It’s a Pleasure, It’s a Reckoning
Author’s Note: Okay before you. throw the tomatoes. i kNOW i need to finish baby cut the tension BUT it’s my ✨birthday✨ and i can post this as a little treat. also this is a multi chapter fic but i have no idea how long it’s gonna be so enjoy the ride besties (also not beta read so there may be some mistakes)
Parings: Frank Castle x Reader
Warnings: This is a heavy fic, CW for; allusions to sexual assault (not graphic), allusions to torture, torture (graphic), canon typical violence, eventual smut, opioid misuse and addiction, i’ll be adding more tags as I go on
Comments and reblogs are loved and appreciated!!
18+ minors dni!!
It’s late. You’re walking home.
You’d been at a bar, hoping a couple of drinks would help numb the night’s previous disappointment. No one really noticed you drinking alone, you expected it was normal, drinking after being stood up, or simply unwinding after a long day at work, it was all the same to the people around you. You’d sighed into your drink, taking a hearty swig and draining the glass. You didn’t love wine all that much, but it was a good one to get drunk off of. You’d slid off of your bar stool and had stumbled on the landing. You’d left the bar alone, you hadn’t checked the time but you knew it was after midnight. You didn’t bother with a cab, you didn’t live far.
Now your footsteps echo through the night air, there’s no one around, the jovial noises of a night in New York don’t reach you here. You don’t bother to take care to avoid splashing through thin murky puddles, the dirty water leeching cold and wet into your worn down shoes. Your heavy bag slaps disjointedly against your leg with the pace you’re keeping. You’re walking fast, because someone is following you.
You’re by the docks, a fruitless and flimsy attempt at losing your pursuer through aimless turns. Though you understand that it’s served to cut you off from populated areas, from people and safety. The night air is cold, but the darkness feels close, fathomless around you. The shipping containers in the distance squat in the darkness like ancient creatures, beckoning you into their labyrinth of twists and turns. You turn to throw a glance behind you at the shadow haunting your footsteps, close enough to tail but far enough to avoid suspicion, or so he thought. Not from you. Not from any woman. The caution of darkness, strange places and strange men instilled into you through ancient instinct from birth, formed from thousands of years of the cries of women before you, the cautionary tales your parents would tell, embedded into your skin like a brand on a newborn calf.
Your breath comes in soft pants, loud enough to carry through the air, controlled and timed. You reach the containers and round another corner, arms wrapped around you in an attempt to look small, like if you wrap yourself tight enough you’ll disappear from sight. You hear wet footsteps pick up as he loses sight of you, you wonder if he would chase you if you ran.
He slows when he rounds the corner, footsteps pausing momentarily to allow some distance. He can’t have you running yet, can’t afford to lose you to this maze of steel you’d drawn him into. You speed up again, careful not to look behind you in case he decides to run for you, knowing he’s been made. You grip your bag closer to you, heading down a long stretch of crates, the city lights glinting like a warning off of the Hudson in front of you.
You’re closer to the water now. Cornered. The soft slapping of contaminated water on filth encrusted dock walls is a score over the silence that settles thick and heavy in the air. Not even the gulls creak out a sound. The city itself leans in, waiting for another to join its long list of victims.
You turn another corner, this time pressing yourself against the crate in an attempt to stay out of sight. Your heart doesn’t pound, but your hands shake, the adrenaline coursing through your veins almost blurring your eyesight.
He rounds the corner a few seconds later, swaying his head from side to side like a wolf scenting the air before he sees you. He’s not too much older than you, thin, not ugly, but hardly the most handsome person you’d ever met. There’s a split second where time stands still. You see the look in his eyes, the shallow victory that resides there upon seeing you pinned against the cold steel. A brief thought occurs to you; would asking him why he’s following you work? Would he turn around a leave? Should you try?
But you’ve already pulled the pipe from your bag.
You swing, and your strike is like a rattlesnake, quick, sharp, efficient. There’s a sickening, heavy, muted clang, and you note that your aim has gotten better, as you’re fairly sure there was a crack underneath the sound of all that hollow metal.
He goes down, too taken by surprise to make a noise past a sort of gasp, just as you’d hoped. Blood trickles out of the wound on the side of his head, looking more like old motor oil than blood, and you wonder not for the first time why blood borne from violence is less stigmatised than the blood from your uterus. With the skin of his scalp pushed back from the force of your swing and the skull underneath cracked and pink, you think this violence is much uglier.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
His blood drips from your makeshift weapon, and it feels heavy in your palm, reassuring. You grip it tighter. You want him to suffer.
He goes to move, a clumsy attempt at a struggle, but he can’t see much past the blood in his eyes, and you immediately wind up your arm and hit him again, right on the hand he’s using to prop himself up.
There’s that scream.
His fingers splay out in compass directions, shattered and utterly useless. You give in to the impulsion and swing down onto his other hand, twice for good measure. Those hands would have touched you, those hands had been used for evil, dirty deeds. How many women had he touched with those hands? How many hits would it take for them to become unusable?
Barely a word has left your lips and he’s already crying. You could taunt him. You did often, but you weren’t in the mood tonight, mood soured by your earlier failure. This wasn’t even meant to happen, just worked out as a consolation prize.
He’s trying to plead with you, but the hit to his head and the shock of the injury won’t allow for much sound past a thick and rubbery blubbering, lips dripping with spit and blood. He’s hunched over on his knees, cradling his broken hands from you, he tries to get up, but his balance is all wrong, like a fly with a wing torn off. He falls over, gasping disjointedly, trying to speak but failing. All he can do is whine, and whine he does.
He’s annoying you now, with that stupid fucking whimpering. He doesn’t get to cry. What would he have been like if you cried? You hit him again, savagely this time, right in the centre of his face, just to shut him up. He goes down, twitches but stays still.
You pause, then. You’d gotten too carried away. You listen out, straining for anything foreign in the noise of the docks. There’s another predator out there, you know. One who managed his territory very well. You have to be more careful.
You should stop, really. This isn’t a safe place to conduct your business, but you’re riled up tonight. So, you take a chance. You check if he’s still breathing, you don’t touch him, treating him like a live bomb as you hover the back of your hand over his nose to feel out for an attempt at breathing. His filthy breath brushes your hands, whilst you listen out again, waiting for the shift of clothing or the clink of batons. Nothing.
You breathe a sigh of relief, righting yourself again and leaning on the wall behind you. You chew on the nubs of your already worn nails, deciding on your next steps.
Leaving him here wasn’t an option. You’d left them before and it was sloppy. New York was big, but you knew your luck would run out sooner or later. Blood was an issue, finishing him off here would be too risky, he’d already bled too much and you couldn’t afford anymore. These were all sensible points, but a part of you was too riled up to let it stop there. You wanted to finish the job first.
After trying the crate behind you, you almost sag with relief when you find it empty, cavernous and safe.
You drag him in, dumping him in the crate before retrieving the water you’d kept in your bag and washing away the blood staining the concrete as best you could. It had been muggy and close for the past couple of nights, you expected it to rain soon.
Once you’d gotten inside, you shut the door, pulling it to so that you’d have minimal sound escaping it’s confines. When that’s done, you undo his belt and gag him with it, pulling it tight against his head and pushing through all the teeth you’d broken with your last swing. You tie his hands after that, with the duct tape you had in your bag. Safely gagged and bound, you drop your bag on the opposite side of the container and settle down, pulling a carton of cigarettes out of your pocket one fishing one out. You light it, watching him carefully in the dim space, the flickering of the light playing shadow puppets with his shattered face. Taking a deep inhale, you keep your eyes on him, and you settle down to wait.
-
When he finally comes to, you give him a couple of minutes to understand his situation. You play with your lighter as he lays there on his side, wide eyes on you. With the great breaths he heaves through flared nostrils, sharp and short, and the whites of his eyes flickering in the firelight, you’re reminded of those moments before you’d take a knife to a stag’s throat after you’d downed it with your father. You take time just watching his pupils expand and contract as you flick the lighter. On, off. Big, small. Eventually you grow tired, and you approach him, dropping your bag next to his head and enjoying the way he flinches, his eyes not once leaving you.
You crouch beside him, rifling through your bag and talking idly to him as if you were making small talk. You speak softly, conversationally, as though you were commenting on a piece inside of a quiet art museum. “I used to go hunting with my dad when I was younger. Didn’t want to hurt anything, just wanted to watch the deer, really. He loved me, but he knocked that out of me pretty quickly.” The man wheezes out a moan, the shape of half spoken words whistling through cracked teeth from around his own leather belt. You look at him, regarding him as if he was a ring stain on a coffee table; easily wiped away. “I always hated killing them myself. One time I shot one because he told me to, and cried myself hoarse when he told me to finish it. He took me by the arm, swung me round. All I could hear was this doe squealing. He looked me in the eye, and he said ‘Everything meets God sometime, best you can do is make it quick.’. Don’t think I ever forgot that.”
Locating the pocket knife in your bag you get up, moving to the door of the shipping container and sticking your head outside. Comfortable that no one was around, you shut the door.
The adrenaline sharpens your eyes, uncurls your back, straightening you up. He’s watching you closely, broken teeth pressing into a leather belt, pushing broken roots up into bloody gums. His eyes are watery with the pain, saliva dripping from the belt.
It wasn’t enough.
You approach him, a ghastly silhouette, the shadow of a demon he never believed in. He shrinks, and pleasure like nothing else rushes through your veins. It feels like pure power, and you’re piss drunk on it. You cock your head, steps slow and measured.
“Does it make you uncomfortable that I’m a person? Do you ever think about this when you follow women at night? Are they people to you? Do you think about their hopes, their dreams? Or are we just cattle to you?”
He shakes his head, fear etched into his very being. He makes himself smaller now, too scared to fight back, too much pain. He knows, innately, that he’s no longer the predator. Tears cut a path through his bloody cheeks, mucus joining the fray as he begins to sob.
“Why are you crying? Are you sorry?” You pull your eyebrows together, sympathy painting your features like a baroque painting, your voice soft and gentle. “You’re only sorry because I fought back.”
His eyebrows press together as he muffles out a string of words, it doesn’t take a genius to guess what they’re going to be, but you roll your eyes and tug the belt out of his mouth regardless, you did prefer it when they cried to when they got mad. More fun that way. When he spoke, it was lispy and wet, forcing words out of jagged broken shards of tooth. “Please- please don’t- I dont even know who you are. I’m sorry- I- I’ll never do it again. I promise, please just let me go, I’m begging-“
You grip your knife in a white knuckled fist, the adrenaline will make this messy work, but your Lance Corporal always said you were more efficient than clean. “Of course you don’t know who I am, you dumb cunt. You never do.” Rage flashes through you, hot and fast like a whip, and it makes you impulsive. So, you raise your knife and jab from your belly- right through the patellar tendon and into the joint underneath his knee cap.
His screams rumble your eardrums with the volume of it as you feel the knife grind against the bone in his joint, the tendon connecting them severed entirely. Satisfied you had effectively clipped his wings, you pull the knife out, the whisper of the blade almost musical. You could tell he’d all but fried his vocal cords with that belter, thank fuck you’d decided to pull him into the crate. The dark and musty space is thick with the smell of his blood and the rough and worn pants as he tries to catch his breath. The hot air hits your face and you grimace, not wanting any part of this man to touch you. You push the knife into his other knee more slowly this time, controlling the pitch of his screams with your knife like a conductor with a baton.
You pull out the knife, wiping it carefully on his shirt and slipping it back into your bag, watching as his eyes droop as the shock sets in. So much for a consolation prize, he was turning out to be a disappointment all things considered.
You didn’t want him falling asleep on you, so you grab his greasy, sweaty hair, yanking his head up so he can meet your gaze, generations worth of rage burning in your eyes.
“You listen to me very carefully.” You shake his head, wanting his focus before he passes out. “You wanna know who I am?” You fist your fingers through his hair and shake him harder, meeting the dimming light in his eyes with fire and fury. “I am every girl you’ve ever hurt. Ever touched, commented on, fucking looked at wrong. I’m the last face you’re ever gonna see. Honey, in this place? I’m fucking God.”
—
It takes a while for him to stop twitching, but you stay cautious. Every time you did this you fought as if it was your Nemean Lion, caution and ferocity swaddled in the skin of someone far less capable and much more female than Heracles. You didn’t mind being underestimated, and besides, Heracles only killed one Nemean Lion.
You’d returned to hitting him after he’d lost consciousness. You struck him with your pipe, limbs shaking, and again. And again. Again. You keep hitting him until your arms burn from the labour and his face is turned inwards, bloody and red like the pulp of a cherry. Grey matter frames the picture.
You straighten up, unravelling your spine and taking a deep breath, shaking out your worn hands. They felt cramped from the time spent white knuckling the pipe, and you stretch them out before rubbing at the blood splattered on your cheeks, taking care around the puckered and pink skin on the left side of your face. You crane a neck over to the edge of the docks, and back to the useless pile of meat at your feet. Should’ve led him closer to the edge. You shrug inwardly, bending down to grab the collar of his shitty nylon jacket and start dragging his dead weight towards the Hudson, where she waits quietly to take another victim.
—
“Frank. It’s me. I know you’ve not been around The Kitchen in a while but… I need your help.”
-
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