That’s My Fuckin’ Wife *punch*
Construction husband!Frank Castle x F!Reader
Summary: Frank’s trying for a normal life for the both of you. He’s back working construction. Things are going good in life, the marriage, the job… Until his coworker gets the taste of your name in his mouth and Frank’s gotta beat it out.
A/N: Day 2 (Construction!Frank) for @darlingshane’s One Last Kill Countdown! Yay, how fun! I didn’t really revise this, just winging the plot like normal. Enjoy 🩷🩷
Warnings: Cursing, male construction site talk, neat n clean bearded Frank, slightly long haired Frank, possessive!protective!husband!Frank, established relationship, Frank-coded assault, Frank-coded threats of murder, implied smut, light spice, fluffy moments of domestication, angst not directly related to reader. Let me know if I forgot anything. 18+ only. Minors do not interact.
Percussive clangs ricochet from cement walls and over rooftops as Frank brings the sledgehammer down. Around him, other construction workers shout, curse. A jackhammer eats up concrete. A whistling gust of wind drags through dust, debris, and it sticks to Frank’s sweat-sheened skin like a crunchy outer layer. He pauses, hammer head by his boot as he wipes the back of his hand over his forehead and wisps of damp hair, smearing sweat instead of clearing it. The gold band on his finger catches in the peak summer sun. He scrubs the collar of his t-shirt over the jaw-tight trim of his beard, squinting through his safety glasses against the sun. Not a cloud in sight.
Rage doesn’t motivate him to be here anymore. Doesn’t have to show up to bleed out for twelve hours, using construction as some semblance of normality.
He’s here for a different reason now. A reason that… fuels him, purpose in work ‘cause his purpose is waiting at home.
A colleague calls out to Frank (using his fake identity), a raunchy, harmless jab. “Hey, Castiglione! Don’t gotta smack that thing around so hard, it didn’t fuck your wife, yeah?” The other guys laugh. Even Frank snorts. A form of… camaraderie instead of mandatory coexistence.
“Maybe that’s how he fucks his wife!” Another guy barks back while performing an exaggerated reenactment of a caveman grunting and thrusting.
All of them fall into another fit.
“Jesus,” Frank mutters under his breath, shakes his head, mouth twisted into a reluctant smirk. “Alright, s’enough. Ain’t gettin’ paid for all that filth ‘bout m’wife.”
They simmer down. For now.
When it’s quiet, the opportunity for a spotlight, one of the shitbag newbie’s pipes in with his usual, nerve-grating dumbfuckery that’s liable to land Frank in jail (again). “Hey, Castiglione,” the kid—Austin, maybe late twenties—chimes. Looks like a goddamn snake: slimy, always slinkin’ around, likely to be found in places he’s got no business being. Dickbag of a person, infecting the world just by being in it. He’s got a problem with everyone, ‘cause he makes problems with everyone for the hell of it. You know the type. “Your wife’s got a way with words. I wonder what things I could make her say, how my name might sound in her mouth.”
A predator the very moment before the attack, Frank’s body engages. Muscles: locked. Eyes: narrowed. Blood: thrumming.
“Don’t think I heard you… The fuck did you say about my wife?”
Everyone holds their breath, including earth.
“I said…” Austin grins, infection. “I wonder what things I could get her to say.”
One singular second passes.
Everyone’s on Frank, all hands on deck to restrain the behemoth of a man scorned with a roar of ‘Whoa, Pete! Easy, Castiglione! Don’t do it, man! Calm down, calm down. He ain’t worth it. Let it go, let it go!’
By a miracle of god himself—Frank relents. Can’t fall back into old habits, even if the kid’s got it coming. Can’t risk calling you at work for bail. Can’t do that to you. Veins in his neck thicker than steel cables, skin blanched the same color he sees. His eyes, though… Dark, feral, those eyes stay snared on Austin in the form of a promise: say somethin’ again, I’ll break your fuckin’ face.
Noon hits. Everyone’s favorite hour ‘cause it means bullshitting, dragging ass back to work, and food.
For Frank, it means peace in solitude. Finding your note in the lunch you pack him every damn day without exception.
Sixteen stories in the air, Frank disappears to his private lunch spot on a parapet wall, his boots dangling over the side, rolled paper bag in hand.
When the guys found out you make his lunches? Shit. Game over. They’ve got an endless arsenal. Frank couldn’t give less of a fuck, though. Let ‘em. Sorry suckers don’t know what they don’t have.
Frank tried to tell you a year ago, when you got this idea in your head, that it wasn’t necessary. “Don’t gotta do all that,” Frank’d say. “Don’t tire yourself out, sweetheart.” “Hey, what’re you doin’? I got it. I got two hands, I ain’t cripple.”
But you got hooked on it. And Frank got hooked on it. Not the servitude, nah.
The notes. The inside jokes. The weird, specifically you ways you’d make his lunch. The chuckle he’d give, the picture he’d text you, a terrifying amount of feet in the air with the note or the sandwich in his hand. Ham and cheese with the mustard in the shape of a heart or smiley face. Peanut butter and jelly, crusts on, cut into bite-sized triangles… toasted. The chip bags you’d murder with permanent marker to draw a (kinda sad, scary lookin’) dog, or cat, or lizard.
Overlooking the city, thinking about how you’re miles away at work, wondering if you’re thinking about him too, hoping you are, understanding if you’re not, Frank digs a hand into the bag. The paper rumples. And…? Sharpness? Wetness?
“The fuck…?” Drawing his hand out, peanut butter and jelly slather his fingers in the innards of his sandwich, dusted in shards of chips. Muttering curses under his breath, holding his sticky fingers up, Frank dumps the bag on the ledge beside him.
A mess spills out. Yeah. It’s the lunch you packed. And someone made goddamn ruin of it. Heart-shaped peanut butter and jellies smashed to hell, chip bag demolished, granola bar ripped into and disintegrated… not to mention the water bottle with a faint yellow tinge to the contents.
Nostrils flaring, the only thing keeping him from snarling, Frank’s hand ghosts over the tattered vestiges of your note, laid to rest on top of the lunch. The best fuckin’ part.
Oh, rage is a familiar friend. He comes and goes easily, reacquainting quickly, like he never left at all.
Frank picks up the shreds of paper, one by one, holding each delicate bit in his massive, dirt-darkened hands. Your scrawl on the paper now in too many pieces to put back together, your note, whatever sweet thing you decided he was worth now destroyed. Rotten before it was ripped, ‘cause some fuck head read it and made sure Frank would never know what it said.
Clouds barge in, loading the sky.
A concussive ringing follows.
The kitchen’s alive with the clamor of pots and pans, the boiling gravy on the stove, the clink of the silverware drawer Frank tugs a little too aggressively.
You skirt around Frank quietly, using the silence to gauge him. Silence with Frank never means anything good. It’s a sign his head’s working overtime, turning ideas over and over until it’s fixed (however that might look for Frank) or he’s fried.
You slip by him to tend to the stovetop, your hand on his hip in passing as he collects the utensils with unnecessary precision.
“How was work today?” you ask, clearing your throat to keep it casual, hiding behind the act of stirring the pot as you verbally do the same thing.
“Hmmm… anything… interesting happen today?”
The question knots the muscles in his back, you see his shoulder blades shift under the tight pull of his black waffle-knit. He pauses, forks and knives in the vise of his fist.
You perk, a brow lifting, feeling the tension fizzle the air and skim over your arms to prickle. “I’ll take that as a no?” you prompt, the corner of your mouth sinking into a frown.
“Forgot it,” he says, voice scratchy when his throat tries to barb the lie, “in the truck. It, uh- heat melted it to hell. Went all over. Sticky mess.”
“So you… didn’t read the note?” A squeak to your tone you clear out again.
The gravy pops bubbles, steam singeing your cheeks. Eyes on Frank’s unreadable profile, his jaw tight, you reach over and flick the burner off.
The silence amplifies it.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Frank says. “Didn’t get to. Jelly glued it together. Who woulda known? Jelly made a dumbass move if ya ask me.”
At dinner, Frank eats like he’s been starved. Goes back for thirds, leaving you mildly concussed from your head snapping back and forth as you watch him sit down, eat, go back. Sit down, eat, go back. Sit down, eat, go back. Praises you the entire time between bites—or with bites in his mouth. Frank’s always shown his appreciation, given thanks, but this…? God, from behind a closed door, it would’ve sounded like sex.
“Can’t believe you learned t’cook like this on your own.”
“Sweetest girl in the world. What’re you doin’ with a guy like me, huh?”
After dinner’s an entirely different beast.
Frank trails you. Every step. Literally. From clean up, to dishes, to put away, to the bedroom, to the bathroom.
Even while you’re in the shower, he’s sitting on the closed toilet lid with your fresh towel draped over an arm, a leg kicked out, blatantly staring through the glass to watch the water-blurred mirage of your body.
“What’d it say today?” he asks, deep voice rumbling through the humidity.
You blink, wondering if you missed part of the conversation.
“What’d what say?” you ask, smearing a hand over the glass to see him clearly for one second.
He leans forward, elbows to knees, towel secure in the crook. “Your note.”
“Oh,” you huff, shrugging, hands smoothing the conditioner from your hair. “Nothing, really. Just the usual. You didn’t miss anything.”
“Sure I did. Missed whatever it was you wanted t’say t’me today.” He motions a hand onward. “Tell me what I missed.”
The sudden weight of bashfulness lags your second shrug, and you turn into the spray to buy time. “I dunno, nothing really… Just that…” Another break, you tilt your face into water and wash off again. Your foot squeaks as you turn around, back in the water, eyes on the tile wall in front of you. “I appreciate you. All the hard work you do for us… me… Even if I don’t say it on a daily basis, it doesn’t go unnoticed.”
Frank’s throat bounces, brows creasing up where your words physically pinch, then warm. Feels… nice. Sweet, like you. “You don’t gotta ‘preciate me holdin’ down a job…”
“Well it’s not just that…” you trail, turning to shut the water off.
Silence loaded with waiting follows.
Frank rises, walking the two steps to the shower door with your towel.
You drag your hands down your face, then push them back over your slicked hair.
The shower door opens in a slow roll over the tracks, guided by Frank’s foot.
“There she is,” he murmurs, offering the towel. “There’s my girl.”
You’ll never get used to hearing that, and your chest never fails to flutter at the tone of his voice when he says it.
When you don’t take the towel right away, instead batting wet lashes up at your husband, Frank fits himself in the frame and drapes the towel around your shoulders. “Thanks f’dinner,” he says through the shimmy of the towel over you.
“You’ve thanked me five times…” yet your cheeks go taut with a secret smile.
“Can’t a guy be thankful for a hot meal an’ a hot wife?”
“Oh, laying it on thick tonight, huh?” you tease, muffled by the towel as Frank plops it on your head to squeeze your hair dry. Never pulls, never tangles. Uses gentle movements hands built for breaking had to relearn.
He snaps the towel off, then belts it around your chest. “F’you? Always.” An arm hooks around your waist to literally lift you out of the shower.
Rug plush under your wet feet, you turn into Frank. Both hands slink up his neck, arms twining around as much as they can reach, signaling to him in your unspoken language what you’re about to do.
Frank gets it. Helps. His hands cover your hips and he lifts so your legs curl naturally around his waist. The towel parts where your bodies meet, your skin radiating velvety warmth. Sitting higher than him now, one of his arms like a perch under your ass, you hum and trace one finger along his hairline, down to his temple, over the sharp cut of his cheek. “It’s not just you holding down a job,” you finally finish, ankles latching behind his back. “It’s… everything.”
Rough fingertips skim the outside of your thigh as you talk, Frank’s dark eyes only shifting between both of yours.
“Don’t gotta thank me,” he whispers, dipping in to nip your chin. “F’nothin’.”
“But I do. And I want to. You… sacrificed everything so we could have this. I know it’s not easy all the time. But you still do it, everyday. I can’t thank you enough for that. I get to have you come home exhausted from physical labor instead of firefights, and the only blood I have to clean is if you cut your finger on a steak knife. I feel… safe. Totally, entirely safe with you, Frankie.”
A thanks. A life he didn’t get to have the first time around. Frank buries his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling the placating scent of your clean, warm skin to staunch the unexpected burn in his throat. “Always want you t’feel safe.” Rumbled against your skin, his beard prickly as he skates his lips to the top of your shoulder.
The sensation, that subtle burn of coarse hair, the tease of his mouth… your knees clamp around his sides. “Frank…” you murmur, his name a plea not to stop.
“Mm?” he hums, lips parting to seal controlled kisses at the slope of your neck. You taste like everything he thought he’d never have again. Sweeter, ‘cause it’s a second chance.
Your body reacts, a transistor in you geared specifically for him, arching your chest into his.
“Smell so good, baby,” Frank murmurs, voice ground down to husk and heat. “Feel so good. So soft. So goddamn sweet, do anythin’ f’you, you know that?”
Somewhere between praise and exploratory touch growing hungry, needy, Frank walks you to the bedroom.
The towel ends up in a wet heap on the floor.
Frank takes his time, drawing out your pleasure first. Makes sure he’s thorough. Uses the desperate pants of his name pouring out of your mouth and the sting of your nails in his back to pacify the frustration from the lunch and note he never got to enjoy.
New days, new beginnings, but Frank doesn’t forgive or forget easy.
Before the sun could do away the night, Frank checked your alarm, pressed a kiss to your head, and left before you could wake—without his lunch. Purposefully. If someone’s gonna defile the wholesomeness of your work, your love, he wasn’t gonna bring it around. Wouldn’t give it a goddamn chance. Smart, yeah?
Now the sun’s blazing, back with a vengeance, heating the metal framework of the building until it stifles.
Sweat funnels down the back of his shirt, pools at the chest. Beneath it, his skin pricks with the fading impressions of your nails. You make the job easy, a good distraction from the mind-numbing repetition of labor. The sledgehammer’s barely made new cracks in the wall before the guys’re at it again.
Bickering incoherently stories down, starting out the day with a bitch-fit instead of just doing the damn work, Frank supposes.
Frank raises the hammer, his arms chiseled in swollen muscle and sweat, shoulders cut mean through his shirt. The head refracts the light, like an augury to the call he’s about to get. Frank drops the hammer down. Concrete crumples under the sheer force, blown to bits at his feet.
Skulls’re easier to break, Frank thinks.
The clamor below heightens. Voices raised, tones strung with urgency.
Catching his breath, Frank pauses, head tilted, hammer handle locked in his fist. Clipped on the back of his belt, his walkie-talkie warbles to life.
“Uhhhh, Pete?” The site supervisor asks through the static. “Got a minute? Need you to come down here. Base level. Make it choppy, minor situation. Need a little… assistance.”
A rock settles in Frank’s stomach. The handle squeaks in his grasp, his fingers cinched around it until his knuckles tent white.
The sound comes again. Same as yesterday.
A shrill tinnitus suffocates all other noise.
He drops the sledgehammer with finality because whatever this is, he already knows he’ll wanna use his hands.
As Frank emerges from the carcass of the building, he sees the situation.
You. His wife. Most precious thing he has. Most valuable gift some merciful god’s decided he can hold. You. Fuck.
Here. His work site. Same place he’s told you not to bother with ‘cause the work’s dirty and the men dirtier.
Brown paper bag in your hand—his lunch—you scoff your indignation as Austin backs you against your car with nothing more than the foul shit spewing from his mouth at a volume meant exclusively for you.
“Stop,” you demand, loud and firm. “Back off! Get the hell away from me!”
Frank storms across the dusty lot as a reckoning, neck scorched red, eye twitching with trigger-loaded rage.
The sun’s long left. Clouds mute the sky in a rabid black.
Your eyes flicker over Austin’s shoulder, his obscenities about your words, your prose and writing in your love letters drown out the instant you see the myth of personified ire on Frank’s face. Your breath stutters, stomach dropping, because he wears something you’ve not seen in years, not since he retired as The Punisher…
You see raw, unfiltered rage.
Less of a man, more of an innately automatic shift: a loaded weapon.
Frank’s taught you to fight. To defend yourself. And you will, absolutely. So when Austin’s greasy breath fans your ear, and your skin revolts like it’s been covered in slime, his words trickling in your ear to corrode any decency—you hit.
You drive your knee straight up, into his balls.
As he comes down in a crumple, hand lashing out to grab you—
One massive fist strikes down with the tenacity of the sledgehammer finding its target.
“THAT’S MY FUCKIN’ WIFE,” Frank roars.
And just like the wall, the guy disintegrates. Fat drops of blood spray on the ground, over Frank’s face.
Frank makes damn sure of it.
Guy’s head bounces off the ground. Frank catches him by the collar.
“One more word,” Frank grits to eyes rolling to temporary oblivion. “One more fuckin’ word an’ I’ll kill you an’ make it look like an accident.”
Yeah. Skulls’re easier to break.
Sun’s out again. Stays out. Mildly infuriating, charring his skin tan. Frank sits at his usual spot, on that parapet wall overlooking the city. Things’ve quieted down again, after Frank took the trash out.
Austin got himself a nice little reprieve in the hospital.
You got an obsessive, half-feral husband for the last few weeks.
Frank got a glimpse at the man he hasn’t been in years. Didn’t like it, being him, how easy it was the flip the switch. But it was necessary so he had no problem enacting swift justice.
He dumps his lunch beside him like any other day, quick to snag the folded note that tumbles out before the wind can get it.
The pungent smell of hard-boiled eggs hits him square in the face, the egg salad sandwich cut into a heart again. He raises his brows at the hot eggs, blinking through the burn in his eyes.
“Jesus, sweetheart,” he talks to the wind like it’ll carry his voice to you. “Tryin’ to kill me with eggs on an eighty-degree day?”
But it’s one of his favorites. Shaking his head, chuckle staying in his chest, Frank unwraps the sandwich dwarfed in his one hand. He takes a bite—half the sandwich gone—and flips the note open.
Paper creased over your letters, Frank’s shoulders fall with an exhale as he reads.
Frankie, One question for you today, more for me than you… What would I do without you? I love you. Don’t get a battery charge today. Let’s leave the felonies at an almost.
And a lipstick-stamp of your lips with your name.
A real, crooked grin tugs his mouth open as he chews. He kisses over your lipstick mark.
“No promises, sweetheart,” he sighs, content, looking out to the city skyline. “No promises… but I’ll try.”