Two Lost Souls (Frank Castle x Reader)
Summary: A quiet night at the diner turns into a nightmare. Reader is left in shock and forced to confront her past, with Frank by her side through it all.
Word count: 1.8K
Warnings/infos: blood, gun violence, death, family trauma, panic, shock, no smut
Note: The first part of the story is inspired by maryfieldss “Expendable” fan fiction! You should definitely check it out.
Other than that, I hope you enjoy the storyline. <3
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The diner's quiet at this hour, just a couple of truckers at the counter and the low hum of an old radio somewhere in the back. The waitress has been by twice already, refilling your coffee without being asked, calling you sweetheart and Frank hon with the easy warmth of someone who's worked the nightshift long enough to make regulars out of strangers.
"You want pie?" she asks. "Made fresh this morning."
"Maybe in a bit," you say, smiling.
"Don't wait too long, we're already running out." She winks, moving off toward the truckers, and Frank watches her go with the same quiet vigilance he watches everything.
You're mid-sentence when the window behind you suddenly explodes.
Frank's on you in an instant, no hesitation, the full weight of him driving you down and under the table, one hand clamped hard over the back of your head, holding it down against his chest as glass and splinters rain across the booth where you'd been sitting a second ago.
"Stay down!" His voice cuts through the chaos, rough and absolute, his body curled over yours like a shield, taking the brunt of it so you don't have to. More shots, glass, the diner erupting into screaming around you.
"Behind the counter. Now!" He's already moving, hauling you with him low across the floor.
You look at him, fear in your eyes that something will happen to him, hands holding onto his shirt tight.
"I got this." His eyes meet yours, fierce and certain. "Go. Now."
You go, scrambling behind the counter, pressing yourself flat against the base of it, and Frank's already up, already moving the other way, gun out, toward the gunfire instead of away from it.
That's when you see her. The waitress, crouched a few feet away behind the same counter, hands over her head, having taken cover in the same spot. You're opening your mouth to tell her to get down further when the shots find her, once, twice, her body flinching with the impact before she crumples.
You're moving before you've decided to, crawling across broken glass toward her while gunfire keeps tearing through the diner around you.
"Hey, hey, look at me." You get your hands on her, pressing down where the blood's coming fastest. "Stay with me. Stay with me, okay? What's your name?"
"Debbie," she gasps, eyes wide, terrified, hands scrabbling weakly at yours.
"Debbie. Okay. I got you, Debbie, just stay with me." You press harder, but there's so much blood, more than your hands can hold back, warm and relentless, soaking through your fingers no matter how hard you push. "Stay with me. Stay with me, please."
You see the fear in her face. Her breathing goes shallow. Her eyes lose their focus, drifting, and you keep pressing, keep talking, keep begging her to stay even as her hand goes slack in yours.
"No, no, no, stay with me!"
But she doesn't.
You don't know how long you stay there, sitting in the blood, holding her tight, gunfire and shouting somewhere far away now, like it's happening in another world. Everything's gone quiet and distant and wrong, your hands red to the wrist.
You've seen violence before. These last few days alone have shown you more of it than you ever thought you'd have to carry again. Blood, gunfire, the sharp, ugly reality of it, over and over, until you almost thought you'd started getting used to it. But this is different, somehow. This settles into you differently, deeper, in a place the rest of it never quite reached.
Then Frank's there, dropping down in front of you, and whatever he sees on your face makes him go very still.
"Hey." His voice is careful, low. "Hey, look at me."
You don't. Can't. Your eyes stay on her, on the blood, on the stillness where a person used to be.
"Look at me." He moves closer, lifts your chin with his finger, forcing you to look at him. "There wasn't anything you could've done. You hear me? Nothing you could've done."
You don't answer. Don't nod. Don't do anything at all, and he checks your face again, jaw tightening at what he finds there, the emptiness, the way you're not really looking at anything, not really present in the room at all.
"Okay." His voice drops, gentler now, resigned to the fact that you're not coming back from this on your own, not yet. "Okay, I got you. Let's go."
He gently eases her body away from you and lifts you up, and you let him, limp and unresisting, out through the back before the sirens even start.
After getting back to the hideout, Frank sets you down on the edge of the bed, and you just sit there, staring at your hands.
At the blood.
It's dried now, dark, under your nails, streaked up your arms, and you can't stop looking at it, can't make your mind do anything except see her face, her hand going slack, over and over.
"Hey." Frank crouches in front of you, tries to catch your eyes. Nothing. "Sweetheart, I need you to look at me."
You don't. Your eyes stay fixed on your hands.
He exhales slow, and you can see him make the decision, not to talk you out of it, not to keep trying words that clearly aren't reaching you, but to just act. He needs to get the blood off of you, needs you to feel something real, something present, and the only way he knows how to do that right now is with his hands, clinical, careful, nothing about it anything but practical.
He starts with your shirt, careful, murmuring low the whole time. "Just gonna get this off you, okay". No urgency in it, no demand for a response, just a steady narration of what he's doing so nothing feels sudden or frightening. You let him, and he works slow, unhurried, getting the blood-stained fabric off of you. He moves to your jeans next, blood-soaked from kneeling in it, unbuttoning them with the same careful, unhurried patience, easing them down and off, leaving you in nothing but your underwear. There's nothing in his manner that makes it feel like anything except necessary, his eyes never lingering, focused entirely on getting the blood off you.
He wets a cloth in the basin with warm water, and starts at your hands first, the worst of it, wiping careful between your fingers, under your nails, working the dried blood loose with patient, methodical strokes.
"There," he murmurs, more to fill the silence than anything, working up your arms next. "Almost got it. Almost done."
You watch him do it, watch the water in the basin turn pink, and something about the sheer focus of it, his hands never rushing, never rough, starts to pull you back, slow, from wherever you'd gone.
He moves to your shoulders next, your collarbone, wiping away the flecks that made it that far, always careful, always narrating softly what he's doing before he does it, giving you room to flinch away if you need to. You don't. You just sit there, letting him, the blood disappearing bit by bit under the cloth.
"You're okay," he says quietly, wringing the cloth out again. "You're safe. I got you."
By the time he's done, your skin's clean, and something in your chest finally cracks. Not relief, not exactly, but the first real feeling since the diner, hot and overwhelming, and you start to shake.
"There you are," Frank murmurs, setting the cloth aside, and pulls a shirt of his own over your head, soft and worn, before easing you back onto the bed. "There you are."
He climbs in beside you, careful, and pulls you against his chest, arms wrapping tight around you as the shaking gets worse, as the tears finally come, as everything you couldn't feel in that diner finally catches up all at once.
"I had her," you gasp, the first words you've managed since. "I had her, and she still…"
"I know." He doesn't offer platitudes, doesn't tell you it's not your fault again. He just holds on, solid, unmoving. "I know."
You sit there for a little while, in silence. Then you sit up and look at him. The man who keeps saving your life over and over again, and still doesn't really know anything about you. And you didn't want him to. You don't want anyone to know what happened in your past. But tonight brought back a memory you'd tried so hard to forget.
"It reminded me of my brother, you know," you say, voice shaking. "The bullet wound. The blood. The fear in the eyes. The breathing slowly fading away."
Your gaze wanders around the room.
"He was twelve, when they came for my father. Got caught up in something…" You stop. Tears run down your face, and you try to hide them. "He was just a kid."
You look up, directly into Frank's eyes. He looks startled, clearly not expecting this, that you'd gone through something similar to what he has. Something shifts in his expression, uncertain, like he doesn't quite know how to respond. A quiet "I'm sorry" is all that comes out.
Neither of you says anything for a while after that. He doesn't fill the silence with more words, doesn't try to fix what can't be fixed. He just sits there with it, letting the weight of what you told him settle between you, his thumb moving slow and absent over the back of your hand, like he's still working through what to do with it.
You watch him, waiting for something. Pity, maybe. But it doesn't come. He just looks at you like he's seeing something in you click into place, some piece of you he hadn't understood until now.
"Never told anyone that before," you admit, quiet.
"Didn't have to tell me." His voice is rough, low. "But I'm glad you did."
There's more to it, so much more you could say, whole years of words left unspoken, but you don't have it in you tonight, not after everything. He doesn't push, doesn't ask the questions you can see forming behind his eyes, and you're grateful for that more than you know how to say. But he can already sense it. Once you're ready, you'll tell him more. And he'll be there to listen.
You take his hand, a little embarrassed, surprised at yourself for telling him at all. But it feels good, having said it out loud.
"Thank you for tonight. For everything," you say with a small, tired smile, leaning back against him again.
He holds you. He holds you tight. And there you are. Two lost souls, lying in bed together, feeling a little less lonely tonight.
