June

Her extra bag thumped rhythmically against her hip as Karen approached the door to her building. She hadn't counted on it being quite so heavy, but it was worth a sore hip and the favor that a photographer at The Bulletin had demanded in exchange for letting her borrow his camera with the best lens.

Aside from the righteous anger she felt about every wrong done to those in Hell's Kitchen, the deep-seated knowledge that she had to do something because people were being hurt, she rarely let her personal feelings get too embroiled in her work. It was too stressful, too draining to focus on herself rather than the actual victims of what she wrote about. But tonight…tonight she was fucking pissed and heaven have mercy on the asshole who'd made her mad because she sure as hell wouldn't. Blood and rage were pumping in her ears and had been since she was accosted on the way to work that morning.

Key turned, she was violently yanking on the still broken door when she felt the large presence just behind her. Before she had the chance to still in terror, for her hand to go to her gun, a hand with bruised knuckles appeared above both of hers and added its strength to getting the door open.

"Ma'am."

Letting out a breath without turning around, she greeted, "Hi Frank."

She wasn't sure if it was something in her voice, posture, or if he just had a sixth sense about such things, but he seemed to immediately know that she wasn't in the best mood and remained silent as she led them up the stairs. As soon as she did her usual short clear of her apartment, she dropped both of her bags onto the counter a bit harder than she needed to. She probably didn't need to kick her shoes off so fiercely, either.

"Bad day?" he asked from where he remained by the door, staying safely out of the line of fire. So damn angry, she didn't quite appreciate the note of amusement in his tone, but she chose to ignore it.

"Yeah. Yeah, you could say that," she nodded, letting out a deep breath. Knowing she'd have to get it over with at some point, because he'd chosen that night of all nights to show up on her doorstep, she reached up and pushed a shaking hand through her hair. Though, if she was being honest, it wouldn't have mattered if he showed up that night or any of the ones within the next ten or so.

She hadn't had anything at work to try and cover it, but she doubted makeup would do much. The curse of being pale, she supposed.

Exhaling some of her anger, because he hadn't done anything, didn't deserve to be caught as collateral, she gave a tired smile when she turned around for the first time. "I really don't know how you handle these. Blinking makes me wince."

"Shit…"

She watched as surprise, anger, and concern all flickered through his eyes, in that order and then through one more round as he stepped forward and took her chin gently in one hand. Yeah, she wasn't crazy about her brand new black eye either.

A good bit of her rage was draining away, though. She was home and she wasn't alone and anymore that was a lot. She wouldn't have minded if he'd brought Bully that night, but it didn't escape Karen that the only person she ever spent time with in her apartment was Frank. Not being alone by nature meant being with him…and that was enough.

Her face still in his hand, his fingers having tilted that side of her face toward the light, he noted, "I'm not sure I like us matching."

For the first time that day since she'd walked into the office and started the painful process of seeing the questioning pity in the eyes of everyone who looked at her like she was a battered wife, a silly girl in over her head, she found herself smiling. "Neither am I. You wear them much better than I do."

His smile in return was nothing more than a fleeting quirk at the corner of his mouth, but it was there. "How do you figure?"

"When people see yours, they see a man who fights, who's strong, somebody not to fuck with." After staring over people's shoulders instead of looking them in the eyes all day, she'd given the difference a good bit of thought. She knew what they were all thinking about her, even if it was only in the first flash of pity that they managed to cover quickly up. "When they look at mine, they see a woman who's not strong enough to keep herself safe, maybe too stupid. They see someone to feel sorry for because she lost."

Frank fixed her with that stare she never understood, though she could practically see the thoughts whirling behind his impassive face. Finally, his thumb sliding down her chin in a way she suddenly found terribly distracting, he asked, "Did you?"

"I'm not the one who was left lying in an alley holding my just-kicked balls if that's what you mean."

His smirk had more life to it that time and she thought she saw a tad bit of pride in it when he retracted his hand and moved to sit on her kitchen stool. As she took off her coat and moved to her dresser to find something else to wear, he started asking the questions she'd expected.

"You know who it was?"

"Yeah. Did you hear about the string of vandalism at a bunch of bodegas in the last few weeks, beat up clerks and broken storefronts?" She glanced up to see his nod before going into the bathroom, continuing to talk through the door as she changed. "None of them actually reported it to the cops and when the cops did get there they wouldn't say much. I found out that all the people running the targeted shops are immigrants, illegal ones. They've all pointed me back to a Connor O'Brien who tried extorting them for 'protection money'. They turned down his offer."

Seeing Frank stiffen at the man's name in her mind's eye, she added for his benefit, "O'Brien is kind of an Irish mob wannabe. He didn't actually have the rep or connections to get in before the Irish…met you."

Changed, she was pushing her hair back when she stepped out of the bathroom and concluded, "It was one of his guys who punched me in the face and told me to back off this morning. What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

In the last six months, Karen liked to think she'd gotten pretty adept at reading Frank Castle's expressions. With how often he used them to basically talk, it was impossible not to…aside from the one that made her toes tingly and she still didn't understand in the slightest.

She'd never seen the one staring at her before in her life and it was easily one of the most peculiar. Ignoring his black eye and the healing yellow splotch on his forehead, he was staring at her with an eyebrow only partly raised, both eyes narrowed slightly in what she took to be confusion, and something resembling bewilderment on his lips.

"You're wearing jeans."

"…yes."

"You never wear pants you aren't going to sleep in."

For a moment, she was surprised he'd noticed. But then she supposed it made sense. She'd noticed enough about him in return. It made her smile faintly.

"You've never seen me do laundry, then." Letting out another breath, desperately trying to get all the remaining anger—or whatever the dark, coiling, poisonous feeling in her chest was—out of her system, she moved past him and started a fresh pot of coffee. She was going to need plenty of it. She knew what his answer was going to be, but she asked anyway as she opened up her freezer, "Is frozen pizza, okay?"

She had yet to come across a food that he wasn't willing to eat and when he jerked a short nod, she smiled without really looking at him. Preheating the oven, she put the pizza on a cookie sheet without looking at him either. It had become something of a habit throughout the day that apparently she couldn't quite break even though she was close enough to him that she was brushing his knees every time she passed.

She could feel him looking at her though. And as usual, he could probably tell exactly what was running through her head.

"Did you pull your gun?"

Despite herself, she was listening for some sort of reproach in the question but it wasn't there, just curiosity. She was immediately ashamed of herself for not giving him more credit. She really wasn't at her best when angry…and more than a little scared.

"No, he was already trying to run away when I kicked him. He wasn't going to do anything more than what he did. I…I thought it would be better if they didn't know I had a gun, you know."

He nodded, "Not a bad idea. I bet most people underestimate you even with it in your hand."

Fifty percent of the people she'd pointed it at had, had smiled mockingly, had thought she was bluffing. He was the half who hadn't, because of course he hadn't.

She flashed a short smile at him before sticking the pizza in the oven. When she tried to step by him to set the timer on the microwave, one of his hands caught her waist. They both looked at it resting there for a second, warm through her shirt, big enough to span over most of her hip. The stare she didn't understand was on his face when she glanced back up. He didn't remove his hand.

"Hey. Hey," he said in a quiet voice, waiting for her to look at him in the eyes again after hers flicked away. The gentle tone smacked her right in the chest and for the first time that day she had to start blinking away tears. Her hand was shaking as she brought it up and pushed her fingers through her hair. If she'd had absolutely any chance of keeping Frank out of her head before, she knew it was gone as soon as her hand moved.

"Hey, it's okay. You're okay." Pursing her lips to keep a sob from getting out, she met his gaze and immediately found herself caught, trapped in the honesty that had somewhere along the line tethered them to one another. He tightened his grip momentarily, a small comforting squeeze. "Karen, you're okay. Take a couple deep breaths. You're okay."

Back of her hand pressed to her mouth, she tried. They were shaky and filled with more terror than she'd let herself consciously notice in the last twelve hours, but she got them out.

"Yeah, see you're okay," he said again in his low voice. "It takes more than a black eye to knock you out of the ring."

She let out a shaky laugh at that, sending a smile his way that he returned with a quirk of his mouth. Taking in and exhaling one more lungful of oxygen, she breathed, "Shit…"

"Yeah, getting punched in alleyways is kinda shitty. I wouldn't recommend it. Black eyes are bad for the complexion."

Her smile gained a better foothold on her features and she gently shoved his shoulder, "Really? You have any other complexion advice for me, Frank Castle?"

"I'm just filled with knowledge, ma'am." His smile remained on his face for a bit until he squeezed her hip once more and asked seriously, "You good?"

The movement was no longer a lie to the both of them when she nodded and squeezed the shoulder she'd just shoved. "Yeah. Thank you."

He shrugged her words off as he retracted his hand and changed the subject. "So you doing laundry tonight or what? The jeans are throwing me off."

Pulling away and beeping maybe half the recommended time for the pizza onto the microwave timer, she smirked. "I didn't realize me being in pants was that confusing."

"Hey, wear those to go meet Nelson or Red sometime and see if they don't comment, beautiful, beautiful Karen."

She giggled slightly at his surprisingly spot-on imitation of drunken Foggy from her phone the month before. Since Bully had become a semi-common visitor to her apartment, she'd cut back on using 'shut up' as her shushing phrase of choice and she admonished instead, "You hush."

Immediately after, she fully realized just what he'd said. Groaning at the thought of Foggy, she brought her hands up to rub her face and immediately winced when she caught her bruise, "My birthday is in two days. Matt and Foggy are taking me out. This is going to look worse by then, isn't it?"

"Oh yeah." He shrugged, "Don't worry about it. I'm sure Red won't even mind."

She sent him a glare at the blind joke, but he looked far too pleased with himself to care. Digging through the fridge for Parmesan cheese, she realized she hadn't actually answered his jeans question. One of her own popped into her brain.

It wasn't like she actually had much experience doing it herself and she imagined that just about all of his…work was doing it. The actual shooting people didn't take that long. Ben had taught her that she didn't need to know everything. She just needed to know when to ask for help with the stuff she didn't. Expert help as often as life and money allowed. Frank was expert help.

Leaning on the fridge door, she asked suddenly, "Do you want to come on a stakeout with me tonight?"

"A what?" The question clearly hadn't been one he was expecting. She saw him blink at her in confusion a few times. The action made her smile a little.

"A stakeout. Or, what's the military term…? Recon! Do you want to come do some recon with me tonight?"

"…Sure."

Hip-checking the door closed, she set the cheese on the counter beside him and grabbed plates. When she set them down, he'd taken a fork out of the drawer for her. Even straight out of the oven and hot enough to burn his fingers, he refused to use a fork with pizza. The one time she'd asked, he'd very vehemently said something about it being a cardinal New Yorker sin. He'd told her to ask Red if she didn't believe him.

"So the jeans are for the recon?" He seemed decidedly more comfortable with that version of the word and she made a mental note to always go to the military version of things if she knew of one.

She nodded, "I didn't think sitting on a roof holding a camera in a skirt would be much fun…"

"Shit, does this mean you're going to wear real shoes, too?"

"I always wear real shoes, Frank," she huffed, sending him a look over her shoulder. "Just because your feet never see daylight doesn't mean my shoes are bad."

Leaning back against the counter, propped up on his elbows in a posture reminiscent of how he took up most of the couch, he shrugged and shot back with a grin, "Mine don't make me limp when I walk up a flight of stairs after eight hours in them."

She crossed her arms over her chest and fixed him with a raised eyebrow. "You're the kind of man who sleeps in his socks, aren't you."

His smile softened a bit and he nodded. "Yeah, until I got married. Maria was all over me about it. I don't know why. Why can't a man wear socks in his own bed?"

"Because it's your bed! You're not walking on anything. You don't need socks."

"Until I get out of bed."

They looked at each other for a few minutes and Karen knew that neither of them was going to back down. She also knew that they were arguing about socks of all things. When her straight face faltered and laughter broke through, he smiled back at her.

"I was that kind of guy," he explained when she wasn't so laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. "She trained me right. Every time I came back from a tour overseas, I knew I was home because I didn't have to wear socks all the time, didn't have to be constantly ready to jump into my boots. I've been bad about remembering lately."

"You should get in the habit again," she offered gently before the microwave began beeping that the pizza was ready. Without further conversation, the two of them fell into what Karen realized was their dinner routine. She grabbed the food out of the oven, he dished, and she got drinks, coffee for both of them at the moment. Tonight, she perched herself on the counter as he just slid back onto her stool, blowing on his four hundred degree Fahrenheit crust like that was supposed to help before he picked up his first slice.

Halfway through that first piece, he nodded toward her bags, "So what's this recon for? You going for something specific on this O'Brien or just whatever you can find?"

"Something specific." Slipping down, she started rifling through her files with her cleaner hand. "I didn't just talk to the owners of the places that got hit. I talked to just about everyone who has a similar store in Hell's Kitchen. It was only the people who were illegal who he targeted. So, unless he's somehow hacking into immigration databases—which I think he's way too blunt of an instrument to be doing—then he's either paying someone to do it for him, someone with that kind of access is having him work for them, or there's someone those people all trust who's snitching to him."

Pizza in one hand, he looked over the notes she spread in front of him. "So you think there's somebody higher up?"

"Possibly. At least someone else involved." She shrugged, "It could just be an ICE employee with that kind of access looking for extra cash, somebody from the neighborhood looking for it, or something more sinister, but either way I don't like loose ends I don't have any proof of. I'd rather know something is nothing. In the gang vacuum that's opened up since you got here, O'Brien has been one of the first to plant his flag. He doesn't have a lot of guys, maybe a dozen, twenty at most and this is the most violent they've gotten so far, but he does a poker game every Wednesday night at the same bar. All the bodega owners I talked to said they were approached on a Thursday. It could just be coincidence, but…"

Watching Frank glance over her notes, absently chewing, it became very apparent to Karen that she'd never told him this much about her work before. She'd never told anyone this much aside from Ellison. It was nice to have someone else to run things by. Ellison thought like an editor, of what could be proved and what would sell papers, which was good but not quite the same. Even though he hadn't actually said much, babbling all her suspicions out to Frank kind of felt like when she'd worked with Ben.

She did her best not to fidget as he took a few quiet minutes to mull over what she'd told and shown him. Even as she attempted to nonchalantly chew at her melted cheese and pepperoni, she caught the sideways glance and smirk that appeared on his face before he finally spoke, "You're thinking that whoever is giving him names is somebody he meets with at these games. Makes sense. Probably not a bad place to start. Any idea what these games are like, who comes to them?"

"Not really. From what I can gather he's more trying to play gangster than actually doing anything at them. He saw it on a movie or something. It's just 'what mobsters do'. I do know he usually loses. I was hoping to get pictures, look at faces of the others who come tonight."

"Sounds good. When do we go?"

She glanced at the clock. "As soon as we're done eating."

"Yes, ma'am." The look of amusement he always got when she told him what to do was plastered across his face.

Gathering her notes back up, she rolled her eyes at him, "You hush, Marine."

They'd fallen back to silence and she'd climbed back onto the counter and finished half her coffee before he spoke again. Pouring himself another cup, he was glancing at her bags when he asked, "Why were you a legal assistant?"

At her confused look, he elaborated, "Except when it came to finding out the truth about my family, you never seemed as…excited feels like the wrong word, but excited about what you did as you do about this stuff."

"I…guess I wasn't." Leaning more heavily against her cabinets, she tried to find words for the feeling that she'd always had but hadn't acknowledged until he'd just pointed it out. "I liked helping people and trying to sort out their problems, fixing things, and… after Ben I was scared. Nelson & Murdock was safe. When you and your family came out…I cared more about finding out the truth than being afraid. How dangerous it was just wasn't that important when I sat and thought about it, when Matt and Foggy told me to back off, to let it go. And then there wasn't a safe Nelson & Murdock to go back to, so here I am."

Frank made a noise deep in his throat at her explanation. Voice slightly hoarse in the way it only ever was after he'd started on his second cup of coffee, he noted, "You're good at it."

"Are you saying the Punisher reads my articles?" she asked with a quirked smile.

"Yes, ma'am. Every single one of them." Before she could do so much as thank him for his readership, he nodded toward the coffeemaker, "If we're going to do recon, we're going to need as much of that as your biggest thermos will physically carry. More if at all possible."

Reaching into her bag and pulling out the other thing she'd borrowed from a colleague that day, she held up the ridiculously big travel mug the woman who wrote the relationship advice column consumed every day. Smiling, she said simply, "Way ahead of you."

She moved to pour what was left in the pot into the mug before starting a new batch, glad that she'd thoroughly scrubbed the mug out in the women's restroom earlier that day. Within another thirty minutes, she'd rapped on her next door neighbor's door to tell the elderly Serbian woman that she was going out for the night. As two women living alone, they kept track of one another like that, and now that Karen was cooking on a somewhat regular basis, they also shared leftovers.

In another twenty, she and Frank were perched on the roof of the building across from O'Brien's bar. Snapping pictures of everyone that came or went in the questionable light, they sat in silence and passed the coffee back and forth.

When a lull in the patrons appeared, she could feel the well-known gaze he sent her as she sat back and fought a yawn. Leaning over and bumping his shoulder, she preempted his question. "Not tonight, Frank."

"Okay." Passing her the coffee, he noted with a lighter tone, "You know, it's not fair that Bully knows and I don't."

Karen knew he was trying to make her laugh but she couldn't manage more than a weak smile. "Lots of things aren't."

He shrugged a nod and said with a bitterness his voice didn't hold nearly as often anymore, "Yeah, ain't that the fucking truth."

"But Frank…" She waited until his all-knowing brown eyes shifted to hers and then held them for a long moment. "Thank you…for still asking."

Less than a foot away from him, she could see the surprise flash in his eyes and the flicker of something else immediately after. He looked away first and cleared his throat a couple of times. She handed him the coffee and he took a long draught before saying levelly, humor lurking right under the surface that was supposed to distract her from the feelings on his face, "Anything for you, beautiful Karen."

"You hush."

Two days later, she somewhat drunkenly stumbled to the door of her apartment after her birthday party, Foggy and Matt in tow because she had a black eye and someone had threatened her and they weren't going to let her out of their sight. So used to Frank's more subtle touch, she knew the alcohol was a key component in her not having blown up at the two of them at some point during the night.

As Foggy rushed himself to her bathroom, complaining about breaking the seal, her eyes were drawn to two things on her counter that hadn't been there when she left hours before. She vaguely heard Matt asking her something, but she didn't really take notice as she stepped closer, smile pulling across her face. Neither wrapped, just with a light blue bow stuck to the top of the cookies, she reached for the package of gingersnaps and the understated but wonderful bouquet of lilies.

Of course Frank was the sort of man who bought a woman flowers for her birthday and remembered which kind she'd mentioned once, once, that she liked. And, of course, he was the sort who remembered the single time she'd said she ate gingersnaps and pretended to be in a spaceship when she was a kid. Of course he was.

She started laughing when she found the nametag amongst the flowers that merely said 'Ma'am'.

A/N: Well, I made it. July is going to be crazy long, so I'm trying to get as much of that done today as I can. Thanks for reading, review if the desire takes you, and I hope you enjoyed! :)