Since you asked for prompts and I love your work: Kastle celebrating New Years, if you'd like.
@fortysevenswrites said: For your prompt request: snowy dinner for Kastle, if you're so inclined :-D
She does not, Karen Page thinks, envy anyone trying to get out of JFK tonight. (She never envies anyone trying to get out of LaGuardia, so that goes without saying). It’s bucketing it down, has been since four o’clock, so all the tourists desperate to freeze their asses off at the ball drop in Times Square better bundle up warm. Karen thinks of the rough sleepers with their dirty sleeping bags, their damp cardboard, their battered McDonald’s cups hoping for change. Some of them will probably freeze to death tonight, and the tourists will walk right on by.
She shakes her head, tells herself to snap out of it, and goes to stir the pasta. She feels self-conscious trying to make Italian food of any kind for Frank, remembers what he said about Maria’s grandmother and her authentic Sicilian, and her forte isn’t as a chef anyway. But she can read a recipe and open a good bottle of red wine, which will hopefully cover a multitude of sins, and Frank is too polite to mention if it actually tastes like shit. He can’t be eating many home-cooked meals these days anyway, since Frank goddamn Castle seems to have a pathological aversion to it. Karen would ask where he’s been, the last couple months, but don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, etc. She’s lucky she got him to agree to tonight.
She checks the pasta, stirs the sauce, pops the bread in the oven to keep it warm, applies the garlic liberally, and hastily turns down the stove before it can set off the fire alarm and send her neighbors all bitching out into the frigid night. (Can’t be a good omen for New Years, anyway.) She gets the glasses and pours the wine, and by 7:00pm, when she told Frank to turn up, it’s more or less ready. Karen resists the urge to fidget, adjust the tablecloth too much. It’s 7:05, then 7:15, but the weather is self-evidently crap and there could be delays on the subway. (Does Frank take the subway, or only ever drive around in that hulking black murder van of his? Karen imagines him in his skull hoodie, sitting next to some nice old babushka out doing her shopping. Knowing Frank, he might offer to carry it home.)
It’s 7:30, then 7:45, and she’s almost started to think that he’s not coming when there’s a buzz on the bell, a thumping up the stairs like the Huns are invading, and a knock -- after that riotous prelude, almost shy -- on her front door. There’s no one else it can be, unless Matt and Foggy’s New Year’s dinner has gone really wrong (Karen doesn’t want to know) but she peers through the peephole anyway. Sure enough, it’s Frank, stomping snow and huffing with cold, flakes gathering on his hood, holding a somewhat wilted bouquet of white flowers. He looks nervous. It’s kind of adorable.
Karen bites a smile, wonders how much of a hard time she should give him about the lateness, and opens the door. “Hey,” she says. “Started to think I was gonna have to eat this by myself.”
“Sorry.” Frank looks down, does that shrug, thrusts the flowers at her like a peace offering. “I can still come in, yeah?”
Karen gives him that you-knucklehead stare she’s perfected, takes the flowers, and steps back to admit the Punisher into her apartment. She goes to put the bouquet in water, takes the wine glasses off the counter, and hands one to him; he murmurs a rasping thanks, nods, takes a sip. “It’s good,” he says, after a long pause. As if he’s switching himself out of whatever mode he’s been running in, remembering to take his walls down. “Smells real good, Karen. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She surveys him, the breath of the winter night still hanging around him. There are scrapes on his knuckles that look fresh. “Do I want to know why you were late?”
Frank shrugs. “Some dickhead thought he was gonna drag a drunk girl down an alley and have a little fun. I made fuckin’ sure he didn’t.” He pauses, evidently considering that a good amount of information, then adds, “We gonna eat?”
Karen raises both eyebrows, gesturing him to the table. The random would-be rapist can count himself lucky if all his limbs are still attached to his body, and she thinks Frank would have a lot more blood and/or unidentifiable stains on him if there was a detour to drop a weighted garbage bag into the East River. But as ever, she loves it, that ferocity, the knowledge that at least one other girl in this stupid city will get home safe tonight, protected, defended. Maybe that’s why she could never really, truly, completely ask Frank to stop. Not when she needs it too.
The dinner is long, the wine is good, the conversation -- well, it takes a while, and Frank is never the most voluble of companions, but it does the job. It gets late, and Karen says he doesn’t have to go out into it again if he doesn’t want, and Frank glances sidelong at her. It’s understood that this is their way of agreeing that he will spend the night in her bed, as has happened before, but for two presumably grown-ass adults, they can’t seem to broach the topic directly. Fine. If this is how it is for now, Karen can wait. He’s trying. That’s the reason she hangs in there with it. Maybe she needs it this way too. Plausible deniability.
She falls asleep after, curled up against him, their bare skin nipped by the chill, the piece-of-crap radiator in her bedroom. When she wakes in the morning, there’s an indent on the pillow and a black coffee waiting. Karen sits up, and sips it, and watches the snow come down.
(Frank isn’t there, but she wasn’t expecting him to be.)
