's shortened back leg. Karen can hear her purring from all the way across the room. "She, uh. She's a real friendly one, isn't she."
Karen's tone is sharp, pointed. "She's not that great at deterring intruders."
Frank drops his head down, nodding to himself for a moment. "Look, I can go, if that's what you want, Karen, I just. Had to see how you were doing." The sentiment falls flat and they both know it, a cringe twitching across his features. He surveys the room, and she can see him measuring out the space in his head, all the things still standing between them. He nods again, giving the cat one last scratch to the chin before releasing her. "I'll go."
Karen shrugs a shoulder at him, shaking her head. "It's what you do best, Frank." The words are out of her mouth before she recognizes the dark place that they'd come from, and the shame of it stops her short.
It's what you do best, Karen.
Frank knits his brow together, looking more somber than she's ever seen him, and he turns to leave.
"Wait." She uncrosses her arms, holds out a hand to him before letting it drop. "Just – wait." She comes around to the side of the island and stops there, gazing at him, willing him to understand her. She can't be the one always reaching for him. Not this time. Not anymore.
Frank closes his eyes for a second, draws in an audible breath like he's searching deep within himself for something. When he looks at her again, he seems to have found it, his expression painfully bare, and she can see every one of his bruises, new cuts that have formed over half-healing scars.
Slowly, he makes his way over to her – less gingerly than he'd needed to at the hospital, but there's still a carefulness to his movements, like she might decide not to let him any closer, and he wouldn't blame her for it.
Karen swallows, gestures into the space between their bodies. "What is this, Frank?"
His breath shudders out. His voice is gruff, hoarse like he hasn't used it in days, and maybe he hasn't, not in this way. "You mean something. To me." He redistributes his weight, nudging himself just a little bit closer. She still hasn't moved.
"God, Karen, I—" Frank shakes his head, mouth pulling upward with a kind of disbelieving laugh. "I did some thinking, after, with the kid, okay, and it made me think, made me realize—"
He breaks off, gaze piercing through hers. His body goes perfectly still, and she knows the effort it's taking him, knows that it can't just be nothing, that it never was, after all.
"You might mean more than anything else that there is, and that – that scares me. That terrifies the shit out of me, yeah? That gonna be okay with you, Karen?"
His voice cracks on her name, and suddenly they're swaying together, her arms coming up to his shoulders to steady him. To steady them both, and it's messy, it doesn't un-complicate all of the damaged pieces that don't fit quite right with them yet, but it's a start. It's a start.
Her breathing evens out in time with his, and then she slides her fingers down to gently grasp around his wrists. His palms turn upward, dwarfing her own. He squeezes her back instead of letting go.
"Both hands, right?" she says to him, and he whispers her name like a kiss to her forehead.
…
He eventually falls asleep on the couch, with her copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up still splayed open over his lap. The cat is comfortably dozing away on his chest, his arm draped protectively around the side of her body. The furrow lines between his brows are smooth, relaxed, and there's no movement behind his eyelids, no tossing and turning like she'd seen at the hospital.
It's a disarming sight, and for a moment Karen can only stand there, watching the rise-fall-rise of their slumbering, before tucking a blanket over them both.
She lets a hand linger, brushing back some stray hair from Frank's forehead. The top of it has gotten long, she thinks, with a feeling that she realizes is fondness, and it leaves her chest warm as she starts to tiptoe away from the couch.
Impulsively, she leans back over him before she's out of range, pressing a light kiss to the square of his bruised-up jaw. He stirs without waking, but the cat blinks up at her for a second, stretching her paws and closing her eyes again when Karen gives her head a gentle little scratch.
"Night, my love," she whispers, and they're both shifting, curling into each other as Karen takes another step back. Frank's nose is half-buried into the cat's fur now, a deep, sleepy rumble sounding out of his throat, and it's hard to look away from them, like this might all simply disappear if she does.
Karen forces herself into her bedroom, but she leaves the door open, and she falls asleep to the thought of what this new after could be – just Frank, and this cat, her two broken strays that have made a home out of her heart for good.
…
Fisk is there again, shouting things and threatening violence, but he's started out farther away this time as he advances toward her, and from this distance, he almost seems small.
"Karen."
She looks around, confused.
"Karen!"
Something warm closes over her wrist, a phantom touch that she can't see, but she would recognize the sound of her name in that voice anywhere.
She puts the gun down.
Frank is hunkered over her when she opens her eyes, his gaze troubled and bright in the dark of her bedroom as his mouth forms over her name over and over. "Hey. Y'okay?" He rasps the words out, still bleary with the last remnants of sleep. His hair is standing at an angle on one end, and Karen resists the urge to run her fingers through it.
He helps her sit up, one hand palming the back of her skull, and it's warm, he's warm all over, as she leans an arm into the crook of his shoulder. The bed bounces slightly under their weight as he reaches with his other hand, sliding a rough thumb over her elbow, pressing the bridge of his nose to her temple and breathing in deep.
"It's always the same dream," she tells him, and she knows he must hear it, the echoing of his own previous words.
Frank licks his lips, hanging his head with something like shame for a moment, as though he wants to ask of her things that he has no right in asking.
"Listen, Karen, I…" He trails his fingers over the soft part of her forearm, before coming to linger down by her wrist. "You were there for me, always are, even when I don't—" He breaks off again, watching the way their hands twine together. "Guess what I'm trying to say is, if I can be that for you, I'd. I'd really like to give it a shot, yeah?"
Frank looks at her now, face sculpted in moonlight, so vulnerable that Karen aches all over to look back at him. She tightens her grip on his hand. "I'd like that too," she tells him.
He lands a kiss to her knuckles, tender and careful, warm with the promise of more. She can feel his breath shaking over her skin, cooling the spots his mouth had touched. She rests her head against the slope of his shoulder, eyes drifting closed as he brushes his fingers up and down the side of her arm before finally weaving into her hair again.
There's movement at the foot of the bed, and a soft chirruping meow as the cat pads over to join them, tail grazing their hands where they're joined.
"She got a name?"
"Work in progress," hums Karen. "Kind of thought for a while she would just up and leave at some point, before I got something to stick."
Frank's quiet for a moment, mouth skimming back and forth over her hairline. She pictures those lines in his brow creasing again, deep in thought about what she's said. "That right?"
"Mm."
He comes to rest with his mouth by her ear, nuzzling a slow little kiss there. "Think it might be time to give her one, then."
Karen stretches into him, head falling sideways, letting him find her pulse point next. "Think so?"
"Yeah," Frank murmurs, heat tracking over her skin as he breathes her in like time has no meaning – like he wants to learn all that he can of her, and then keep on going, no end in sight, no war zones, just this. She thinks she's never wanted anything more either. "Yeah, Karen. I do."