I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF.

the softest palms that never want to touch you until after a bottle of wine.  /  “just braid your hair if you won’t brush it, at least, you useless girl.”  /  pulling on your skirt with one hand as you shuffle away.  /  “you’ll get it done before the day is up.”  /  guilt that isn’t yours to have.  /  it’s a crooked game, but it’s the only one in town.  /  chains.  /  “how could you do this to me?”  /  the sharp sting of guilt.  /  you feel something even though you’re paid to do the opposite.  /  the family you never had.  /  falling backwards through time.  /  quicksand.  /  drowning, but you don’t save yourself.  /  “you’re getting better.”  /  “they smile like a snake.”  /  you’re the stars and the sky.  /  there’s a part of you that couldn’t stay away even if you were forced to.  /  they are your wings, there’s no doubt there.  /  “let’s take off somewhere. let’s fly.”  /  you edge a bit too close to the sun.  /  another ghost to take your place after every stumble.  /  deep roots in the ground slashed open in the sun.

rock candy melting in water.  /  waves rise and leave the foam behind.  /  the precipice you call home has a tip you’ll reach eventually.  /  happiness is the best front a man can take.  /  “i’ve never seen someone as beautiful as you before.”  /  you disagree; they’re more beautiful.  /  discomfort at the tiniest of touches.  /  the sky opens up when you see them. / rain comes down.  /  poppy fields.  /  your sanity hanging by a thread.  /  “oh god, what have you done?”  /  roommates weren’t supposed to be the smartest ones of all.  /  they’ve got a devil on their shoulder and an angel in their mind.  /  you try to help, but it only got worse.  /  now they’re dead, it’s all your fault.  /  adam & eve in the garden.  /  a temptress in crisp button-downs.  /  “fuck, you’ve gone off the deep end, haven’t you?”  /  they lie so perfectly you almost forget yourself.  /  the spark that lit the kindling on your funeral pyre.  /  sugar and spice and a taste for the dark side.

yves saint laurent.  /  black opium on your pillow, a scented cloud drifting behind you like a cape.  /  crisp green apples piled up on the table.  /  your shoes are sharp, but your wit is even sharper. / what a pretty one, they say.  /  you laugh without humor. / a soft, hollow spot sits in your chest.  /  there’s a place you’ll never leave no matter who tries to stop you. /  the seat of power fits like a glove. / heavy is the head that wears the crown.  /  you share a space, but not a mind. / they think you are weak; you are, maybe.  /  “what are you going to do with all of these pills?”  /  an empty bird’s nest.  /  broken pencil tips. / there’s an empty paper in front of you that you’ll never fill.  /  “we want you to succeed. i hope you can grasp that.”  /  “they weren’t there when it happened.”

     Yeah,  okay.  That’s what’s left.  It’s all he has to give,  the only thing he can think of to say because the rest is just bitter and  corrosive   like battery acid;  Frank can’t do that to her,  not today,  not after that,  so he grips the handle of the axe a little  tighter  than he should and keeps his mouth clamped shut before anything else spills out of it.  The way she looks at him now,  how she sets aside the knife and ties back her hair reminds him of exactly who she is.  Not a victim,  or a damsel that needs saving.  It reminds him a lot of what it means to be resilient,  to persevere,  to adapt and overcome.  

     He forgets about that sometimes  ––  forgets that he doesn’t need to  save  everyone,  because some people do just fine on their own.  He wonders if she forgets about that,  too.  Forgets just how  capable  she is without him,  on her own.  How capable she’s always been,  and how much she put it into practice.  “Karen,  I’m–– …  I’m sorry.  Alright?  I’m sorry.  I didn’t––I didn’t mean to make you feel like it was your  fault,  you know,  ‘cause it wasn’t.  Shit happens.  Yeah?  Shit happens ‘n we’re up to our goddamn knees in it.  I was being a dick,   and …  and I was scared.  I was.  Because seein’ you like that,  I just––I couldn’t live with it.  I couldn’t live with it if something ever happened t’ you.  Guess somewhere along the way all that got screwed around in my head ‘n came out pretty bad,  huh?”

     she does forget.  sometimes,  forgetting is easy.  losing sight of herself,  or losing herself altogether,  in the chaos of survival.  the knife had gotten stuck;  that was the mistake.  it had caught deep in bone and dead tissue,  wouldn’t come loose when she’d pulled,  and that’s when she’d felt the jolting snag of hands from behind.  that was the mistake,  but a mistake is all it takes.  just one.  most days,  she doesn’t feel helpless.  most days she can reflect on what she’s capable of and find enough strength in it to keep going.  some days,  like today,  the weight of doubt and second guesses is almost unbearable.

     What he isn’t saying they’re all on borrowed time.  Fighting just to survive the night,  the following morning and the afternoon after that,  just to do it all over again  ––  day to day,  hour to hour,  minute to minute.  What he isn’t saying is that it’s all there is anymore,  and that doesn’t mean what happened is less than she thinks it is,  but that it’s just what it is.  There’s nothing else.  He doesn’t flinch when she takes the blade,  but he can feel the  emptiness  of it.  How space presses in sharp against his palm the same way it did after Curtis died,  the same as it always has,  and the same as it always will.  Frank finds the handle of an axe,  jerking it up from rest as he rises to stand with her.  “I’ll do it.  Why don’t you just,  uh––stay put,  yeah,  think about how much of an asshole I am.  Maybe you’ll finally get t’ rewrite that policy in the meantime,  huh?”

     Who almost died.  That’s what she had meant,  everything that stuck like glass in her throat and Frank finds himself wishing she would say it,  and wishing she wouldn’t all at once.  He’s died a thousand times over before.  They all have,  but never as sure as that  ––  with the exception of one,  and that  one  still claws at his heart every passing day.  Almost is a word that’s all too familiar to him.  Almost this,  almost that.  Almost dead,  but his heart hasn’t caught up yet.  “Yeah.  Okay.”  Maria always hated that.  How he would end the conversation with,  yeah,  okay,  as if there were nothing else to say.  There’s a separate Ka-Bar holstered on the left of his belt that doesn’t belong to him;  it belonged to  Curtis,  but he didn’t need it anymore.  His jaw tics as he unclips it and holds it out to her with the kind of unwavering stare that’s nearly too empty to be on Karen.  “Take it.”

     “Shit,  I don’t know,  how ‘bout you tell me since you like doin’ it so goddamn much.  Was that an asshole move,  Karen,  did that,  uh––did it piss you off?”  There’s no vitriol here.  Everything is as dry and bare as a bone;  Frank figures that must have made this all the much worse,  and he sees how  badly  it stings her,  a second too late to do anything but feel it in return.  That,  among everything else.  “You think I don’t know that?  What exactly is it that you think I felt today,  huh?  I’ll tell you,  alright,  that was––that was  fear,  that’s what that was––and I know you felt it,  too,  more than anyone.  I know that,  but you weren’t the only goddamn one.”

     He would have done anything.  He would have walked through the gates of Hell and bargained his own soul for answers,  for even just a scrap of truth about the men involved  ––  who  facilitated  that deal,  and the one who gave the order.  Fisk knew that Dutton was there;  he plucked at each of his strings until he found just the right one to pull,  and knew exactly what would happen sending Frank into the cell block that kept him and his men  caged  like wild animals.  What he didn’t know was just how much of an  animal  himself a man like Frank Castle was.  All that  grief  that manifests under a new name.  Not just anger,  but a boiling rage that festers and splits its mouth open wide enough to devour everything in its path.

     “Not Fisk.  Dutton.  He was there that day.  He was there.”

     Karen pieces it together a little at a time.  He could have told her more,  about Fisk’s plan to have him brutalized in that cell block and the  massacre  that followed,  all that blood and carnage and bodies,  but didn’t.  He could have told her about their last exchange,  the promise he’d left him with.  The next time I see you,  only one of us walks away.  Maybe one day he will,  but that day isn’t today.  

     Today,  Frank sits in silence and lets her talk,  and he listens to everything she has to say without judgement,  or pity,  or anything else.

     He knows what that kind of guilt feels like.  How it presses down and suffocates.  He can taste it just as  bitterly  as his own.  “––  your friend.  Ben.  That was his car I was drivin’ that night,  huh?  That’s why you didn’t,  uh …  didn’t want me touching his shit.”  Frank pauses to look at her again,  studying her just the same as she studies him.  “Yeah.  Another time.”  They’re closer together than they are apart,  or maybe they always had been and he just didn’t  notice  until now,  until this very moment when he catches her eye,  inhales the smell of her.  It’s everywhere in this apartment,  but always announcing itself  more  in the places she’s near.  “How do you,  uh …  how do you  hold on,  you know,  how do you hold onto yourself the way that you do?  All this shit you’ve been through ‘n you––you don’t  break,  you know,  you walk outside every morning and face this whole goddamn city with the kinda courage I’ve only ever seen on the battlefield.  How do you do that?”

     dutton.  the name rings a bell,  but it’s a faint one.  something she can’t place.  not that it matters;  if he was involved in the massacre,  and frank found him,  then he’s dead.  the simplicity of that conclusion should rattle her and doesn’t.  which,  somehow,  rattles her more.  because a part of her,  despite her best efforts,  has sunk into a state of numbness.  of desensitization.  after the shock comes the calm,  deceptive as the eye of a storm.  she’s lost so many pieces of herself that she wonders if it’s even possible to stitch them back together.

     one day,  she’ll tell him everything.  she’ll tell him about her brother.  about the chain of events like a domino effect when she’d come upon the union allied pension file and woken up covered in daniel fisher’s blood.  she’ll tell him how it felt to have a paralytic drug coursing through her system the night she took a life;  tell him about the seven rounds she’d fired into james wesley because she would not be swayed,  wouldn’t be cowed by intimidation or threats.  a story for another time.

     she has to believe that they  have  time.  that it’s not borrowed,  even though all evidence points to the contrary.

     "...  yeah.  yeah,  um  ...  his car,  his music.  sometimes it still doesn’t feel right,  to even drive around in that thing,  like it didn’t feel right when ellison gave me his old office.  but i  —  i know that he wouldn’t mind.  he was a good man.”  talking about it hurts,  but it’s supposed to hurt.  it isn’t supposed to be easy:  great or small,  loss never is.

          “Oh,  Christ,  Karen,  don’t give me that shit,  don’t––I never asked you to do that.  All I said was that it might be a good idea to cut it.  Yeah?  I said that,  you turned it down,  that’s it,”  tension sets everything rigid,  from coil of his muscles to how her jaw clamps in the way it always does when she’s rightfully  frustrated  with him.  “Look,  I don’t care what you say,  alright,  call me an asshole if that’ll make you feel better,  but don’t put goddamn words in my mouth.”

     josie’s bar doesn’t close until two,  give or take,  and they’re inching past midnight one drink at a time.  for a place that’s always crowded with locals,  it offers a strange degree of privacy to its patrons.  people don’t bother each other here.  if hell’s kitchen had a beating heart,  she thinks,  this place would be it.

     they’ve been talking for a while now.  the night opened with shots and banter,  eased steadily into a whiskey or three and the settling weight of whatever worlds they’re both carrying.  deanna’s sentence had begun the segue,  an absent  man,  my brother would’ve  …  that tapered off into silence and a long sip from her glass.  brother  is a wound that’s asking to be reopened,  a word that burns,  stings,  and suffocates all at once.  but if karen’s gotten good at anything,  it’s repressing those memories.  this one isn’t hers.

     her head tilts,  hair slipping over her shoulder.  “would’ve  —  ?”

     “it’s a long story,”  deanna says.  a quick scrunch of her nose,  a look that says she’s already prepared to dismiss the subject.

     “there’s been a lot of that going around lately.”  a pause.  then,  “i have time.”

     she continues,  before the other woman can swerve with a quip or a halfhearted rebuttal that’ll drive them into silence again until one of them takes this in another direction.  “i get it,  you know.  everyone has their secrets.  we drag all this bullshit around with us like luggage,  and we think that we have to carry it alone  —  we think that it’s easier,  especially when it’s gotten people hurt.  or worse.  people that  …  didn’t deserve it,  people that we tried to keep safe.  guilt like that,  it’s  …  difficult,  to let go of.  so i get it,  if you’d rather keep it to yourself.  but,  if you wouldn’t  —”

     there’s a smile,  a soft hitch at the corners of her mouth.  an invitation without pressure;  with an out,  if deanna wants to take it.

     “i’m here.  nothing that you say to me leaves this bar,  i can promise you that.”  the smile pulls a little more.  “what happens at josie’s stays at josie’s.”

     “Hey,  I didn’t say that.  Did I say that?  I don’t remember saying that.  If it wasn’t your hair,  it would’ve been somethin’ else,  you know,  careful’s––Jesus,  what is that,  what  fairytale  is that?”  His eye looks swollen because it is.  Still,  he pulls away from her touch.  “Don’t change the subject.”