one batch. two batch.

Frank Castle. Punisher. "You know, long as I was at war… you know, I never thought about, uh, what would happen next. What I was gonna do when it was over. But I guess that's it, you know. I think that might be the hardest part, the silence. The silence when the gunfire ends. How do… How do you live in that? I guess… I guess that's what you're trying to figure out, huh? It's what you guys are doing. You're working on it. I respect that. I just… Um… If you're gonna look at yourself really look in the mirror, you gotta… yeah, you gotta admit who you are. But not just to yourself, you gotta… admit it to everybody else. First time as long as I can remember I don't have a war to fight. I guess if I have to be honest, I just… I'm scared."

[punishcrcastle]

ghostrider-reyes:

@punishcrcastle

Robbie’s relationship with the first Ghost Rider had always been–weird, mostly because it came with a bunch of other people attached to it: there was Johnny, there was Danny, and somehow Frank got mixed in because he was friends with the two of them–and they had all in one way or another looked at Robbie, who actively killed people at the behest of a demonic spirit he shared his body with, and immediately thought him worth their protection/mentorship/friendship/whatever the hell it was they thought they were doing. He used to mind it more–he had been surviving by his own merits since he was a teenager, taking care of another human being, and he had more power than he knew what to do with–he didn’t need anyone’s help. These days he just lets it happen–he’s actually kind of proud of the fact that he’s one of the few people in the world that Frank Castle likes, and it’s–nice, to have someone who understands why he has to do what he does. Doesn’t question the morality of it. 

And it’s good that he doesn’t ask questions, because when Robbie catches a glimpse of the familiar painted skull on a bulletproof vest he’s in the middle of penitence staring the hell out of a member of a gang of particularly violent Doom supporters–the same gang that Robbie has caught carefully hanging around the vicinity of his apartment since he started tracking them. The guy writhes in pain, claws at his face as the all of the pain he’s ever inflicted on other people is brought on him, before Robbie lets it stop and lets him think he’s safe for the moment being. He’s too shaken to get very far, unable to process what had just happened to him, so Robbie takes the opportunity to turn around and face Frank. “Checking up on me?” He says as he feels the flesh growing back on his face, wraps both hands around the chain slung across his chest. “Cause there’s not much to see here, just a piece of garbage who thought he could intimidate me by hanging around my place.” 

There weren’t many people left in the world who really got Frank. After what happened to his family, he became a hard man to understand. He turned his grief into rage, turned the things that had happened to him into violence, and that made a lot of people uncomfortable. It made them squirm, made them nervous, because if that could happen to Frank, who was to say it couldn’t happen to anyone? The Punisher was something of an inconvenient truth, and most people didn’t care for that. Somehow, though, Frank had managed to find a few who did. He’d managed to find people who, on some level, got him. He wasn’t sure what it said about him that more than one of those people had some vengeance demon he still didn’t quite understand possessing them, but he’d learned not to question it. Somehow, it still wasn’t the weirdest thing in his life.

Of all of them, Robbie was the one who somehow managed to bring out whatever was left of Frank’s paternal instincts. It was his age, Frank knew, the way he was still a kid in most ways. It made Frank feel like he ought to protect him, to keep him safe in the way he hadn’t been able to do for his own kids. That was what brought him on the block that held Robbie’s apartment every night towards the end of his rounds. The kid could protect himself, Frank knew, but that didn’t stop his feet from leading him there. It wasn’t exactly rare for him to find Robbie like this, taking out some piece of shit. Obviously, Frank didn’t mind it. If anything, it was entertaining. Snorting, Frank shrugged a shoulder. “Just in the neighborhood,” he replied. It wasn’t entirely a lie; he had been in the neighborhood, even if he had come for this purpose. “You want any help with that? I’ve had a slow night.”

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

Relationships of the romantic variety had never been kind to Karen. Her secretive nature was most likely a big part of that, she could freely admit it, due to the fact that no one truly knew her. Matt hadn’t understood what she had lost — he had never asked — and her certainly didn’t acknowledge her ferocity or desire for freedom. What Karen had had with Matt was love, she had never once doubted that, but she had fallen in love with a man that never existed, and assuming Matt similarly, he had fallen for a woman devised entirely of his assumptions. The other people Karen had dated were similar, she never knew Clint, and he never understood a thing about her, and the list only continued from there. It was an unfortunate reality, but with Frank, things were different. He asked the proper question, he allowed Karen to take the necessary time to trust him, and he never once assumed what kind of woman she was based solely on devised appearances. It was among the many reasons that Karen had fallen for Frank, and perhaps the most important, the exact reason why she was willing to dive into loneliness in order to be with Frank Castle for presumedly a very short period of time.

When Karen broached the subject, it was obvious that Frank was surprised. She couldn’t blame him for that, they had been avoiding discussing it, but Karen could only play that game for so long. She preferred their honest way of communicating, but without acknowledging what had happened between the two of them, honesty was impossible. “I’m glad you haven’t forgotten,” Karen replied with a wry smile, hoping to remind Frank that he was free to be lighter, albeit only briefly. He was a burdened man, incapable of joy for extended periods of time. It was something that Karen would inevitably have to make peace with, though she believed accepting Frank’s misery was impossible — he deserved far better. “I always believed what we’ve built is equal,” Karen pointed out, “and equality means either of us can discuss what’s on our minds.” Luckily, Frank continued, and admitted that he hoped it would happen again. “No, that’s not bad at all,” Karen replied. “I was hoping it might happen again, too, although I’m not sure what that would look like. Have you got any ideas?”

Most of Frank’s experience in dating without being in a relationship came from high school. He’d still been a teenager when he met Maria, barely graduated when he’d asked her to marry him. The rules back then were incredibly different than they were at this point in his life. He had a lot more baggage now, a lot more weight that he wasn’t sure he could ask anyone else to carry. Karen knew a lot of it, of course, had dug and dug and figured out everything that happened to him when he came back from the desert. (She’d been the first person ever to ask him about his family, the first person to talk to him like a father who’d lost his children instead of a loose cannon getting ready to explode. He’d never quite found the words to thank her for that.) Even then, she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know all the things he’d done overseas, all the orders he’d followed. Frank didn’t regret the criminals he put down as the Punisher for a second, but some of those people he’d taken out for special ops? He regretted them. He felt for them. They ate him up inside more often than not, and he didn’t know how to tell her that without admitting that, at the time, he’d thought nothing of it.

It was part of the reason why he hadn’t expected this conversation, part of the reason why he’d figured she’d let it go, pretend the kiss hadn’t happened. Frank wasn’t the sort of man anyone could ever really get to know, and he wasn’t the sort of person most people wanted to get to know. He was gruff, he was angry, he was constantly grieving. And Karen, for whatever reason, cared about him anyways. She took on his pain like it was her own, grieved for people she’d never known because Frank was grieving, and for Karen and her big heart, that was enough. “You’re hard to forget,” he told her with a rare smile. His smiles -- the real ones, the ones without that underlying level of bitterness behind them -- seemed to be reserved for her and her alone these days. “It is,” he agreed. “I know it is.” He and Karen were always on equal footing, both worked hard to ensure that that was the case. His smile widened a little at her confession, and he nodded his head. “I think --- Me and you, I think we’ve always looked a little different than everyone else. I think I don’t mind what it is, what it looks like, just as long as we can be something.” 

[punishcrcastle]

notdaredcvil:

The PTSD angle had been one that Matt had expected to come up within minutes of taking Frank’s case. Something within him had known that Frank would push back against it, maybe because he had heard the man’s heart, how steady it was, and how he didn’t do anything different between holding a gun and putting a bullet through someone’s head besides let out a light exhale, and that was more to do with focus than anything else. Taking on the Punisher case in the first place had been insane. He knew that Frank would have the time of his life in prison, knew he would tear through criminals like the best of them, but yet he had remained determined to … do what, exactly? Get him off with murder? Reduce the sentence? Get him put in a mental institution where Matt was pretty damn sure, even now, that he belonged? Or was Matt just trying to prove something to himself, trying to give the firm something to focus on besides how much he was lying, trying to keep Reyes the hell away from the Punisher case?

Honestly, Matt hadn’t really picked out the answer from the list that came to him. He assumed that working together in his mind, they had all managed to convince him. Karen had agreed with him automatically, which had only served as a means to spur him on. He knew why she did it. For some reason, she saw a part of herself in Frank Castle, saw someone that deserved a strong defence, someone that deserved respect, even. Matt hadn’t really had time back then to wonder why that was, at least not until he was on the docks that night and heard Karen’s heart thumping when she thought Frank was dead, but now he had nothing but time.

Nothing but time, and a reminder of what had happened a year ago, a reminder that continued to pop up regardless of what Matt did to encourage him to stay down. Fighting back against Frank wasn’t like putting Turk behind bars, or getting meth dealers off the streets. Fighting with Frank was exhausting purely because of the psychological weight behind everything. Frank got in his head like almost no other enemy (besides, of course, Elektra. Considering the fact that it was Elektra, that was more a compliment of Frank than anything else). There was no doubt that he was well trained, that he posed more of a threat in a hand to hand fight than Matt had expected, but the true challenge in dealing with the Punisher was the fact that sometimes, Matt didn’t really want to stop him.

“I suppose it depends on what you’re protecting,” Matt argued, “or what you think you’re going to.” Daredevil basically relied on the fact that everyone was a coward. His reputation was well known, most criminals knew that he wouldn’t murder them in cold blood and leave their bodies on spikes for their families to see, and that meant that he had to get more than a little creative with his threats, and with the damage that he inflicted. Matt had to make them believe that there were things worse than death. The fact that someone could do that back to him, though, was something that he was fighting back against. “Not advice,” Matt said, though that much was obvious. The muscle in his jaw twitched nonetheless. “Insight, if it’s possible. I’m guessing you have to have some kind of system for picking who you murder, right? It can’t be random.”

There was a definite edge to Frank’s words. He was hard to get a read on, even with the insight that Matt had, far more than the average person. Matt had sat with him in that graveyard, had been saved by him on the roof, had talked to him more times than he could count in between and after those occasions, and still he had absolutely no idea what was going on in Frank Castle’s head. In college, he was taught that to appeal to the jury, you had to get into their minds, had to root around in there to see what worked. He monitored their responses, how their bodies changed to his words, and altered what he was saying to meet their specifications. With Frank, that was impossible. “What do you call what you do now, then?” Matt asked. “A vendetta? Revenge? A hobby?” Matt didn’t speak at that, didn’t argue against it. Maybe he was scrambling. Maybe Frank was one of the few people who managed to get that response from him consistently. Maybe a whole lot of things that he didn’t want to think about came to the forefront before he pushed them right back down again.

“Okay, now you sound like someone else I know.” Only Elektra could make something so threatening seem like a pick up line. It was the curve of her words, maybe, how Matt could tell she was smirking while saying them. Or maybe it was the fact that they were both naked when she said it. Either way, it definitely wasn’t as appealing when Frank was describing it. Getting into bed with Fisk was dangerous, trying to double cross him would get anyone killed. “The Irish tried that,” Matt reminded him. “Getting the one over on him. So did the Yakuza, Madame Gao, everyone else. We got him put away, but what you’re saying, we know he’s not done. He’s not down. What makes you think you can take him out even if I stepped back?”

Protecting people like Fisk wasn’t what Daredevil was for. If Frank wanted to kill Fisk, he would kill Fisk. But if Matt knew about it, and did nothing, wasn’t that the same thing as murder itself? This was where the line got blurry. Father Lantom was very clear about it, stated that watching while bad things happened was the same thing as doing it himself, but Matt wasn’t entirely sure, not that he would ever admit it out loud. “So what would you have me do?” Matt asked. “You want me to do what you do, Frank, is that it? You want me to kill every person that sells drugs on the street because they got in deep? You want me to murder a man trying to provide for his family, even if it’s in the worst way possible? Not every criminal deserves that punishment.”

Matt swallowed thickly. Frank had a way of putting every single one of the moral arguments that he had in his own mind into words, making them harsh and biting, cutting through the cool wind that blew across the rooftop. “I can’t save everyone,” Matt said finally, “and neither can you, with your bloodshed, with your guns and your violence. You can’t save everyone either.” Matt wasn’t entirely sure whether saving people was what Frank was fighting for, or if in his mind, he was killing the people who hurt his family all over again, that in some way it would make up for what he lost. Like he had said before, he couldn’t get a read. “He won’t get past me,” Matt said finally, though he wasn’t entirely sure of that inside himself. “He’ll come for me first. I was the one who put the final nail in the coffin, not the lawyers, not the judge. Me. And I’ll take him down again, put him back where he belongs, for longer this time.” Fisk, though, knew what the criminal system was like, what the justice system was like. He wouldn’t risk parole on killing Daredevil. It was playing chess with Bobby Fisher, and the only way to end it seemed to be uprooting the entire goddamn board.

Everyone had a turning point in their life, something that happened to them that changed who they were on some basic level. Back in the war, Russo used to call it the point of no return. He’d look at a guy in the trenches, see something cross over his face, and he’d just know. He’d turn to Frank with a nod, something somewhere between grief and some sick pride in his eyes, and he’s say it. He’d say there’s no coming back from that like it was some badge of honor to be irreparably broken. Frank learned how to recognize it, too, learned how to see it in someone’s face before Russo turned towards him, learned to look for it, to wait for it. Some guys, it made them better at what they did. Others, it made them worse.

It wasn’t just something that happened overseas. It could happen on a guy’s home turf, too, happen anywhere. Frank was of the belief that it was inevitable, that at some point in their life, everyone came to their point of no return. Sometimes, it was getting served with a pile of divorce papers by a stranger when you’d thought for sure things were looking up. Others, it was flashing lights and sirens pulling up your driveway with awful news, the kind that knocked the air right out of you. Some people, they got hit with several, got pelted with moment after moment of terribly things that they’d never recover from. Frank wasn’t sure how many he’d had. He figured each bullet that tore its way through his family had counted for one, figured he’d had another waking up in that hospital, another when he realized Schoonover was at least partially responsible for what happened to Maria and the kids.

Murdock had to have had at least one, and Frank knew it. Nobody climbed out their window in the dead of night all dressed up in red kevlar with horns on their head if they hadn’t faced the unfaceable, no one figured they could singlehandedly end crime in Hell’s Kitchen without killing someone if they hadn’t had a moment when the world was crushing down on them and they couldn’t get air into their lungs. If not for the annoying, condescending way he tried to push his ‘no killing’ bullshit on everyone else, Frank might’ve felt for the guy. (Maybe there was a part of him that still did regardless; Maria always said he was a goddamn softie.)

“Nah,” Frank countered, glancing to Murdock carefully. “Doesn’t matter in the end. In the end, everybody breaks. You can trust me on that.” Hell, Frank knew he’d probably break, too, if someone put enough pressure on him. It didn’t matter how strong a person was, how much they had to fight for, eventually everyone gave in. Human beings, they ran on survival instinct. Every nerve in their body, every instinct in their brain, it wanted to live. Their lungs would do anything to keep drawing breath, their heart would do whatever it took to keep beating. You couldn’t win out against a drive like that. “This about finding some way to stop me? That’s what you want, isn’t it? I tell you my system and you think you can get there before me, put ‘em behind bars before I put ‘em in the ground?” He snorted again, rolling his eyes. “Wouldn’t matter, anyways. I don’t know until I know. Until I work my way up the ladder, ask whoever I’m taking out who they work for, who they work with. They don’t hesitate, you know? They’ll sign their buddies’ death certificates if they think it’ll get them a few extra days of living.” The distaste was clear in his tone. Back in the Marines, every guy in Frank’s unit would’ve died for the guy next to him. Out here, they’d sell out anyone for a shot at another extra heartbeat.

For years, Maria had known Frank better than he knew himself. She knew what he was hungry for before it even registered to him that he needed food, knew what he was going to say before the thought popped into his mind. He’d joked once that he wouldn’t know who he was if he didn’t have her around to tell him, and he hadn’t realized how true it was. In the Marines, miles away from her, he’d lost himself. He’d spent months on tour not really knowing what he was doing, following orders he knew were wrong. Then, he came home to her, and it was like a missing piece sliding back into place. And then, just like that, she was gone again. He wasn’t sure she’d recognize him if she saw him now. He wasn’t sure he recognized himself, either. It was sad to say it, but the person who knew this new Frank Castle the best was probably Murdock. The guy was a constant pain in Frank’s ass, but Frank couldn’t deny that half the reason he annoyed him so fucking much was because Murdock did seem to understand what went through Frank’s head. He saw the understanding in his face, saw it for a split second before the man shooed it away and went back to clinging to his morality. It was infuriating. 

Letting out a sharp laugh, Frank shrugged his shoulders. “You wanna know what I call this?” He gestured to the gun, as if to clarify what he meant. “I call it taking out the trash. It’s not a vendetta, it’s not revenge, it’s a goddamn chore. It’s a necessity. It’s something I’ve gotta do so my house won’t stink. This isn’t some moral debate for me, Red, it’s not a question. This? This is simple.” Murdock, of course, wouldn’t like that. He wanted it to run deeper, wanted there to be some huge, endless gap that separated Daredevil from the Punisher. He wanted Frank to be crazy, to be after something he couldn’t relate to, to be wrong. He wanted it so bad, and Frank figured it must’ve driven him crazy that it wasn’t the case. 

“You got smart friends? Gotta say, that’s surprising.” It might’ve been, if he hadn’t known who was under that mask. Karen was one of the sharpest women Frank had ever known, and as much as he hated to admit it, Nelson wasn’t an idiot, either. They might not want much to do with Murdock now, but they’d been his friends once. They’d cared about him up until the moment he’d stopped letting them. Murdock might’ve been an asshole, but he managed to attract smart friends. “The Irish, the Yakuza, Gao, they’re all a bunch of goddamn idiots. They wanted to take him out in a way that would let them take his power. They wanted to take over for him, to take what he’d built and have it for themselves. They made it complicated. Me? For me, it’s simple. It’s easy. It’s one shot, one round, one kill.” There was more to it than that, of course. The other gang leaders, when they’d been gunning for Fisk, had wanted to make it out the other end still kicking. They’d cared more about whether they lived or died than whether or not they finished the job. That had never been a driving factor for Frank, never been something he worried about. If he died taking Fisk out, he was fine with that. If killing the Kingpin meant the Punisher bit the dust, too, that would be all right.

“I want you to take some fucking responsibility,” Frank snapped, voice gruff and deep and angry. “I want you to recognize that your way is bullshit. That it doesn’t work. I want you to understand that when you put these guys behind bars, when you have them sent to jail for a couple months, a couple years at most, it doesn’t change shit. They get out, they do the same shit over and over again. They go to parks with loaded guns and they open fire. They kill children, Red, kids. So, yeah, if it’s between putting down a man ‘trying to provide for his family’ and keeping someone from burying their goddamn kids, I’ll pull that trigger every goddamn time. You wanna stop me, I’ve told you how. You can stop me with a bullet or you can get the hell out of my way. That’s what I want you to do.”

Frank was breathing hard now, worked up and angry the way only a conversation with Daredevil could make him. The guy had a way of getting under Frank’s skin that no one else on Earth could replicate. Laughing bitterly, Frank shook his head. “Don’t tell me about who I can and can’t save. I know. You can trust me on that one, Red, I know I can’t save everyone.” Hadn’t he seen that spelled out for him plain in the park that day a million years ago? Hadn’t he heard it punctuated with every bullet that ripped through his children, ever drop of blood that spilled out of his wife? Frank knew he couldn’t save everyone. He’d always known that. “But hell, at least I’m doing something real. Something permanent. What about you, Red, huh? What do you do? At the end of the day, what kind of difference do you make?” Not a big enough one. Not anything close to big enough. “Christ, Red, he already did. He already got passed you, already slipped through whatever hold you think you had on him when you put him behind bars instead of in the morgue. You put him back in prison, he’ll get out again. Guys like him, they always do. He’ll get out again, and again, and again, and he won’t stop coming. He’ll never stop coming. Maybe this time he comes after you first, yeah? Maybe this time he comes gunning for you and you put him back in. What’s to say he won’t save you for last next time? Or the time after that? There’s only one way to keep them safe, Red, one. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

[punishcrcastle]

notdaredcvil:

There were any number of other people that Matt could have gone to the border with. People that he cared about, people that he intrinsically trusted (even if there was always an element of doubt there, with everyone besides maybe Daisy and Nat). Frank Castle fit into neither of those categories. In fact, he was the person that Matt distrusted the most. They could agree one moment that there would be no guns involved, but the second they ran into the fight Matt would hear the AK-47 rattling in the background, and he would have to tackle his teammate then instead of the guys they were supposed to be taking care of. In another life, perhaps, he and Frank would’ve made a good team. As it was, they were as much a hindrance to each other as an annoyance.

Matt wasn’t entirely convinced that today would be any different, but they had seen each other now. That meant even if they went their separate ways, they would cross paths. At least this way Matt could keep an eye on his back for a knife. “Fun wouldn’t be the word I’d use to describe it.” One thing that Matt had always feared was complete darkness, complete silence. That was what that round to the head had brought him, albeit for a short period of time. “Oh yeah? I managed to find your place alright. Your guard dog was easily persuaded.” Even finding the Punisher’s hideout, though, hadn’t provided Matt with the insight he needed, and listening to the city meant he turned up too late. Frank was unpredictable, and insanely good at what he did. “Okay, first off, demons aren’t even alive,” Matt deadpanned, “so I’m pretty sure we can’t technically kill them, right?” Banishing the demon’s messengers had to be what a good Catholic did! Or at least that was what Matt was trying to convince himself.

Frank didn’t exactly have an abundance of people. He didn’t have a lot of friends he could turn to, didn’t have a lot of people watching his back. These days, it seemed like he only had Karen, seemed like she was the only person on Earth he could ever trust, and he never would’ve taken her into a fight like this. Karen Page was a hell of a lot stronger than anyone was willing to give her credit for, but that didn’t mean Frank wanted to see her running out into a wasteland full of demons with only him watching her back. Still, he probably would’ve taken her over Murdock. At least Karen wouldn’t have been a thorn in his side, wouldn’t have been lecturing him on the morality of pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure if it’d be easier going up against demons, but he wasn’t exactly counting on it. Murdock had a way of making everything difficult.

If it’d been up to him, he would’ve gone the rest of his life without ever teaming up with Daredevil again but, tragically, the universe had other ideas. The universe had always hated Frank’s fucking guts. “You’d think that’d make you do everything in your power to avoid it happening again, but here you are, running that mouth of yours.” Murdock always made it exceptionally hard not to shoot him. The way Frank saw it, he was a goddamn saint for only doing it the once. “Yeah, and where’d that get you, huh? Didn’t do you much good.” Matt had caught Frank eventually, of course, but Frank wasn’t sure that was something that could really be called a victory for Murdock. Did finally catching your guy really mean anything when he was half-dead by the time you found him? Frank wasn’t sure, could only make vague stabs and guesses as to how Murdock’s mind worked. “They got beating hearts,” he pointed out. “Go down when you shoot ‘em. That makes them something. Thing’s gotta be alive for you to kill it.” Was that how Murdock was rationalizing this? Christ, that was pathetic. 

[punishcrcastle]

spoiledsteph:

@punishcrcastle

This was a stupid idea. Beyond stupid—almost as stupid as setting off a firecracker to distract Mr. Freeze. He wasn’t happy, Steph busted her knee on the ice rink he’d made trying to capture her, and the whole night was a total waste. Steph was determined to make the stupid idea of finding the Punisher and getting him to do her bidding into a rousing success.

It could happen! Steph told herself, trying to stay positive. It just wasn’t…likely. Whatever. Probability could eat Steph’s shorts. Shaking the can of spray paint to warm it up, she covered the side of an old water tower in Queens with a doodle of a skull. That was the dude’s calling card, right? Steph wondered, stepping back a bit to admire her handiwork. Next to the skull, Steph wrote an enormous 11PM, hoping the Punisher would scope out the area before making it rain bullets, or worse, demanding that Steph hang up her cape and hit the road, jack. “This just a negotiation, I promise,” Steph mumbled, just in case he or anybody else was listening, “not a subtweet!”

Giving the graffiti one last look, Steph scuttled to her hiding place (a rooftop away), and settled down to wait.

Typically, people in New York who knew Frank was alive did everything in their power to avoid catching his attention. They figured it was better to be safe than sorry, figured eventually the Punisher would snap and kill someone regardless of whether they deserved it, and that was fine by Frank. He didn’t want anyone tracking him down, didn’t want to deal with any more lectures than he was already getting from Murdock.

So when graffiti with his symbol on it popped up near one of his favorite vantage points, he was surprised to say the least. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, wasn’t sure what they were after. It could’ve been a trap, he figured. The cops would never try something so risky, but plenty of the gangs in the city might. They’d figure they could get Frank where they wanted him, figured they could team up on him and give him more than he could handle, take them out. They were wrong, of course. If he was walking into a trap, heading into a huge group of mobsters looking to take him out, it was akin to walking into a goddamn playground for him. That was what made him go, what drove him to actually give it a shot. If nothing else, it’d keep him from getting bored.

At 11pm, he found himself standing under the graffiti, glancing around. Experimentally, he whistled, loud and sharp, hoping to draw out whoever brought him here. “You gonna start shooting,” he called, “you best get to it. I’m not a man who likes to wait.”

[punishcrcastle]

akagoddammit:

Jessica shrugged in response. “Wouldn’t be the worst thing,” she said simply. The worst had already happened, and they both knew it. Nothing, not even death, scared her now. Nothing but the thought that Trish really was just… gone, forever, that there was nothing waiting for her sister on the other side. Jessica would endure any kind of hell if it meant Trish had some kind of heaven. 

She ignored his response, and glanced around the warehouse. Fairly simple, but she guessed it was where he’d be staying for a few days. He was comfortable enough to take out his weapons stash and clean it, at the very least. “Yeah, I noticed that,” she said softly. She’d stuck around that scene long enough to hear what Frank’s victim had done – she couldn’t argue he didn’t deserve what he got. But it still turned her stomach when she thought of how the man had squirmed in his bindings, gurgling at her because his lips were too swollen to enunciate. 

The air immediately changed when she spoke, tension sparking like electricity. Neither one of them were ever really off the edge, always a half step away from walking on the razor. She stiffened too, bracing herself for his reaction, unable to stop her eyes from flicking towards the gun at his side. But when he spoke, his words were soft, which only made her more unsettled. The shame unexpectedly washed over her, and she ducked her head, staring down at the dusty floor. “I know,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment. “I try not to think about it.” She took a breath, then glanced back up at him. “But it wasn’t the worst thing. Turning them over. Wasn’t – as hard as I thought it’d be.” He was maybe the only person who understood what it was like to be a killer, to have death and murder in your blood. “Part of me wasn’t sure I’d be able to – to not cross that line again. Now at least I know.” 

Snorting, Frank quirked a brow. “Wouldn’t be fun, either,” he muttered. They both knew that he knew too well how it felt, facing down the worst thing. For Jessica, it had been losing her sister. For Frank, it had been watching his wife and kids die. They’d both already faced their worst case scenarios and, for better or worse, came out the other end still breathing. They both had to figure out how to navigate that, how to live with it.

Even before he’d lost his family, Frank had never been one for a life of luxury. Maria had been the one who’d insisted on the interior design of their home, driven by a love for all those house shows Frank mostly pretended to hate. The life he lived now, squatting in empty warehouses with his own blood staining the floors, it wasn’t something he minded. He’d had it a lot worse out in the desert, had it a lot harder when he’d been living in a tent full of a dozen other guys. This was almost luxurious by comparison. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t trying to keep it secret.” Frank had never much cared who knew what he was doing. He didn’t bother cleaning up after himself, didn’t try hiding it. He killed the people he killed, and every last one of them had it coming. On some level, he figured Jones understood that.

He didn’t miss the way her eyes darted to his gun, as if he’d shoot her for letting the people who killed Trish live. It wasn’t something he’d do, despite what some people thought about him. Frank had never been quite as unhinged as Murdock tried to make him seem in his trial, had never done anything without knowing exactly what outcome he was after. He didn’t kill people for crimes that didn’t deserve to have them wiped off the face of the fucking Earth. Jessica not taking care of the people who’d killed her sister, his friend, wasn’t exactly good news, but it wasn’t worth firing a shot over. “It’s not supposed to be easy,” he snapped, gritting his teeth. “You think what I do, you think that’s easy? It’s not about easy, it’s about getting the job done. It’s about keeping it from happening again.” He couldn’t say he wasn’t fucking pissed, couldn’t pretend he was fine with those men being in prison instead of in the ground. He wasn’t fine with it. He’d never be fine with it. “Sometimes that line needs to be crossed. It did then. You should’ve finished the goddamn job.”

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

@punishcrcastle​

Relationships were always complicated, Karen understood that. The romances she had were typically short trysts, including what she had had with Matt. She had loved him undoubtedly, but at the end of the day, she hadn’t known Matt Murdock and Matt hadn’t known her. She never trusted him with the truth about Kevin, and Matt had never once asked about where she grew up or how close she was to her family. It was unfortunate, a difficult lesson to learn — you could love someone desperately and never know them, and they could make decisions about who you were — but Karen was slowly overcoming the heartbreak over that particular failure. Truthfully, it wasn’t losing her relationship with Matt that hurt as much as once again being forced to lose her family. That being said, her decision to visit Frank had nothing to do with the past that had broken her heart. She was visiting Frank because of the man he had proven to be: trustworthy, honest, caring and while they undoubtedly had difficulties and would in the future, she wanted to know for certain that their relationship could exist in its own realm. It would never be open, no one would realize Karen was with someone, but it would mean something to her.

Seated inside Frank’s current warehouse, the dogs gathered around her feet, Karen nervously looked down at her hands. Typically, she was comfortable with Frank, their friendship was deep and they had discussed secrets. “I was hoping we could talk about something,” Karen said quietly. Their kiss had been on her mind since it happened, and she wasn’t blind, she was aware that Frank was interested in her. “We kissed recently, and I was wondering if you wanted that to happen again.” Beating around the bush with Frank was pointless, they respected each other much more than that. Karen understood that in many ways, whatever they created would be lonely for her. Frank was dead for all intents and purposes, a wanted criminal, but Karen was inclined to follow her heart. Even if it were brief like every relationship Karen had in the past, Frank was worth it.

For Frank, love had seemed simple up until the moment it wasn’t. He’d loved Maria and his kids more than anything else on Earth, would have done anything to keep them safe, and he’d failed them entirely. Love hadn’t been enough to save them, to keep them alive and, suddenly, it seemed far more complex than it had ever been before. He started thinking of shit like that, of relationships and romance and family, in the past tense. He’d had it once, and he figured he’d never really get it again. You didn’t get a second chance at something like that, didn’t get a do-over. Then, he met Karen. He met her and, all of the sudden, he was feeling shit he thought he’d lost a long time ago. He looked at her, saw her, and family didn’t seem like an abstract concept he’d never see again. What he had with her was different than what he’d had with Maria -- he was a different man now than he’d been back then -- but it was still there. It was still something.

If the way she’d kissed him was anything to go by, she thought it was, too.

He’d been avoiding the subject since it happened, been fighting a war to keep his eyes from darting down to her lips every time she spoke. She hadn’t mentioned it, either, and he tried to be relieved. He tried to remind himself that the person he was wasn’t someone who could have what she deserved, wasn’t the sort of man who could give her what she needed. He figured she regretted it, and he couldn’t fault her for that. When she broached the subject in his warehouse, he felt his eyes widen slightly, unable to hide the surprise. “We did,” he agreed. “We did do that.” He considered her words for a moment, wondered why she was asking him what he wanted. “Guess I was waiting on you to tell me that,” he admitted. “Thought the ball was in your court.” Rubbing at the back of his neck, he shrugged a shoulder. “It bad of me to hope it might? Happen again?”

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

Truthfully, Karen had never entirely known what fuelled her to look deeper into the Punisher case. She had suspicions, but introspection was difficult, and the choices she made leading up to entering Frank’s home had been reckless. When she first negotiated to peek at his files, she risked angering the DA, affecting Foggy and Matt in the process. Unfortunately, that hadn’t gone well, and it definitely hadn’t been safe. After she witnessed the sheer injustice that she had found regarding Frank’s injuries and broke into his home, she wasn’t entirely sure what kind of man the Punisher was, although he had spared her life. Perhaps what fuelled her was as simple as that: finding justice, seeking the truth, but Karen understood herself far better than to completely believe that. Karen’s motives were honourable, but only to an extent. Frank losing his family and battling for answers and ensuring no one else lost what he had reminded her of herself years ago, chasing every single lead in Kevin’s death that she possibly could. His obsession mirrored her own, albeit far more violently, and the recognition had helped Karen defy the odds and fight for Frank Castle when no one else would. He was human, he deserved sympathy if no one was capable of empathy.

Loss and obsession were dangerous things to bond over, but rather fuel each other’s unhealthiness, Karen and Frank supported each other. They realized who the other person was beneath their disguises and guards and they were battling the odds, attempting to find justice that no longer existed in either of their circumstances. The law ignored Karen’s case entirely and corruption had disgustingly been eradicated the evidence in Frank’s case. Together, they could find peace, Karen hoped, although she was more than aware that Frank would most likely never settle. Where Karen had every intention of working through the trauma she had repressed, Frank seemed determined to remember his family indefinitely. It was lonely, it was heartbreaking, but Karen rarely felt so intensely about someone — especially someone honest and respectful — and she had every intention of being with him if possible, regardless of how short their relationship would be. When Frank kissed her back, Karen wasn’t at all surprised. Their feelings were obviously mutual, neither had bothered disguising it, and kissing Frank reminded Karen of life outside her pursuit for truth. Her mind had been so consumed with finding answers about the Castle, about President Doom, and about Kevin that she had never once considered the connections she was missing out on. It was breathless, it was wonderful, and in the end, it would only lead to loneliness. She cared for a man that would never surrender memories of the family he had lost. “Good,” Karen replied, ignoring her doubts. “I meant that and before you try to inform me it’s a terrible idea, I already know and I don’t care.” Strangely, her words reminded her of Matt when he had warned her. Frank most likely wouldn’t, he understood that Karen made her own choices, thank god. “If you had any intention of warning me, that is,” she added.

Frank wanting to hear from her on a daily basis was undeniably nice and Karen couldn’t help but enjoy the knowledge. He was aloof, difficult to justify contacting often, but if Frank wanted it, Karen could easily comply. “I’ll text you tomorrow morning then,” she replied. Idly, Karen wondered how their relationship would change the more they spoke, the closer they got, even though it was impossible. Frank was legally dead and if he weren’t, he was a wanted fugitive. Anything that could possibly happen between them would have to remain hidden and that was a tragedy she would have to accept. “Thank god you don’t seem to care about many people’s opinions,” Karen replied seriously. Frank had made it clear that he cared very little for what other people thought, but that he did find Karen’s opinion important. She genuinely believed that he was a good man given a terrible hand, and the more she got to know Frank, the more that opinion solidified. When Frank took her hand, offering an apology, Karen silently squeezed his hand in reply. It wasn’t sympathy, but she had heard countless apologies in Fagan Corners and had no interest in them continuing. What Karen wanted was to discover why her brother had been killed and why law enforcement had never looked deeply enough to find evidence about how and who was behind it. Frank of all people would understand that. “No, I never could,” she admitted quietly, sounding pained. “All the leads I found went nowhere and eventually, the cops began talking to me. I still continued, but my parents had a mental breakdown and I agreed to stop. That’s when I moved here,” Karen explained. It was a difficult confession, she was a relentless woman, but it was the truth. Lying to Frank was never something she intended to do, though a lie would be much easier to say. “I’ve always been funny,” Karen replied with a snicker. Frank’s teasing was seemingly reserved solely for her and it was something she enjoyed. “You should bring them by here so I can bathe them properly,” Karen replied, obviously disagreeing with his claim. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe the government that’s in New York thought he was the only person capable?”

The first time he’d seen Karen, it was through the scope of his rifle. She’d been protecting Grotta even though he hadn’t deserved it, been intent on getting him out of that hospital and to safety. The next time he saw her, tied down to his hospital bed, he’d recognized her immediately. He still remembered the cold realization that came with her words, still remembered hearing her speak and knowing she’d been in his house, seen how he’d left it. When he’d asked to speak to her alone, he hadn’t expected much. He’d figured she’d be afraid of him, figured she’d hate him for what he’d done. For Grotto, for the rest, for all of it. She hadn’t. Karen was just about the first person to show him any kindness, to treat him like a human being instead of a threat. She’d listened to him talk about his kids, smiled as she recounted the state of his house, asked about the toys in the floor and the drawing on the wall. Daredevil, he reminded Frank who he was, who he had to be, but Karen? Karen reminded him of what he had been. She helped him remember a time when he’d had more than the weight of a rifle in his hand, helped him recall what it felt like to see people face to face instead of through a scope.

Even now, she treated him as more man than monster. She didn’t carry the same caution around him as most people did, wasn’t afraid of him. He’d told her he’d never hurt her, and Karen believed him. Karen took his word and made it worth something just by holding him to it. It could be a dangerous thing, not having anyone who expected something from you. It could lead you down a path you couldn’t come back from, the kind of path that landed men on the other side of Frank’s gun. Karen kept him from becoming that man, and Frank owed her for it, owed her more than he could ever hope to repay. It was why he should have pulled away, why he shouldn’t have kissed her back, but he wasn’t strong enough for that. Frank had so little left in the world, had nothing and no one but her. Maybe he was damned for wanting her, for kissing her when he knew he shouldn’t, but he’d accepted his damnation a long time ago. Frank wasn’t sure what he deserved in life, if he deserved anything decent at all, but he knew Karen had earned a life with a better person than him. She was good down to her core, and while Frank had no regrets about the people he’d killed, would do it all again in an instant, he wasn’t under any illusions as to what sort of man he was. At the end of the day, he was still the man who’d been unable to protect the people who were his to save, the man who’d lost his wife and his children because he’d been too slow to act. Karen deserved better than that man and, deep down, he was pretty sure they both knew it. But for now, for this moment, her lips were on his and his hand was on her waist and it felt all right. He chuckled as she spoke, nodding his head. “Yes ma’am,” he breathed, quietly relieved. If she was asking him not to tell her what a bad idea this was, was he still bad for keeping it to himself? “I was,” he told her. “I was gonna tell you.”

Typically, Frank wasn’t the type of man to keep in touch consistently but with Karen, things were different. She worried about him, he knew, and he worried about her just the same. It’d probably save them both a headache, having a daily text message at least. “I’ll keep an eye out for it,” he promised her with a nod. He knew he’d never be able to give her much. Once upon a time, he’d been the sort of man who could give someone what they needed, had given everything he had to Maria and their kids, but he wasn’t that person anymore. That man had died with his family, the same way Frank should have. Even if he weren’t legally dead, even if he weren’t a fugitive, even if he didn’t have to do what he did, Frank wasn’t sure he was the sort of man who could settle down, could come home and sleep through the night and keep the bed warm for someone else to sleep at his side. He felt for Karen, felt more for her than he had for anyone in a long time, but he didn’t know how to be what she needed. He didn’t think he ever could be. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about with me,” he agreed with a nod. There was only one opinion he cared about at all, and she knew it. They sat there for a moment in silence, her hand in his. It might’ve been nice if not for the subject matter, might’ve been enjoyable. “You still looking?” He knew the answer. Karen wasn’t the sort of person who gave something up without an answer, wasn’t the kind of woman who let things go. She kept looking into his family even after he’d shot the Blacksmith while she begged him not to, kept trying to find his answers even when she had no clue where he was or how to get them to him. “Yeah, that’s what you think,” he replied with a low chuckle, shaking his head. “You gonna, what, give them a bubble bath?” He was smiling as he said it, clearly amused by the idea. They both knew he’d do it, both knew those dogs would be at her apartment for bathing within the next few weeks if only to give him an excuse to see her. “You think so? Seems like they’d have better people to appoint, if they thought that. The mayor, maybe. Hell, I could see them putting a guy like Stark in charge. But Doom? Seems like a loose cannon.” 

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

Growing up, Karen had never idolized superheroes like the other kids in Fagan Corners did. They were all amazed with people like Captain America and proudly claimed that they would grow up to become exactly like him. Karen, on the other hand, had never viewed Captain America as someone worth revering. After all, it was impossible to emulate someone that was a complete stranger, and frankly, Captain America was a creation rather than a person; America was clever for giving the people a figure to rally behind, someone brave and enigmatic. Still, Karen couldn’t help but see dishonesty in the man that the military had used to inspire Americans. That didn’t change his heroism, of course, or make him a bad man, but Karen preferred to believe that everyone had heroic traits. Every single individual was a superhero in their own capacity, every single person was worth rallying behind, armed with a just cause, and Karen was proud of her viewpoint. She liked to believe that her most heroic trait (not that she considered herself heroic) was her desire to find the truth even when it seemed impossible, Matt’s was obviously his willpower, Foggy’s was his loyalty and Linda who worked at the coffee shop across the street from her home was her thoughtfulness. Every single person had a heroic trait, even those that were feared.

Frank Castle’s most heroic trait was his unconditional love. Karen had never met a man who fought so fiercely for the people that he loved — unfortunately, in his case, those people had been lost. The people that viewed the Punisher as someone invulnerable was incorrect in their assessment, Frank Castle had become outwardly cold, but his emotions were intense and all consuming. The vendetta may have consumed him, but Karen was lucky and saw many more sides of Frank Castle, and all of them made her all the more positive that above all, Frank was chasing after the love that he had lost. It humanized him in ways Karen could hardly fathom.

Frank’s smile was a rare sight and Karen felt honoured that she’d earned a genuinely content expression from him. Frank deserved more than pain and Karen would go to every single length in order to remind him of it. “She sounds like she was spoiled,” Karen replied fondly. “But if she liked it, I’m very happy it that she got it. Of course you didn’t mind it, you were providing for the people you loved.” To Karen, it made perfect sense that Frank had strove to make his kids happy, complying with their picky palates. She had never intended to be a parent, but she had loved Kevin enough to do similarly if it were required. “I’ll have to get you to cook something for me soon,” she said with a smile. Karen believed that Frank would never lie to her, he was an honest man, too haunted to bother with lies, though she doubted Frank would be prone to lying under any circumstances. “You’d be surprised how many busy people find the time,” she said bitterly. Matt in particular had always lied to her, and while Karen had no doubt that she had loved him, moving on from Matt was easy as a result. As Frank sighed, Karen glanced over at him and smiled, pleased that he seemed to enjoy their close proximity. “I don’t think I know how to only make friends anymore,” she said quietly. It was a sad truth, but one Karen was slowly growing accustomed to. “It keeps you alive,” she replied simply. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Making people into heroes had always been a slippery slope. It held them to a standard that often wasn’t fair, put a lot of expectations on them that were impossible to meet. It was hard on the person being made into a hero and the one doing it, a headache for everyone involved. Frank had gotten himself a reputation with the Marines, had become the sort of man people believed in without question or doubt. It was dangerous, made them sloppy. Got them killed, sometimes. Heroism wasn’t something anyone could really live up to, Frank knew. Anyone who tried would fall short, and anyone who was counting on them would wind up disappointed, wind up hurt, wind up dead. Still, he figured the closest thing to a hero he’d ever seen was Karen. She was incredible, awe-inspiring, and she didn’t even have to try. It was something else. She was something else. Frank wondered sometimes if she knew it, and other times he was sure she didn’t have a clue. She saw herself as ordinary when, in reality, she was anything but.

There weren’t many people left who could make him smile in a way that wasn’t sarcastic or bitter or angry underneath, but Karen was absolutely one of them. Sometimes, she almost made Frank feel like the man he’d once been, almost made him feel like the man who he’d figured had died alongside his family. She had a way about her, had some quality that made it impossible for him to be miserable and surly and furious the way he was when he was on his own or talking to someone else. Karen seemed to get him somehow, and it had been a long time since Frank had anyone capable of that.

Her eyes lit up when he smiled, as if the expression was something precious. It warmed his heart in a way he was no longer familiar with. “Yeah,” he replied with a light chuckle. “Yeah, I guess she was.” He liked to think he’d been a good father, liked to think he’d done right by his kids until the moment he hadn’t. It didn’t matter now either way, he supposed. No matter what sort of father he’d been, it wouldn’t shape them, wouldn’t affect their future. They didn’t have a future to affect anymore. “I was,” he agreed. “I’d like that,” he told her. The idea of cooking for her was a good one. It’d been a long time since he’d put those skills to use, and Karen was a good person to use them on. “Might be a little rusty. You’ll probably have to, uh, have to bear with me a little there.” There was a bitterness in her tone as she spoke again, and Frank couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking about Murdock. He wasn’t sure what had gone down there, wasn’t sure what happened or how it ended, but she’d clearly had some anger about it when discussing it with him in the diner. Selfishly, Frank was sort of glad she hadn’t taken his advice and worked things out. Karen deserved a hell of a lot better than a man content with lying to her face. (She deserved better than Frank, too. He thought she might deserve better than anyone could ever give her.) “You made friends with me,” he reminded her. “And I didn’t exactly make it easy.” She’d pushed and prodded in ways he didn’t understand. It might’ve pissed him off if it hadn’t been so endearing. His expression softened as she went on, talking about how she didn’t want to lose him. There was something like guilt in his eyes. He couldn’t promise her she’d never lose him, not when he’d told her he’d never lie to her. Frank knew where he was headed, knew where his road ended up. He couldn’t go back on it now, couldn’t stop what he was doing. He needed vengeance, needed justice, needed peace. There was only one way to achieve that. “I don’t want to lose you, either,” he said instead, because that was the truth and it was better than a comforting lie.

[punishcrcastle]

akagoddammit:

He picked up the gun, but he hadn’t shot at her. Not even once. She had a feeling that was more than most people could say. Maybe he was just wondering how she found him so fast, but it was easy enough when you had the experience she did. The time she did, on the outside of humanity, living in the outskirts. She felt it more and more each day, especially here. With the announcement they were in another dimension, everyone else was huddling together, like shipwrecked survivors, coming together for warmth. But she and Frank, they were outside all that. 

“Ever think I give a shit?” she shot back, smirking as he set the gun aside. She pretended to think it over for a moment, and then she climbed over the railing and dropped down. The cement cracked as she landed, but at least she managed to stay on her feet. “If you call that a superhero jump, I will shove your biggest gun so far up your ass, you’ll spit bullets,” she warned him, brushing dust off her hands. 

She stood up slowly, hesitating now that she was actually in front of him. “Sorry,” she started finally, sputtered it almost. “For – bailing last time. Something came up.” It sounded like a lie, because it was one. It just occurred to her, as she walked out of his last hiding place, that hearing him shoot someone wasn’t a memory she wanted, even if she only heard it. “I wanted to tell you,” she said softly. “That I got them. The ones who killed her.” Her eyes flicked up to lock on his. “I got them, not the way I wanted, and not the way you wanted, but how she would’ve wanted me to do it. They’re in some Panel jail now, or something.” 

It was hard to be surprised that she’d found him again. She had a way of it, something he didn’t really understand. Frank was decent at finding people himself, hadn’t met a criminal yet who could hide from him, but he had a hell of a lot more training in the area than she did. The Marines taught him how to hunt men down, how to find him no matter how well they hid, and he still wasn’t as good as it as she was. He respected her for that.

“You’ll give a shit if I pull the trigger next time,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. They both knew he wasn’t going to shoot her, but sometimes it was a nice thought. She’d never get under his skin the way Murdock did -- that man had a knack for it that no one else could manage -- but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be goddamn annoying from time to time. Still, it wasn’t bad, seeing her. “You said it, not me,” he pointed out, raising his hands in mock surrender. 

She’d never been one for hesitation, and seeing it in her now made Frank stop what he was doing and look up, brow raised. “Don’t worry about it,” he shrugged. “Had work to do, anyways.” He was better left alone on those days, when he found someone shitty enough to deserve for him to take his time. On those days, Frank was more animal than man, more instinct than logic. He stiffened as she spoke again. She didn’t have to say the name; Frank knew who she meant. There was only one person she could mean. Trish had always been the main thing the two of them had in common. “You got them,” he repeated softly. She got them, only she hadn’t. Not really. They were in jail, they were breathing, they were alive. It left a bitter taste in the back of his throat. “They deserve a hell of a lot worse.” It wasn’t fair for them to live when she didn’t get to. It wasn’t fair that life was so often wasted on people like that when the lives of people like Trish, like Maria, like Frank’s children were cut tragically short. It wasn’t right.

[punishcrcastle]

notdaredcvil:

Matt told himself that there was no way in hell or high heavens that he would ever, ever allow himself to become Frank Castle. There was a belief within Matt that said the man standing before him had a heart, that it beat for the people that he cared about even if that circle was small, that he desperately believed he was achieving justice, vengeance, protection for those who were left alive, or whatever the hell it was that caused him to put a bullet through the heads of those that he deemed deserving of such a punishment. There was a belief there, and perhaps that came from the fact that they had sat together in that cemetery, that even after they fought each other and shot at each other and whacked each other around the face with a billy club, they could still have a moment of pure humanity. Maybe it was because Matt had actually felt the tiniest scraping of fear when, in the middle of Frank’s story about reading his daughter to sleep, he had heard the man’s heart pounding furiously in his chest, the space around it filling with blood.

Somehow, Frank had pulled through. Matt was inclined to say that such a thing was divine intervention, but God sparing someone that had murdered so many seemed like something that shouldn’t happen, that couldn’t happen. God’s plans were often confusing, they were beyond human understanding, and often, Matt found himself screaming on rooftops because a murderer, someone who stole innocent families’ possessions, a human trafficker, had been released from prison and was back on the streets, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it besides put his fist in their faces.

He wasn’t Frank Castle. He never would be. Yet, he could understand why Frank had said that he was only one bad day away from being him. They both shared the same proclivity towards violence in order to handle situations, even if there were potential legal avenues that they could go down. They were both angry, they were quick to action, they were impulsive even in their planning. They were well established, they knew what they were doing, they were confident in their abilities, and steadfast in their beliefs. A long time ago, Matt had listened to Frank and saw a picture of himself forming, and it had terrified him. Stick hadn’t taught him how to fight while pulling his punches, after all - Matt could kill with the best of them, and could kill well.

That didn’t mean he would ever do it. It wasn’t just the religion that stopped him, it was that he knew if he crossed that line, stepped a toe over it, he would find himself going down deeper and deeper into that hole. He would never be able to get out of it, or see his friends for being at the bottom. A man was not an island – that was what Claire had told him once, and he had ignored it. He wasn’t ignoring it anymore. “I suppose that depends on the man you get,” Matt said. “That’s why you pick your targets more carefully, right?” It was something like a question, far more than rhetorical. Sometimes it seemed as if he knew Frank better than most, others he was as much a mystery as ever. How he chose the people he went after was one of those mysteries.

“You’re one cocky son of a bitch then,” Matt said, unable to stop himself from smiling at the end of it, though he could tell even without seeing himself that it was sharp at the edges. Frank Castle was the kind of person who could purposefully get taken in by the Irish mob, tortured to within an inch of his life, and still assume that at the end of the day, he would be the last one standing. Outside their base, he had proven that was the case. “This thing,” Matt repeated. “Are you talking about your mission?” Missions - that was what soldiers focused on, wasn’t it? Was Frank still thinking like a soldier, or had he moved past that so long ago he wasn’t entirely sure what he was? That almost seemed more dangerous, not having a single thing to grasp onto, to keep him afloat. “I haven’t made a decision on it yet,” Matt answered instead. “Doesn’t mean I don’t have plans. You’re –” Matt cut himself off, focused on the city instead. Frank was … complicated. Even in his own mind he would leave it at that.

A muscle in Frank’s cheek (jaw, it was lower) tensed, and Matt wasn’t sure whether he should flinch at that or feel vindication. He settled for remaining stoic, not moving at all in the face of it. He had the feeling there were few that could stand up to that look on the Punisher’s face. He probably could because he couldn’t see it. He’d be The Man With Fear any other way. “And what if you couldn’t get to someone that you thought deserved punishment?” Matt asked. “What if the only way to get to a person that was wreaking havoc on innocent people, a person who had a finger in every pot, was to get into bed with someone like Fisk?” Desperation made people do dangerous things, and Matt knew what was going on in his own mind. With other people, he wasn’t so sure. “You are, though,” Matt said. “You’re playing right into what he wants. He’s going to walk out, and no one will be able to touch him until the perfect moment, and before that, he’s going to hurt hundreds of people. At least.”

Frank’s anger at Fisk was palpable, and he believed every word that he was saying, as he had a tendency to do. Frank was almost painfully obvious, and at that moment, it made sense to Matt why he had heard that catch in Karen’s voice that night at the docks, as she looked into the explosion and wondered if it had finally taken Frank out. “It’s exactly the same,” Matt argued. “Knowing someone is going to do something and letting them do it is exactly the same thing as doing it myself.” It was like the first night, when Frank had taped a gun to his hand. Choose between murder and murder. That was no kind of choice. “The lawyers didn’t put him away,” Matt argued. “I did. They got the legal standing, but I was the one who put him down. If he’s going after anyone, it’s me, not them.” Not Foggy. Matt couldn’t live with himself if that happened. He was barely living with himself now.

It didn’t take a lot for a man to go from a war criminal to a brutal vigilante. People looked at Frank, at what he did, and they wanted to explain it away. They talked about the bullet he’d taken to the head, talked about it scrambling his brains, or they mentioned his time overseas and figured he’d come back with PTSD, figured he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. Nelson had gone as far as attempting to use it all as an excuse, as a way to keep Frank out of jail. He wasn’t responsible for his actions, they’d claim, because he didn’t mean them. It was a little insulting, frankly. His meltdown on the stand had been due to Fisk’s promise, a desperate grab for answers as to what happened to his family, but Frank hadn’t had to pretend, hadn’t had to grasp for the words. He’d meant every single goddamn word he’d said on that stand.

Frank Castle was a man who knew exactly what he was doing. When he put down the people he killed, he did it with a clear head and a clear conscience. If he had the chance, he’d go back and kill every single person he’d killed again and again and again, he’d do it all over in a heartbeat. Every single one of them had gotten what they’d deserved, and he knew Murdock knew it. He could deny it all he wanted, could talk about hope and trust and pixie dust until he was blue in the face, but it didn’t change what he knew.

When Frank looked at Murdock that first night and every night that followed, it was like looking into a funhouse mirror. The image was a little twisted, a little altered, but it was still a reflection. No matter what Murdock adamantly claimed, there weren’t a lot of differences between Daredevil and the Punisher. Murdock figured he was better off because he couldn’t finish the fucking job, figured his inability to make a takedown of some gangster scumbag permanent made him high and mighty. The way Frank saw it, it just made him a coward. He knew it was only a matter of time before Daredevil crossed over that line, knew there was no coming back for the man once he’d done it. He wasn’t sure if he was looking forward to that day or dreading it, didn’t know if he wanted Murdock to become a little more like him or wanted to see him stay who he was. It was hard for Frank to puzzle out what he really wanted nowadays, and whatever the hell kind of dynamic he had going on with Matt Murdock seemed an impossible puzzle to solve.

Snorting as Matt spoke, Frank shrugged a shoulder. “Not really,” he admitted. “Torture, it does everyone the same. No amount of strength is gonna hold up if you keep at it long enough.” He hadn’t learned what he knew about torture from his time as the Punisher. That was something that might surprise people, something that’d make them uncomfortable. Frank’s skills in making people talk came from the Marines, came from less-than-legal covert operations that the U.S. government didn’t want anyone knowing about. His more intimate knowledge on the subject came from the days when those missions went to shit, the times he’d been the one in the chair gaining a body full of scars and waiting for the perfect moment to get out. “You wanna know how I pick the people I put down? What, you looking for advice?” He snorted again, quirking a brow. He didn’t have much of a system, really, didn’t have much of a defined way of finding the people he killed. In the beginning, he’d been hunting down anyone affiliated with anyone who’d been in the park the day his family was killed, but when those people got harder to find, he got a little less picky. It wasn’t hard to find scumbags deserving of death in New York or any other city. Most cases, all you had to do was open your eyes and there they were.

“Cocky or stupid,” Frank replied, smiling faintly at the phrase. Maria used to say that, used to shake her head with a laugh and wonder aloud whether she’d married an egomaniac or an idiot every time Frank had insisted he could fix the gutters or take care of the tree that had fallen over the back fence. Looking up, he noted that Murdock was smiling too, sharp and crooked like it was an accident, like he was still pissed off but couldn’t help the expression. He raised a brow at Matt’s question, at the use of the familiar word. “I haven’t had a mission in a long time,” he said. If Murdock hated what the Punisher did, Frank Castle’s missions as a Marine would probably make his blood freeze in his veins. Would he think Frank was better or worse back then than he was now? Would he figure following orders absolved him of what he’d done overseas? Frank wasn’t sure. For all their similarities, he had no idea how Murdock’s mind actually worked. “Oh, no that’s a load of bullshit,” Frank replied, barking out a dry laugh. “You’re scrambling here, Red. I’m not too stupid to see that.” It had always seemed like Murdock wasn’t sure what to do about Frank when he caught him, even in the beginning before they’d really spoken. Whatever morals Murdock had, Frank seemed to challenge them.

Sometimes, conversations like this were almost entertaining. That day on the roof, that day he’d chained the asshole to the chimney and talked in vague terms about what made him who he was, it’d almost been fun. Murdock found a way to ruin it every time, of course, said something that pissed Frank off or got loose and tried to stop him from doing what he wanted to do, what he needed to do, but for a few minutes, sometimes, he almost enjoyed it. Right now wasn’t one of those times. All these hypothetical questions about morality, all these possible situations that he’d probably never find himself in, they were irritating. Being irritating was one of Murdock’s best skills. It was probably what made him a half-decent lawyer, if Frank had to guess; the judge’d say anything just to shut the guy up. “You get into bed with somebody and it gives you into the best position to slit their throat in their sleep,” he replied lowly, trigger finger twitching around an imaginary gun instinctively. When he got to Fisk, when the man was out of jail and where Frank wanted him, he wasn’t going to make it quick. “And what are you doing, huh? You’re sending ‘em to jail, is that it? You’re sending him the people he needs, you know that? You send people to jail and they meet him, they get in with him, and they’re out in, what, a few weeks. Months, maybe. You’re giving him new pawns to move around the streets, giving him people to do what he wants done. You think that’s not playing into what he wants? You think people aren’t getting hurt from that? I know you’re not the brightest, Red, but even you can’t be dense enough to miss that.”

He wondered, at moments like this, how exhausting it must be for Murdock to be so strict in his backwards thinking. Killing someone meant killing them, not killing someone meant the same, thinking about killing them was as bad as doing it... It had to get old, had to wear him out. He remembered asking back in that cemetery if Murdock ever got tired, remembered what little expression he could see through the man’s mask, remembered thinking his question might’ve been answered even if Daredevil didn’t offer anything verbal. “What about the people who die because you couldn’t pull that trigger, huh? The guys you let go taking out families, that the same thing as you doing it yourself?” As far as Frank was concerned, it was. When you thought about the number of lives you were saving by pulling that trigger once, the decision became an easy one. It became simple. “The lawyers played a role in it,” he argued, biting his tongue as Daredevil insisted he’d been the one putting Fisk away. He had been, but not just as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Matt Murdock played a hell of a role in that play, too. “If you think he’s gonna stop with just you, that he’s not gonna go after every person who had a hand in putting him where he is, you really are an idiot. The lawyers, the judge, the jury, the witnesses... You don’t let me do what needs to be done and they’re all gone. Only reason he hasn’t started having them killed already is because he wants to do it himself. You have to know that.”

[punishcrcastle]

notdaredcvil:

Just once, Matt wished that the people he reluctantly teamed up with could be those that he didn’t have a significantly complicated history with. All things considered, he didn’t think that was a particularly hard condition to follow, but in the past that had proven to be false. The Secret Warriors had seemed simple until he ran into Elektra on the rooftops, but then again, he wasn’t particularly upset about that turn of events. Fighting demons across the border was tantamount to a death sentence, it was the stupidest thing he had ever contemplated attempting, and Frank’s presence reduced the chance of him dying by about a quarter. It wasn’t much, but Matt had worked on worse odds before, and if Frank wanted him dead (as he kept reminding himself) he would have been dead already. There was no harm in teaming up with the man when the mission was clear, the objectives were simple, and the adversaries that they would face were already obviously dead, or non-corporeal to begin with.

“You ever tried it?” Matt asked, deadpan. “Have to say, it’s not the worst thing I’ve experienced. You need to get some swinging knives to take that accolade.” Nobu had nearly killed him that night, had left him with his fair share of scars, but Matt would never forget the terror of hitting the wall and hearing no sound from it. Of the smashing glass being silent, his radar sense dulled. He had sat in complete darkness, complete silence, for the first time, and it had nearly driven him insane. He hadn’t told anyone about it, and he wasn’t intending to. “I have the curiosity, and I’m not too bad with gathering facts,” Matt said, figuring if Frank was having fun messing with his identity, he could do the same. “We could try for a bit of both?”

It was no secret that Frank had shit luck. He was reminded of it every time he ran into Daredevil. New York was a big enough city that it shouldn’t happen often, if at all, but it seemed like just about every night there was a flash of red in the corner of his vision and a lecture about morality to follow. There were other vigilantes, too, of course; Spider-Man had given him a hell of a headache, and Black Widow all but hired him to do her dirty work, but Murdock was by far the most annoying. If Frank were smarter, he would’ve turned around and saved himself the irritation of a team-up, but something stopped him. Maybe it was knowing that Karen would probably be upset if he got himself killed, or the fact that he’d never really be able to repay Matt for listening to him go on in that cemetery. Either way, Frank didn’t turn away. He was pretty sure he’d regret it.

“Yeah, I have. I don’t think I had as much fun with it as you did.” The round Frank took to the head nearly killed him, left him in the hospital for a year entirely unconscious. Some might argue it’d scrambled his brain, too, but Frank’s head was clear. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. You didn’t seem too skilled when you were out looking for me.” Of course, Murdock had no idea how many times he’d nearly caught Frank before that night with the Irish, had no idea how many times Frank had only just left a scene before Daredevil was on it. Frank was keen on keeping it that way. The guy didn’t need any more of an ego boost, and the last thing Frank wanted was to give him one. “Guess we can. You gonna try to arrest the demons? Gonna send ‘em to trial, put ‘em behind bars?” His voice was mocking, a tone that wasn’t rare in conversations with Matt.

[punishcrcastle]

slcvicshadow:

Frank’s methods weren’t ones that Natasha entirely condoned. She had given up killing under unnecessary circumstances many years ago, limited the blood she shed wherever possible, but she couldn’t deny that the Punisher had positively affected New York, and she wouldn’t deny that many of the men Frank murdered weren’t the kind who were invested in rehabilitation. After his background, horrific and bloodied, Natasha couldn’t blame Frank for inventing the Punisher. She also didn’t remotely regret arranging a partnership with him, though the targets she provided were always ones Natasha watched closely, ones she ensured had no intention of changing and performed acts that were absolutely irredeemable. New York City, especially in quarters as close as they were forcibly, needed to be safe from its own citizens. They had enough threats to worry about without gang members and murderers and similarly disturbed criminals. Frank Castle was an asset in that specific context, and Natasha saw no point in denying it.

That being said, Frank Castle wasn’t someone Natasha trusted entirely. His work was clean, efficient, but he had in no way proven himself loyal to Natasha — or anyone as far as she knew — and caution was useful when working with new people. “Unfortunately, freaky experiments I’m sure more people would attempt if they had the idea.” Unfortunately, scientists were geniuses in the textbook sense, but rarely in common sense. She had witnessed it with Ultron, caught wind of some of Reed’s insane ideas, and Natasha never pretended that they were bettering humanity with them. Experimenting on the demons was inevitable, they needed to know more about their enemy, but Natasha only wanted to hear of scientists she trusted doing the gruesome work. “I’m sure someone is aware you’re alive,” she replied, obviously disbelieving. “As much as you think is necessary. I’m not sure what circumstances we’ll be walking into.” If killing was necessary to keep the news of experimentation secret, Natasha would go to that length, though it wasn’t preferable. “Can you keep yourself from pulling the trigger if it isn’t necessary?” She asked, vocalizing the exact opposite of her personal thoughts and opinions.

So far, the partnership with Romanoff had worked just fine. The men she’d pointed him towards were men in desperate need of killing, and judging by the fact that she kept coming back to him, kept bringing him more names and more locations, Frank figured she was satisfied with his results. Eventually, if New York stayed how it was, he knew things were going to slow. She’d run out of names to give him and he’d run out of people to kill, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be relieved or lost when it happened. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to exist any other way. He wondered if she did, if she knew how to live without doing what she did, being what she was. Something told him she didn’t know how to do it any more than he did, that they were more alike than either of them really let on.

People had a way of being more awful than you could ever really imagine, though Frank had long ago lost his ability to be surprised by the lows they’d sink to. He wasn’t shocked that people were using the demons for experimental procedures, wasn’t shocked that they were doing their best to use the literal hell the city had been sent to their advantage. “Probably right about that,” he agreed, because if there was one thing he knew it was that people like that weren’t a minority. Scumbags were almost the norm in a city like New York. “Two, maybe three people,” he allowed with a shrug. Murdock and Karen had been  aware of his survival pretty much the instant it happened, Nelson had found out pretty unfortunately after the fact. Pretty much everyone else he knew he’d met after the city had declared him dead. “I’ll bring all of it,” he decided, tightening his grip on his duffel bag. You could never have too much ammo, after all, and it was far better to overestimate what you needed than to underestimate it. “Is it going to be necessary?” He wasn’t sure he was capable of it. If Karen begging him not to kill someone hadn’t convinced him, there probably wasn’t much Romanoff could say to change his mind, either.

[punishcrcastle]

slcvicshadow:

@punishcrcastle

When news traveled to Natasha that a very successful and powerful gang in New York, residing primarily in Alphabet City, called the Defectors was quite literally nabbing demons to experiment on them, it was an understatement to say that she was disturbed. The Web provided no additional information about why, largely due to the Defectors’ intense level of security. It could be an issue for the Panel, one that the Black Widow could publicly solve, but Natasha trusted neither the government nor the public not to adopt the Defectors’ idea. The anatomy of the demons was impressive, especially their natural armour, and people would go to any length to protect themselves. In order to keep from drawing attention to herself — the majority of her allies were famed heroes, including herself — she contacted the Punisher. Most still believed that Frank Castle was dead, but if they were caught, no one would question why the Punisher was pursuing another gang. (They would, however, question why he was breathing.)

She met Frank two blocks away from the Defectors’ main headquarters, and in an effort to disguise her identity, Natasha wore all black, different from her Widow suit, and a partial mask to cover her face. It was precautionary, but she understood how important subterfuge was. When Frank arrived, Natasha strode forward to meet him and as promised, began to explain the situation. “Gang is trying to experiment on the demons and I’m going to be helping you with this one. I think we’re both intelligent enough to realize how important it is that no one else finds out about this.”

If you’d told Frank when he first started in as the Punisher that he’d be working alongside an Avenger one day, he wouldn’t have believed you. Hell, there probably would’ve been some laughing involved, maybe an insult or two. Him and the Avengers, they were worlds away from one another and he’d always known it. He wasn’t a hero, and they weren’t capable of finishing the job. It left a certain divide between them, and their fame and expanded abilities made that divide far wider than the one that existed between him and Daredevil. But Black Widow... She was different. She was more willing to do what needed to be done, something that had first been reflected in the SHIELD files she’d leaked and later been confirmed when she’d approached Frank on that rooftop. Maybe she was an Avenger, but she wasn’t a goddamn scout like some of the other heroes roaming about the city. She didn’t wear a mask, didn’t pretend that the world’s shittiest people were worth saving. She was honest, and Frank appreciated her for that.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about this part, though. The teaming up, the working together, it had never really been his style. When Frank had something that needed doing, he did it on his own. He went in guns blazing and came out bleeding, and that had always been preferable to taking someone else along for the ride. He knew the moment he showed up at the spot Romanoff asked to meet at that that wouldn’t be the case for today, and while he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, he was willing to give it a shot. “What kind of freaky ass shit are they into?” He raised a brow, considering the concept. Experimentation on a relatively unknown foe was a recipe for disaster. “Who do you think I’m gonna tell? Everybody I know thinks I’m dead.” He snorted, dropping a duffel bag on the ground between them. “How much ammo should I bring?” It was his way of asking how she wanted to do this. Frank was capable of stealth if they needed it, though it wasn’t his preferred method.

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

There was never one moment that Karen considered herself invulnerable. She was intimately aware of her weaknesses and intimately aware of her fear. The idea of entering the Punisher’s home, searching for clues about the truth in his tragic history had not been something Karen did lightly. She never once believed that it was safe, never once believed that she was guaranteed to leave alive or unharmed. Similarly, she didn’t believe that entering the wasteland alone was a decision she was certain to live through. The demons were deadly and dangerous, Karen had no skills that ensured her survival. Someone had to do it, however, to report the truth. Karen would be that woman and while she wasn’t fearless, she was capable. Selfishly, having Frank at her side was comforting. She trusted him to keep her alive and she trusted that together, Karen would have the opportunity to tell the tale about the wasteland honestly with Frank’s blessing.

There were several times that Karen got close enough to Frank that she could kiss him. They had never shied away from proximity, but she couldn’t remember one instance that lasted this long. Typically, one of them pulled away, but they had done the opposite this time around. Her arms were loosely wrapped around his neck, Karen could feel his breath against her cheek, and she wanted more than anything to press her lips against his. If she chose to, it would be among Karen’s more dangerous decisions, albeit for less literal reasons. Frank would go to any length to protect her, she knew, but her heart would never once be safe with Frank. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, although a future with him was either lonely or impossible. Unfortunately, logic rarely won out with Karen. She was driven by her emotions entirely; emotions fuelled her desire for the truth, and right now, they fuelled her desire to be closer to Frank. When he cleared his throat, Karen was absolutely afraid that she had lost the opportunity to kiss him, but Frank didn’t pull away. “No, not enough,” she said quietly. He deserved better, deserved more, and one day, Karen prayed she’d be there to witness it. After she spoke, she gently pressed her lips against his, unsure how Frank would react. His life was far from one filled with romance, but Karen made her decision without thought. Pulling away, Karen made no effort to step away from Frank entirely when she asked, “Was that okay?” It was clear that Frank wanted to be close to her, but neither of them had crossed the line.

When Frank agreed to the motivational texts with a smile, Karen couldn’t help but smile as well. “I think they’ll definitely do the trick,” she agreed. The idea of speaking to Frank more often was an appealing one, too, if she were being honest. As the subject shifted to his father, Karen listened attentively, knowing that Frank rarely spoke about his family. It was an honour to be trusted with details about his history and she had every intention of treating it as such. “You’re a good man, too, Frank,” Karen disagreed. He would never agree with her, but wasting oxygen on reassuring Frank that she thought highly of him was worth it. “My brother died,” Karen admitted quietly. Frank hadn’t asked which was exactly why she was willing to tell him about what had happened with Kevin. “They claimed it was an accident, but I never believed it. I kept searching for answers, never found them, and my parents begged me to stop. I left instead,” Karen explained, her voice betraying little emotion. She had always excelled at covering up what she felt, and while it was difficult to tell anyone about her experience with losing  Kevin — more often than not Karen spoke about him in the present tense — Frank, if anyone, would understand. Frank’s jokes were rare, but Karen had to admit that she was relieved to hear them, defusing some of the tension between them. “I think it’s probably the latter,” she said fondly. “It has to be the smell of the dogs.” She loved Frank’s dogs as if they were own despite rarely seeing them. “I think everyone would remember that,” Karen said quietly. “Sometimes I wonder if President Doom ran at all. In all the chaos, someone could have trusted him with the job.” Karen sounded paranoid, possibly insane, but Frank would never view her opinions as such. She trusted him to take her seriously and most importantly, Karen trusted Frank to believe her if she was onto something or kindly tell her she was off base.

After he started out on his quest for vengeance, it hadn’t taken long for Frank to make a name for himself. It hadn’t taken long for the police to realize that it wasn’t an army taking out the gangs in Hell’s Kitchen, hadn’t taken them long to learn that it was a single man. They hadn’t known his reason then, hadn’t known what drove him to do what he did. They hadn’t even known his name. That was how he’d gotten stuck with the Punisher bullshit, how he’d gotten pegged with some goddamn vigilante moniker he’d never wanted. Back then, pretty much everyone had been afraid of him. It didn’t change when he was caught, didn’t go away when he was a man beaten half to death and handcuffed to a hospital bed. The nurses had been skittish every time they came into his room, the doctors had stayed a good three feet away from his bed unless they actually needed something from him, the guard stationed outside his door always had one finger on the trigger. Everyone who came into that room was afraid of Frank except Karen. Karen, she’d been inside his house. She’d seen what made him who he was, looked through his things to understand what he’d lost. She’d spoken to him like a person, like he was a human being instead of a caged animal. Frank never quite knew how to react to that, didn’t know how to feel anything but grateful. It was the first thing other than anger that he’d felt in such a long time that he almost didn’t know how to handle it.

He was still grateful now, still thinking of how much he owed her. Murdock was the one who dragged him out of the Irish’s hideout, the one who’d called an ambulance for him and refused to let him bleed out in that graveyard, but Karen was the person who’d saved him. She was the first one who’d ever seen Frank Castle through the Punisher, and that was exactly why he couldn’t kiss her now. He owed her too much to drag her down with him, no matter how much he wanted to. Karen deserved the world, and Frank was too broken to give it to her. “No?” He repeated the word softly, mouth still forming around it when her lips touched his. A better man would have pulled away, would have let her go, but fuck, Frank didn’t know how. He leaned in to the kiss, putting a hand on her waist and holding her as close as he could. The first time he’d kissed Maria, it was like jumping in a pool on the first day of summer. Cold, heart-stopping, with that brief moment of terror dating back to prehistoric times, the fear you might drown. Karen, though... Karen was all heat, like smoke in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t pull away. When she finally pulled back, he blinked, swallowing. “That was more than okay,” he said, a little breathlessly. She’d knocked the wind right out of him with it, he realized. "Did you... uh, did you mean that?” It was almost painful, offering her the out, but he knew it was the right thing to do. If she wanted to take it back, he’d let her. It’d kill him, but he’d let her.

Her smile was goddamn contagious, and Frank couldn’t help but let his widen at the sight of it. Karen had a way of doing that, a talent for making him smile no matter how heavy the weight in his chest felt. “I think so,” he agreed, selfishly loving the idea of speaking to her more often, of hearing from her on a daily basis. What they had now was good, but it didn’t feel like enough. He wanted most with her, even knowing he didn’t deserve it. She didn’t speak as he talked about his dad, didn’t interrupt or say a word until he was finished. He looked up at her with the ghost of a smile on his face, raising a brow. “I think you’re just about the only person that thinks that,” he told her quietly. Frank knew he wasn’t a good man, and he’d made peace with it. When she spoke, he looked over, a little surprised at the confession. “I’m sorry,” he said gently, reaching down to take her hand carefully. After he woke up in the hospital with a row of tombstones instead of a family, he’d learned that there was a hell of a difference between pity and sympathy. Pity did little more than piss him off, and he knew Karen would feel similarly. “You figure it out? What happened to him?” It explained her need for the truth, explained why she chased it so adamantly. She needed the truth for her brother, for Frank’s family, for everyone who’d ever been forgotten by the people who were meant to look out for them. He snorted as she spoke again, shaking his head. “You got jokes, huh? You funny now?” There was a teasing lilt to his tone, something he seemed to save exclusively for Karen. “Those dogs smell all right, considering.” Not much he could do to wash them living in a warehouse, after all. “You think he just took over?” Frank’s brow furrowed at the possibility. “Who gave it to him? Who has that kind of power? And why didn’t anyone realize it?”

[punishcrcastle]

karcnpcge:

As far as Karen was concerned, the term ‘hero’ was far too exclusive. The public had branded it as a way to describe groups like the Avengers and the Justice League, and while they were right, those superheroes were willing to risk their lives to keep civilians safe, everyday people deserved the title, too. Doctors saving lives were heroes, politicians who ensured that cruel, discriminatory bills never passed were heroes, and those that were willing to defend minority groups were heroes. Anyone that showed bravery on a regular basis was a hero. Karen, though biased, believed that term applied to Frank in a very unique sense. Frank’s methods were far from kind, he was brutal as he was thorough, but he was brave. Every night, despite the grief and pain he suffered from, Frank defended New York City from horrific criminals. Those he killed were always irredeemable, and while Karen had never condoned bloodshed, she understood Frank’s perspective and never denied that it had changed New York for the better. Hero was applicable to every brave person, every brave act, and the Punisher had both in spades.

With that in mind, Karen wondered whether it had taken Frank bravery in order to come to her apartment for dinner. In a sense, it was a date, and Frank hadn’t been on one since the death of his family and wife. Their relationship was unique, and while they were absolutely friends, Karen knew that Frank was a smart man. Whatever was between them was deeper than friendship, much more physical, and Karen was terrified. Frank had much more reason than her to be — he had lost everything — but for a moment, Karen was going to be concerned about her own perspective solely. Frank Castle was far from an apt romantic partner to choose, he was a serial killer by definition, and Frank was damaged. He had not recovered from his family’s brutal murder, nor did Karen expect him to, but that meant his vendetta would always come first. While Karen understood that, she knew she deserved better. This was risking her heart like she had done with Matt, and once again, Karen was choosing a man who would never be capable of putting her first. It required bravery to realize that, and it required bravery to accept that whatever she had with Frank would be very short lived and most likely painful.

“Thank you,” Karen replied with a faint smile. Frank rarely handed out compliments, she had every intention to appreciate them, just as she appreciated the effort Frank had put into his appearance. She had grown accustomed to seeing him covered in blood, it was a nice change. She never lost sight of the fact that Frank Castle was a man first and foremost, but at times, it was difficult to view him as vulnerable. Impossibly, Frank seemed to live through everything, defy all odds. When he began speaking about Maria, Karen’s smile grew slightly, knowing that it was a sign of how much Frank trusted her. “What kind of things did you cook her and the kids?” Karen asked, hoping to continue the moment. “I’m really tired of bullshitters,” she said honestly. Frank knew very little about her dating history, though he had noticed that something had happened between her and Matt. “It’s refreshing that you’re not one,” she added. As Frank shifted closer to her, Karen rested her shoulder against Franks, leaning some of her weight against him. “Well, I should rephrase: I haven’t made any human enemies recently.” The demons seemed to target her whenever she got too close to them, a fact that Karen was aware of every time she left her home. She would never win that fight. “That makes sense,” she said quietly. “I can’t say that I hate hearing it.”

Heroism was a part of some people.Frank had seen it every day in the Marines, seen soldiers with a chronic habit of helping the people around them. Back then, over in the desert, it never ended well. In places like Afghanistan, heroism got you killed. Sometimes, heroism got you killed in New York, too. Trish’s death was a painful reminder of that. Karen, she was just like them, just like all the bright-eyed, determined, heroic assholes he’d seen shot to hell in trenches, just like all the guys he’d seen bleed out into the sand. It fucking terrified him. She was so steadfast in her beliefs, so eager and determined to find the truth that she didn’t seem to mind the idea of dying for it. Frank, he was reckless because he had nothing to live for, but Karen? Karen’s recklessness was because  her search for the truth was more important to her than her own goddamn life. Frank respected it, he respected her, but he was still terrified of losing her to it. Maybe that was selfish, but he’d always been a selfish man.

Still, he wasn’t here with some misguided idea of changing her, wasn’t here with hopes of making her something less than what she was. Karen had her truth, chased it down with determination and recklessness, and Frank had his vendetta. It was what made them who they were, and they both understood that. No, he was here for her, here for the same reason he asked to talk to her alone in that hospital room, the same reason he was so afraid of losing her. At his core, Frank was a thoughtless, selfish man. It would have been right to let her go, to let her live her life separate from him, but he couldn’t do it. He’d lost so much already, and he couldn’t imagine adding Karen to that list, not even if it meant she’d be better off. 

“You’re welcome,” he replied, and the smile on his fact could only be described as soft. It was a smile that existed only for her, one that few people had ever seen. Frank was angry, he was cold, he was rough around the edges, but Karen made him forget all that. She made him something like the man he’d been a million years ago, and he clung to her for it. His smile widened a fragment at the question. “Lisa, uh, my little girl... She went through a phase where she’d only eat foods that were certain colors. Yeah, there was... There was nothing green. She liked it to be red. I’d make spaghetti, you know, with red sauce. Put carrots in the sauce and she loved it. The orange with the red, she liked that. Yeah. My boy, he was... He was too young to care much about colors. He liked, uh... Simple foods. The wife, she said it must’ve driven me crazy making macaroni and spaghetti when I used to make the real stuff for her, but... I never minded it. You know? I kinda liked it.” He snorted at Karen’s statement, nodding his head. “I don’t have much time for bullshit,” he told her. Murdock, he figured, had always made time for it, probably lied to Karen about everything from the girl helping him fight on the roof to the horned helmet he wore when the sun went down. She deserved a hell of a lot better than that. Frank sighed as she moved in closer. He rarely felt at ease anymore, but with Karen’s shoulder up against his, he felt close to it. Not calm, but not at war, either. “Wouldn’t be you if you weren’t making enemies of some kind,” he teased, though the confession did worry him a little. The demons didn’t seem to be killing anyone yet, but they’d start eventually. Things like that always did. “Really?” He knew Karen didn’t have much of a stomach for killing. It was surprising to hear that she was all right with what he did.

[punishcrcastle]

moonkxight:

“I’M not a god.” Marc says on a slow exhale. Most days it feels like a loose catch all term for everything that Khonshu is, he’s always shifting and changing enough that Marc can never quiet grasp him entirely–some days so he can’t grasp him at all. He sometimes thinks he might be closer to an angel, a warped and twisted version of some heavenly being basking in holy light–the white light of the moon, the absence of light in the darkness of that tomb or the night sky, the spaces between stars. “They’ve always been there though, it’s just that no one knows where to look for them until it’s too late and they want something. Bad usually.” He’s reminded of the scant few memories he has of his father practicing his sermons, his voice reaching to the back of the synagogue with rapture as he preached of the divine missions of human beings–how little he actually knew about the real terror of the divine. Then again, he’s not sure what actually constitutes divine anymore. 

“Listen man, I was just tracking a group of soldiers, and you happened to be in my path. I’m not suggesting marriage here.” Marc shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes. He knew that the Punisher would be difficult, but this is bordering on just stubbornness for the sake of stubbornness, possibly to see if Marc will just break and move on his way. “I wanted to see how they interact with the demons on the streets–in comparison to the ones guarding the resources.” He resists the urge to grin triumphantly when he gets his in, approaches the place where the Punisher is crouched in wait. 

“Fine then, call me Spector, I don’t care.” He huffs and rolls his eyes underneath his hood. “What do you want me to call you, if not Punisher?” 

“No, you just got one rattling around inside your skull.” Frank was just about the last person who could call someone crazy and he knew it. No matter how much he denied it, no matter how much he ranted and raved, he knew Murdock had a point in calling him unstable. Going through what he had, Frank figured it was a miracle he had any sanity left at all. Still, a guy with a moon god inside his head? It seemed a whole new level of insane. “What do they usually want?” His voice was about as cautious as Frank was capable of being, as if testing the waters. He knew he couldn’t write the man off as completely insane, not in the way he could have a few years back. He’d seen a lot crazier things than vigilantes taking orders from moon gods. Typically, Frank ignored all of it as best he could, but that was a little difficult when it was directly in front of him talking to him.

He listened as Moon Knight spoke, shrugging a shoulder. “Glad to hear that. I don’t marry guys in masks. Got a rule for it.” Even in the Marines, Frank hadn’t been one for teamwork. He preferred to take matters into his own hands, to do what needed doing without worrying about someone else getting themselves killed along the way. Still, he recognized that Moon Knight had more of a plan than he did, and he was willing to give the team-up a shot at least once. Nothing could be worse than working alongside Daredevil, after all. “You think there’s gonna be a difference there? You think the soldiers are working with the spooks?” It was an interesting idea. He moved to make room where he was crouched, offering the man a brief nod to let him know he was fine with him taking the position next to him.

“Spector,” he repeated with another nod, weighing the name for a moment. “Christ, you call me anything but ‘Punisher.’ Frank. My name’s Frank.”