#warjournal02

Foggy and Karen are reluctant to leave the room even after Frank specifically asks for Matt alone. Karen in particular—she has something she keeps trying to say about Frank’s family, some breakthrough she’s made, and Matt has to walk her out with a few strong words about office managers not being bound by privilege before she backs down.

She does, though. Foggy too. Matt can hear them whispering outside the door, concerned, but he can tune it out. Focus on Frank, his presence imposing even from a hospital bed, his heart and his slow breathing drowning out the hundreds of heart monitors and MRI machines and televisions and phones throughout the hospital. It’s different, talking in a hospital room instead of a graveyard or a filthy rooftop, doing this as Matt Murdock and not Daredevil, but Frank—Frank’s not any different at all. He’s still tense like a predator about to pounce.

punisher max. | ACCEPTING

hypovolemic shock isn’t the kind of thing you forget once you’ve felt it, is the thing—sam knows he’s right, can feel his galloping heart, the cold sweat dripping down his neck, the bloodsoaked bandages sticking unpleasantly to his skin over ragged stitches. still, the punisher’s gruff baritone rubs his nerves raw, eddies of rough desert brown like he’s brought his war zone back with him in his soul. 

when he manages to get his fuzzy black outline centered in his pinhole of peripheral vision, the silhouette blocking the light is smaller than what his voice sounds like it belongs to.

the punisher season 2. | accepting

‘ yeah. maybe. ’

if it’s true of anyone, it’s true of frank—what he’s been through without breaking, what he’s done without breaking—it’s a lot more than most people could claim. more than matt thinks he could say of himself. he knows he has a line, somewhere, where whether it’s—something happening to foggy or anyone else he loves that much, something external, or—or if he loses his grip on what he’s always known is inside him—someday it’s all going to be too much. one way or the other. murdocks always get back up, until they don’t. 

frank—he doesn’t go down in the first place, not really. everything he takes feeds the rage inside of him. he doesn’t fight it and matt thinks it’s gotta eat him alive. but he never goes down.