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They'd been sleeping together for one year, two years, never talking about it. That was fine by Karen, who was sick of talking at any rate. She kept getting harder every year — kind of luminous, you know, Frank had told her once, like all her impurities were being burned away, like she was being sharpened — and there weren't any truths here, just half-lies. Anyway, she'd acquired a dog (breed: pitbull mix, name: Max, likes: bacon, laundry, scratches), and her byline now carried a real weight that meant people paid attention when she asked questions, and sometimes when she came home Frank had dinner waiting.
That was Frank all over — sweet, but you couldn't call him out on it. "You like beef?" he'd ask, and Karen would mumble some bullshit about A.1. while she propped her eyelids open and tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with the hook to the third part of her exposé on police corruption. Three nights later he'd be serving her medium-rare strip steak with braised broccoli and a wedge salad.
They made it work. Karen didn't read anything into it; she didn't fit into the ways other people conducted relationships, and Frank was... Frank had once had a family, and nothing could ever touch that. Her typing got faster and her sentences got so pointed and succinct she could say in three paragraphs what other reporters were too cowardly to say in three pages and sometimes she drank beer and sometimes she drank wine and sometimes she drank whiskey. She learned how to set a broken bone and how to stitch up deep-tissue wounds and how to lance a toenail with a blood blister underneath so you didn't lose the whole thing, which was somehow her least favorite part of her crash-course in first aid. She never turned Frank away. She patched up his wounds and hunted down his targets, the forward scout to his following army, and in return he taught her how to tighten up her stance and how to use a tactical shotgun, he kept the wolves from her door, he screwed her raw in her bed, and he made her dinner.
And sometimes he called her "sweetheart," but she never made the mistake of thinking he meant anything by it. That was just Frank all over — unthinkingly sweet, a sweetheart, because all he really ever wanted to do was hurt the bad people and protect the good ones. Karen sometimes thought she deserved a little of the hurt, but Frank would never; it wasn't what you did to the woman you were sleeping with. You made her dinner and read her articles and called her sweetheart, even if she wasn't your sweetheart. Karen hadn't ever been someone's sweetheart in her life. Maybe that was a way she was less naive than Frank, who had once castrated a man and left him to bleed out on the pavement outside of his own front door.
"Two 'a's or two 'e's in 'attendance'?" she asked Frank, who was reading Jack London on her couch with Max snoring and farting at his feet.
He thought about it for a minute — she could tell, way he looked away, way his eyes lost focus and trained on the wall. He came at problems with a kind of sideways directness, because he didn't think like other people: not better or worse, just different.
"Two 'a both," he announced.
"Oh shit, you're right," she said, and Frank huffed a little and looked down, like he was trying not to laugh at her. His hair was getting long, not quite shaggy, but no longer Marine-short, and his stubble was almost thick enough to call a beard. "All right, okay, laugh," she said.
"Sure you're a reporter? 'Cause if that fancy laptop of yours is doin' all the heavy lifting — "
The computer was a gift from Ellison after she'd nailed Caesar Cicero's ass to the wall. "And I guess that big rifle of yours does all the work for you?"
"Yeah, that's right," he said. "All I gotta do is point."
"Oh, is that right?"
"Yeah it is," he said, and they were both grinning like dipshits at each other, Frank with a gash through his eyebrow and his big ears and Karen in old sweatpants and reading glasses with her hair in a knot on top of her head.
"Bet it doesn't have spellcheck though," she said, and she wasn't paying attention to a lick of what she was saying.
"Sounds like your laptop ain't got none either," Frank shot back, and Karen snorted a couple of times and lost it. It was three in the morning; she'd been going for thirty-six hours straight. Frank must've figured that, because he said, "How long you been up?" and then, "You gotta sleep, Karen," suddenly serious. The exhaustion hit her all at once like a snap, deep down in her bones; she'd been getting tired more easily lately, maybe from too many late nights and early mornings, or maybe because her late thirties were creeping up on the horizon.
"Yeah," she said, and yawned, a big jaw-cracking yawn that ate all her attention, and when she was finished Frank was standing in front of her, getting an arm around her shoulders, helping her down the hallway and into bed. He pulled off her socks for her, because she didn't like sleeping in socks — they got all twisted up — and then he took off her reading glasses and set them on her nightstand. "Hey," Karen said, "stay," and he made sure her hair wasn't caught behind her head and pulled the blankets up to her chin and said, "Just goin' to get my book, sweetheart, yeah?" and that was how Karen fell asleep.
She woke up ten hours later in an otherwise empty bed with a niggling question on her mind. Her last cycle was... six, seven, eight, nine weeks ago. "Shit," Karen said, "shit," and then she got up and counted her birth control pills — she hadn't missed any — and then she put on a coat over her sweatpants and walked to the corner bodega. Three pregnancy tests later, she was sure, but she made an appointment with her doctor anyway. The appointment wasn't until tomorrow, though, so she ate lunch and took a shower and sat back down to finish her damn story. It was Sunday.
Frank didn't show his face. That wasn't unusual, either, although Karen had made it very clear that he'd better have figured out some way to let her know if he was bleeding out in a ditch somewhere, and he'd made it very clear that he expected the same consideration in return. Karen joked that her plan was to scream loud enough that Daredevil would be able to hear her, and Frank said something back about... about... it was a good joke at Matt's expense; she remembered that much.
Was that why she'd been so tired lately?
She finished her piece and sent it off to editorial and called to let Ellison know she wouldn't be in on Monday, maybe not on Tuesday either, maybe not for the rest of the week — she'd be working from home if she felt up to it, and the paper prized her enough that they'd allow that, no questions asked. She had the money for it, had a stable job, didn't mind the idea, maybe even liked it. Two years ago, even last year, her phone call would've been to an abortion clinic, not her GP, but the timing was all right. Her new place had a second bedroom that could serve as a nursery, and the wife of one of her coworkers ran a daycare out of their home.
Frank came back on Friday. He gave a couple of quick, back-of-the-knuckle raps on her door, making sure she knew it was him, and then let himself inside. He had his own set of keys. Karen didn't have a key to his place, but she'd seen it a couple of times — seen all of them, the three main bolt-holes he used through New York. Two of them were little more than closets with a camping cot and a gun rack, but the third was a bunker with room for his van and a full-size bed. That was just about the same as having keys; she could find him when she needed him.
He had his guitar slung over his shoulder — meant he was planning on staying for a few days — and his rucksack and a couple of bags of groceries in one hand. "Hey," he said.
Karen blinked. "Uh, hey." She was in the same place she'd been Saturday night nearly a week ago, hunched over her computer, the table completely buried underneath handwritten notes and maps and documents.
"Thought I'd make somethin'," he said. "Curtis, he's got some new guy, he's, uh, he's cooking for him — some fancy pasta with white sauce. Gave me the recipe." And normally Karen would've said, "Yeah — yeah, that sounds good," or "A new guy, huh? You meet him yet?" or maybe, "Frank, did you break your nose again?" (his nose already changed direction a glorious three times), but she stayed silent, and Frank, always sensitive to impending disaster, set the bags down without breaking eye contact.
"Frank," she said. "Look, we need — we need to talk."
"Yeah?" he said. "About what?"
"I," she said. "I don't think we can do this anymore." And Frank, he just looked confused, so she said, "This thing where you show up out of nowhere and cook me dinner and we — where we sleep together. It isn't anything you've done. It really isn't," she added, because she didn't want him to think — "It's just not working. For me."
"...Yeah," he said. Looked away, grimaced. It was almost like a smile. "Guess I can't say I'm surprised. Is there — uh, is there someone else?"
"You... could say that." Because soon there would be the baby, her baby.
"Right," he said. "Right. You take the groceries, I'll..." He picked up his rucksack and slung it over his shoulder, hiked up the guitar case, turned the doorknob behind his back and then opened the door the rest of the way with the toe of his boot. It was a maneuver Karen couldn't have managed even without forty pounds of luggage.
"Frank — " That was reflex, the old instinct to stop him from leaving.
"Yes, ma'am?" he drawled.
"We'll... we can talk later."
"Doesn't seem like there's much to say, ma'am," he answered. When he backed out of the door, Karen put her hand over her mouth. But it was the right thing to do — she'd tell him someday, he deserved to know, he deserved — she just wasn't going to tell him like this, before the baby was born, before she'd established herself as a single mother; she neither needed his obligation nor would permit him to feel like an unwanted replacement was being foisted upon him. That was what she did: she survived, on her own terms, no matter what.
So Karen did her job. She ran down business moguls and public prosecutors and police captains and politicians, and she stayed up late writing down whatever truths she found — but not quite as late as she once had. She read books about pregnancy and parenting and bought prenatal vitamins and started cleaning the file boxes out of the second bedroom, because that was her job now, too. She met Foggy and Matt at Josie's and drank cranberry juice, at at dinner with Ellison and his wife Shawna she had to bolt for the bathroom when the odor of the vinegar in the salad dressing made her gag. But she didn't start thinking about names.
The exposé on police corruption ran her straight back to the Maggia's door, but she wasn't blind enough to miss the Kingpin's fingerprints — the feel of him, of domination, of the dead-eyed stare people in his employ would give when questioned, because whatever the system could do to them wouldn't ever be as bad as what the Kingpin would do. He was now, however, at least nominally legitimate, so Karen published about the Maggia while she gathered evidence for her case against Wilson Fisk.
She didn't think about Frank. She sat at the table under the window in her living room where she worked when she was home and stared at the wall, and Max curled up on the couch and stared at the door, and sometimes an hour would pass before Karen would realize she was sitting in complete darkness and then she'd stand up and turn on a lamp so that light pooled in at least one corner of the room. That week, the month that followed it — they accounted for the first time in years that she knew she wasn't thinking clearly. What Karen had learned in her thirties was what she wanted and how to trust herself in wanting it, but now… she wasn't sure. She just wasn't sure.
Even though she didn't think about names, she thought about the baby. About whether it would be a boy, a girl. Fine hair like hers or thick, dark hair like…
She was walking back from the subway station one night when she realized she was being followed. Two of them: the same slouching twenty-something white guy from the subway, now wearing a wool coat instead of a sweatshirt, and a graying woman in slacks and a blouse under a trenchcoat that could've come from Karen's own wardrobe. Her hand went to her purse and found the grip of her .380 before her head had finished putting the pieces together. That was another thing Karen had learned in her thirties: that your body sometimes knew what was happening before the rest of you did.
She was three blocks from home —
The woman dropped back. The man drifted closer. Karen started walking faster, heels clipping along the pavement with the rapid staccato gunfire that any other woman would've recognized as a warning tempo. It was spitting rain, not enough to soak her through but enough that her hands and the back of her neck felt cold.
Two blocks —
The man cut across the street to Karen's side. At the same time, two more stepped out from the alley behind her.
One block —
And then someone shoved into her. "Move!" he snapped, and Karen's body let him hustle her through her front door and up the first flight of stairs while Karen's brain was still fumbling at the revolver.
"Elevator?"
"Out," she said.
"Shit," Frank said, and he hustled her up another flight of stairs and another and then three more and he opened the door to her apartment and shut it behind them and threw the bolt. "You got four of 'em on your tail, but they ain't all Maggia."
"Windows?" Her heart was thundering now like it hadn't been in the street below.
"Nah," he said, and then he was quiet for a minute, listening at the door. "No snipers. Just wanted to scare you, I think. Pissed 'em off, you getting to Cicero like that."
Karen screwed the blinds shut anyway before she turned on a light. "Thanks," she said. "I didn't notice until I was off the subway. I, uh, I actually thought they might be courtesy of the Kingpin, but he's backed off lately."
"Yeah, well, don't let your guard down. Fisk won't let you keep digging at him forever." He stepped away from the door and ducked down the hall, into the bedroom. Clearing her home. She could hear him tugging on the windows, making sure they were still locked, not happy until he'd seen for himself.
She kicked her heels off and left them on the living room rug, went to the fridge, looked at the beer, and then sighed and poured herself a glass of juice. "You want something to drink?" she said, or started to say, because she turned around and Frank was there in the kitchen, always so fast and so quiet for such a big guy. He was holding the bottle of prenatal vitamins in his hand.
"Shit," Karen said.
His face was all closed off, not far away like it got sometimes when she found him standing stock-still in one place while memories of some other life played behind his eyelids until she brought him back with a touch on his arm, but hard, raw, kind of like he was braced for someone to knock him in the face with a claw hammer.
He said, "You carryin' my kid, Miss Page?"
Give him credit — he didn't ask if it was someone else's.
Karen swallowed. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, Frank, I am."
And so much for truth-telling; this was more like truth-swallowing, it was a hot coal held on the tongue and swallowed only when someone clamped a hand over your mouth and held your nose shut so you had to eat it or choke.
"Huh," he said. "Huh." He looked to the right, down, to the left, back at her for a second, off to the right again. "You, can you — did you not tell me 'cause you thought I wouldn't be a good — "
"NO," Karen said. "No, Frank, god, that wasn't — no."
"Okay," he said. "So are you gonna tell me why?"
Karen pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and didn't say anything.
"You, uh. You're keepin' it, then?"
"Yeah," she said. "I mean yes, I want — I want this. And Frank, I was going to tell you, I swear, but not until later, after she was born."
"She?"
"She," Karen said.
"Is that right," Frank said, with what in another person might have been something like a brittle wonder. "Is that right."
There were two people Karen really, really wanted to talk to right now, and one was Ben Urich. The other was Maria Castle. Because Maria, she cared about Frank, and she didn't stand for any bullshit, and she'd been through this before.
"You cannot be a part of her life if any of this feels like you're having a… like you're being forced into it," Karen said. "Because I'm not trying to replace… god, I could never… but if you feel trapped into it, you can walk away now. No hard feelings. I can be a single parent. But if you're doing it because you want… you can be as involved as you want to be. I trust you."
"Christ, Karen," Frank said. "I may be a dumb S.O.B., but I'm not so dumb I don't know a good thing when it's starin' me in the face. Of course I wanna be around."
"Okay. Okay, good." Karen started breathing again. "I thought, I mean I figured you would —
"Aw, fuck," Frank said, "how are we going to keep her safe? Karen, I still kill guys — "
She gave him a look.
"Yeah, guess I deserved that. But if anyone gets wind of this, they're… I am not the safest person to be her dad."
"I'm not the safest person to be her mother," Karen pointed out. "Since apparently you hadn't noticed, most of the crime syndicates in this city are pretty used to having their goons gunned down. They're a hell of a lot more interested in going after the person spilling their secrets all over the front page — in going after me."
"You know, I woke up this morning, biggest problem I had was figuring out why you threw me out on my ass. And, uh, stoppin' those guys who were followin' you."
Karen smiled, kind of shaky but wholly sincere, and said, "Yeah, well, now…"
"Yeah," Frank echoed, "now." And he took a minute to rub Max behind the ears, because Max had been at his feet for the entire conversation, staring up at Frank with mournful, liquid eyes while Frank ignored him.
"I'm glad you're back," Karen said. "I missed you."
He looked down, pretending to be absorbed by the dog that was drooling on his boot. "So," he said, "when you said that, uh, I could be as involved as I want — if I asked, does that mean you'd marry me?"
Oh, and Karen's heart, it just stopped right in her chest. Jesus, what was she going to say?
"Yes."
His head came up. "Yeah?"
"But not if… Frank, I can't be an obligation, I can't have you doing this because you think it's your duty. You being involved with her, it isn't contingent on you being with, with me."
"Karen, sweetheart," he said. "Jesus, you are never an obligation."
"Good, okay," Karen said, and then, "Good," again, because she'd forgotten how to string two words together even though it was a fundamental part of how she made her living. "I'm going to keep my name, though. Seems like it'd be easier on both of us."
"You thought about names for her yet?"
"Actually," Karen said, taking herself by surprise, "I was waiting for you." And then she ruined it by adding, "Dammit, Frank, I have been so, so…"
He tilted his head.
"Horny," Karen finished.
He laughed, and Karen busted up laughing, too. Pregnancy hormones, maybe, or all the tension leaving a vacuum when it vanished, or maybe just missing him in her bed, with those big gentle hands and his steadiness, the way he didn't rub against her sharper edges and all the collected trauma that lived in her head, how he understood her without trying to take her apart. Frank Castle. Who'd have thought. After all those long years of being alone, she had a family.
"Now that," he said, and Karen was so glad to be back with him that she almost forgot what he was talking about, "I can do somethin' about that." And he took her to bed, and she was like a rifle in his hands; he aimed and pulled the trigger, and off she went.