He's not there, the next morning when the nurse wakes up. She never expected him to be.

She doesn't see him again for weeks, and when she does he has scars she doesn't remember seeing on him the first time. Lucky her, he only comes to her with the stuff he can't fix himself. 'Or some Hell's Kitchen version of me,' she thinks. Hopes even. New York is a big city, bigger for someone who's bleeding. It turns out he never stays until she wakes up, which annoys her. She wants to make sure he gets a meal, make sure he's not walking funny, clean his dressings, make him drink some water before he leaves, but he never lets her do any of it. Doesn't even leave a note. She doesn't think about why it bothers her so much. She starts leaving bottled water on the coffee table for him while he sleeps and has to be satisfied with the fact that it's gone with him when she wakes up.

There are a few blood stains on the couch after the first time, despite Frank laying the blanket down. They come out with some Shout. The blanket, on the other hand, is stained for life. She doesn't throw it away, keeps it folded so the blood stains are hidden on the arm of the couch for the next time he shows up. She replaces it and puts the new blanket in the linen closet in the living room so he's not tempted to ruin a second blanket.

She stocks up on the medical supplies she'll need for him too. The only good thing about the mandatory overtime is that the hospital is equally mandated to pay her time and a half for it. It covers a lot of gauze and peroxide, though she's not ashamed to say she lifts some supplies from work to help cover the cost as well. She picks up clean clothes for him too, just in case. Tommy, her ex, had left behind a few things, but he was the long skinny sort, nothing Frank could have fit into. It's just the basics. Sweatpants, t-shirts, socks. All black, all clearance items. He'd left behind the tshirt that got ruined when whoever tried to kill him failed the first time he came to her, and she felt bad about him walking around in the cold without it, though she tells herself it was just because the wound could do with an extra layer between it and the elements.

A part of her feels crazy. Why invest money and effort into this guy who was gonna get her charged with aiding and abetting? He might not even come back and see her again, he was drunk when he answered that question after all.

But Frank does come back, true to his word. Sometimes he's chatty while she stitches him up and wipes him clean, sometimes he isn't. She hedges her bets based on the look on this face when she first sees him. He always looks pissed when he shows up on her doorstep, but sometimes he looks livid. Those nights she asks only what she has to, and hands him the vodka without a single word before grabbing the box of supplies she stows under her coffee table just for him. Other nights he just looks annoyed and she's braver with her bedside manner.

"You need to figure out a way to warn me you're coming, I'm not always here ya know."

"Doesn't look like you got a boyfriend," he shoots back.

She glares at him. "I don't. Between you and the hospital working me like a dog, where would I find one?"

Frank smirks. "You're not supposed to, that's our plan. More good nurses are lost to marriages than to burn out." He laughs when she throws dirty gauze at him.

Her life works like that for a while. Going into the hospital for her morning shift at the ass crack of dawn, leaving as soon as she possibly can, which is never on time but sometimes before eight p.m. She barely gets six hours of sleep a night. And Frank visits her, never with any regularity, never with any warning. She leaves her cell phone number written on the same dry erase board on her refrigerator so she knows he's seen it, but he never calls or texts it. Wonders what kind of emergency would constitute a heads up. Wonders if maybe he doesn't keep it in case something happens to him and he doesn't want her targeted. She figures a man like that is careful about the way he keeps his company. If she does have a Hell's Kitchen counterpart, she doubts they know any more about her than she does about them.

When Frank does show up he's usually waiting for her, the bloody blanket laid out carefully, his boots by the door, the wounds he can reach by himself already cleaned up with her gauze. He's started letting her stitch them up though. She does a better job of it than he does.

The Nurse gets even less sleep than normal when he visits her. Partly because patching him up takes time, partly because she's worried about him dying on her couch. But he's always gone before her alarm goes off at five for her shift. Except the first time he's not.

He rarely screams, or makes any noise of pain at all really, no matter how deep his cuts or how many times she has go back into a wound for bullet fragments. She'd worried about it more before she saw him naked. Frank was riddled with scars, none of them pretty, most of them old. He was old hat at getting stitched up, she figured out that day.

"Marines," he tells her when her face falls as she runs her eyes over him, one of the few times he's seen her actually wear her worry on her face. "Half of 'em I got there." He stands there butt naked except for his socks, holding his boxers over his dick with his hand for her sake. He doesn't have a lot of shame any more, and reserves most of it for memories of his family, but he figures she might, even being a nurse. The redness on her cheeks when he turns around lets him know he was right.

"Yeah, I googled about the other half," she tells him.

"You googled huh?" He asks, towering over her from her normal seat on her coffee table, his boxers and hand the only thing keeping his dick out of her face as she cleans the cut that rips him open from hip to mid-thigh. He thinks most men would feel vulnerable in a situation like this, wounded and naked in front of a woman. He doesn't. Her blush makes him feel powerful. "What'd you go and do all'a that for?"

Her eyes meet his and he thinks if his hip wasn't giving him so much pain he might have a harder time hiding himself from her given how good she looks looking up at him from that angle. "Oh you know, I just thought it might be a good idea to find out as much as I could about the guy who followed me home from work and shows up at my house after the knife fights he gets into."

Frank grins, finds he can't help himself around her when she runs her mouth like that. He's not used to mouthy women being sweet to him, they're normally shooting at him or otherwise trying to kill him while they're yelling at him. The nurse stitching his wounds while telling him off makes his head spin in a good way for once. "Smart thinkin'," he says as she starts sewing him closed. He takes another long pull from the Stoli bottle she keeps in her freezer as the needle pierces his skin. "See anything you didn't like?"

"Oh no, not really. Just the murdering, but that didn't seem like a major part of it or anything." She's careful with her stitches, he notices. He could give a fuck what the scars look like as long as they're closed up, but hers heal clean. The first one she did for him is all but faded back into his skin, not even raised.

"Nah, just a footnote really," he agrees with her sarcasm. He likes riling her up. Like's seeing the way her jaw tightens and her eyes roll. Thinks he'd like to make them roll back some other way some time if she lets him. She glares in response. He smirks. "You don't really care about it," he tells her.

The nurse frowns, doesn't stop stitching but shoots him a funny look, like he's gone off his meds. "How do you figure that?"

"I'd've met the cavalry one of these nights at your place. Some poor PD would have staked out your apartment waiting on me to come up here for your help, and all he'd get for his hard work would be a concussion and a kidney shot. But no one's coming, are they, sweetheart?" The nurse shakes her head. "And you wanna know what not?" He doesn't wait for her to answer. "Because you don't care all that much about the murders. Why not?"

She frowns, avoids eye contact. "Cause I also read what those people did to your family," she admits, working hard to keep the emotion out of her voice when she thinks about how his family died in front of him.

"I've been repeatedly informed that it doesn't make it better. That an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind or whatever shit they thought was gonna change my mind about killing all them. You don't agree?"

His tone is mocking but she doesn't hesitate with her answer. "No."

She doesn't give him a chance to interrogate her, continue to mock her answer, or even react to it at all. She gives him the third degree about taking care of his wounds, asks how he's caring for them after he leaves, asks how he's feeding himself, if he's got a safe place to sleep while he recovers. It distracts him, he thinks it's cute, her babying him. It makes him have to adjust the hand holding himself that she's doing it from that position. He thinks he needs to get laid if basic care and kindness is making him feel any type of way. Or maybe he needs to figure out a way to pay her, establish a line of professionality between the two of them so he's not tempted to cross it.

"Hey, why don't you ever ask for payment?" He suddenly asks while she wraps his hip up.

She frowns, the question making her pause her movements and look up at him, confused. "I unno," she shrugs after a few seconds of silence pass. "I guess I figured if you were following me home for care you weren't exactly swimmin' in it," she lies. It hadn't crossed her mind at all until he asked the question.

Frank nods some, looking her over as she goes back to wrapping him up, her soft fingers smoothing the gauze over his skin more gently than he deserves. "I'll figure it out," he promises her.

She sits back on her hands on the coffee table once he's finished. "I'd rather not be paid in money that's gonna get me in trouble," she tells him. "I'd just as soon take care of you for free if you're looking to launder anything though me.

"Relax, I'm not gonna start robbing banks for you, sweetheart. I was thinking more along the lines of replacing your vodka with more of the good stuff."

The nurse shrugs, then nods. "Yeah, okay. That works for me."

So that's how he pays his Brooklyn nurse. She starts coming home some nights to a brand new bottle of vodka sitting in her freezer next to her frozen dumplings and microwaveable mac and cheeses, no Frank in sight. Sometimes he leaves them on her kitchen counter when there's no more room in the freezer. She keeps the extras at the bottom of the linen closet. The labels are always in languages she can't read (she assumes Russian, but she never asks, doesn't wanna know too much about what he gets up to), and when she takes shots out of the bottles they go down like water.

She doesn't know how he's getting into her apartment, but one night he leaves a note on the dry erase board on her fridge along with a case of the good stuff, "Get a dog or something, Jesus." She can't, she 'works too much, it wouldn't be fair to it,' is the argument she makes the next time she sees him. But she notices he doesn't buy her any of those safety gadgets she sees on social media while she's scrolling when she can't sleep. She asks him about it once.

"Wouldn't keep me out. And if it wouldn't keep me out it's a waste of money," he reasons.

"Everyone's not you, Frank," she tells him. "It might deter a lesser man with lesser morals."

He grunts, considers it. "You could pay one of the neighborhood kids to walk the dog," is all he's got.

She smiles and rolls her eyes. "If anything happens I'll just make sure to live and get a good description so you can handle it for me," she jokes. Frank takes it seriously.

"Not a good preemptive measure, but that's not a bad plan should anything happen," he says, his jaw tight, he doesn't like thinking about her having to get a description. She knows if she had to get one for him that description would change after he handled it.

"Frank, I'm kidding. I've lived in this building almost a year and nothings happened to me."

He nods, stays quiet for a minute before, "Almost a year huh? When's your lease up?"

"Frank…"

"I'm just saying, we could get you into something with a doorman at least," he argues.

"Oh yeah? Cause a doorman would stop you?" the nurse shoots back.

"Everyone's not me, sweetheart. You said that."

She sighs. She did say that. She goes back to stitching him up.

It's a nice little routine they have. The nurse lets herself get complacent with how well he takes the pain he's given, how nicely he heals, and how easy he is to fix up.

She almost forgets how bad injuries like his can get until the universe gives them both a reminder.

"Hey there, Pretty Girl," is all Frank manages to say before his mouth starts pouring out blood onto her hardwood floor. Thick blood, the chunky kind that never stops scaring at her no matter how many times she sees it at work.

"Castle?" She tries not to let the fear into her voice, so he won't hear it and panic, but she doesn't succeed. It doesn't matter anyway, Frank can't hear her over the ringing in his ears every time he takes a step. He manages to limp as far as her coffee table before he collapses on it. The nurse thinks she's gonna have to replace it before Frank dies. If he survives this particular visit to her personal ER, that is.

He's non-responsive when she asks him where he's been hurt, but his eyes are still open and moving around her ceiling, seemingly watching her ceiling fan blades go round and round. The nurse unbuttons his shirt and her mouth goes dry. There's three bullet wounds that she can see immediately. The one in his chest pierced him clean through. "Shit," she curses, standing up and already running to her bathroom before her knees straighten. She pulls out the entire medicine cabinet, complete with the fresh set of forceps she stole from work. She considered stealing an old pair, but she figured 'fuck that place'. She carries them all to the couch and dumps them there before heading back into the bathroom to wash her hands. She doesn't rush the hand washing, cleaning under her nails and between her fingers thoroughly and putting the gloves on before she leaves the bathroom.

She sits on the couch this time. "I'm gonna need you to stay with me as long as you can, Frank. Passing out on me is gonna make a tough job even tougher, big guy."

"Big guy?" His voice sounds dazed. "Called you pretty. I get 'big guy'?" It's slow too, the nurse doesn't like that but it's not silence so she'll take what she can get.

"Course you did, I am pretty. And you're a big guy, my coffee table can attest to that."

He smiles but his eyes grow duller. He's not moving an inch on his own. "Kids at restaurants are 'big guys'. Hulks a 'big guy'."

The nurse doesn't like that she can hear his speech slowing as she packs his pierced wound full of gauze to stop the bleeding. It's close enough to his heart to be concerning, but far enough away that it might have missed the important parts. She doesn't have the equipment to know for sure if it'll kill him. She's gonna have to fix him up as best she can with what she can see and pray about what she can't. She doesn't like that he's not making any sort of noise of pain about it, though. "Yeah, I guess. What are you then, huh?

"Pain in your ass?" he asks. The nurse sees his eyes moving and thinks he's looking for her, but she can't be sure. She squirts a gauze pad with peroxide and gets to cleaning the gun shot wounds with the bullets still left in them. She doesn't have time to be gentle. Frank doesn't seem to notice which worries her.

"Only if you live. I know I've mentioned this before, but you're not allowed to die here. I don't even know if I know where to rent a hacksaw. Not to mention the fact that they probably ask for ID for that sorta thing. They'd send me to fuckin' jail Frank." She wonders if he's Catholic, if the guilt will be enough to sustain his life.

Frank just smiles. "Only if they find me, baby doll. Don't get caught."

She ignores that, just happy he's talking. "I wouldn't do well in jail, Frank." He hums his response and the nurse looks up, forceps paused in the first wound. "You hear me?"

He hums again, closing his eyes this time. "Mhm. Pretty girl."

She nods, continuing to dig in his hole, pulling out a fragment of the bullet. "Pretty girls are pretty targets in prison, Frankie."

"Frankie?" He croaks.

"Yeah. Anyone ever call you that?" she asks, cursing when she digs out another small piece of bullet.

"Yeah. Few people. Very few." His voice is just above a whisper now. She's losing him, if not totally then for sure to exhaustion.

"Better than Big Guy?" The nurse asks, continuing to scrape his insides.

"Mm," is all she gets back from him.

She looks up at him and his eyes are finally closed. "Frank?" She digs her elbow into his good hip and jostles him. He doesn't say anything. She leans her ear down on his bare chest and listens to his heart. "God DAMN it," she curses before going back to the task at hand. She works a little faster now that he can't complain about the pain, not that he was. The first bullet comes out in five pieces total. The second in three. She packs them both with gauze before unpacking the first one. The bleeding stopped and she cleans him out and stitches him up. There's no way to tell how much blood he's lost between wherever he got shot and her apartment.

She struggles turning him on his good side to stitch the other side of the pierced wound, holding him up with her non-dominant shoulder while she cleans and sews him shut. She sets him down as gently as she can before unpacking the final two wounds and sewing them shut as well. She cleans them all one last time for good measure before wrapping him up and inspecting the rest of his body. She finds one of his shoulders out of its socket and puts it back, his left ankle is twisted nearly to its breaking, and a metric fuck ton of developing bruises riddle his body. She elevates his ankle on a desk chair and some pillows from her room and ices both his shoulder and his ankle while he sleeps. Once she's finished she falls back on the couch. "Shit, Frank."

The nurse sleeps out there, on the couch, waking up every 20 minutes to check to make sure Frank's chest is still moving. She has to call out of work that morning. Even if she had slept well enough to work, she can't leave him in her apartment to die alone if he doesn't make it.

He sleeps all day.

In the afternoon she finds him awake, holding the blanket she put over him in the night, and waiting for her during golden hour when she wakes up from a quick nap. His neck is turned to face her.

"Hey Pretty Girl," he says, his voice stronger than when he passed out the night before but still raspier than his normal gravel.

The nurse breathes a sigh of relief. "Hey Frankie." Frank smiles wide, closes his eyes. "How you feelin'?"

"Like you had the fight of your life with the grim reaper trying to keep me on this side."

The nurse sits up, bags under her eyes, hair sticking to her face with sweat. "I only found the three holes and your shoulder and ankle. Did I miss anything?"

Frank shrugs his good shoulder. "Coupla scrapes and bruises. You found all the good stuff. Knew you would."

She shakes her head and looks away from him. "You better have another onea me up in Hell's Kitchen. I better never fuckin' catch you bleeding like that all that way from there to Bushwick, you understand me?"

"Knock it off with your tough girl shit, sweetheart. Pretty girl like you makes a pretty target in prison, remember? You're not gonna let me die without a fight." He sounds smug about it. The nurse leans back on the couch and pouts.

She crosses her arms over her chest. He's right and they both know it. "Doesn't mean I have to keep feeding you vodka though."