she was starting to lose count of how many times she’d wound up in a hospital room with frank castle.
based on ‘the way i said i love you’ prompt 2. with a hoarse voice, under the blankets. for @lindigo.
The first few days in the hospital were…disorienting.
A rotating door of people in scrubs. White coats, sometimes, with their clipboards, and the pen lights they dug out of their pockets at obscenely odd hours in the morning.
They gave different names, but their faces all looked the same to Karen. Distracted. Unsmiling. Some of them downright apprehensive, lingering near the foot of the bed as they asked their questions and then disappeared for the rest of the day.
The room had no windows. Well – there was one small opening that barely passed as a window, wedged into the wall up toward the ceiling, with two decidedly inhospitable-looking metal bars blocking the view to whatever was down there.
She was starting to lose count of how many times she’d wound up in a hospital room with Frank Castle.
He was half-slumped over, breathing soundly in his sleep when she shifted around to gaze at him. He’d trimmed his hair, sometime in the last few months since she’d seen him, but it looked like it was starting to grow out again at the top, curling slightly over his forehead.
She resisted the urge to reach out and touch it.
He hadn’t been sleeping well here. There were shadows under his eyes, and his face was twisted in discomfort, arms twitching as he tossed and turned his head with a grunt. She had to look away for a moment, remembering how his voice had cracked last time, telling her things about his family. Things he was losing, things he might never get back.
“Frank,” she said softly. “Frank.”
Her hand touched his arm, and he started awake, head whipping around to gather his bearings. The moment his eyes landed on her, everything seemed to go still, and his whole body relaxed back into his chair for a moment.
It was a new thing, to see him wake up like this and not look quite so – haunted, as she’d come to expect. Like her being there had calmed him, instead of making him turn away, and she shouldn’t be thinking about what that could mean, really she shouldn’t, and yet.
“Hi.” Karen sank her head against her pillow, hand slipping away from his arm. The effort of that alone left her winded, and she counted to three for the room to stop spinning again.
“Hey.” His voice came out in a rasp, sleep-roughened, but then he sat up with a startling alertness, leaning forward to fix his eyes on her. “You okay?”
She almost smiled at him. “I’m fine,” she said firmly. Then, in a much lighter tone, “You know, we should really stop meeting like this.”
Frank scoffed out a short laugh. “I’m not the one who’s been laid up in bed this time.” He clasped his hands together, finger tapping out a nonstop rhythm against his knuckles. He rocked forward in his seat, head bowed and bobbing slightly as he shifted just a little bit closer to her.
Karen watched him for a moment, the way his jaw tightened as he swallowed back whatever he wasn’t going to say. How his gaze kept pinging back down to her hand, resting on the edge of the bed near a break in the guard rail.
Slowly, she turned her hand over, opening up her palm to him. Frank gave a small shudder before taking it into both of his, grip callused and warm as he ran a thumb over the bones of her wrist.
She fought the urge to close her eyes and just…feel this, while she could.
It took her a second to realize he was speaking. Low under his breath, muttering, “You’re okay,” over and over as he held her hand tighter in his. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”
There were so many things Karen wanted to ask him – Why, Frank? Why here? Why now? – just to hear him say the words. She knew she should be angry with him, for carving himself out of her life and then bulldozing back in when staying away no longer suited his needs. For never giving her a say in the matter.
She should be angry, and she was, but she was something else too, and that…that part was always harder to fight when he was right here, in front of her.
It hadn’t surprised her, that first morning she’d woken to find him prowling the length of her room in half-shadow. Moving around like something caged in, until she croaked out his name and he’d been by her side in an instant, looking at her like she was the only thing to keep him from flying apart.
He sat with her during the day, drinking hospital coffee with a satisfied grimace while reading to her whatever he could find, snorting his way through brochures on the walls, magazines that he’d nicked from one of the waiting rooms.
He was careful not to bring in any papers, and she was careful not to ask.
When the horoscopes at the back of the Cosmo got old, Frank pulled out a book from his back pocket – a slim paperback of translated poems by Pablo Neruda – and he read these aloud to her instead, in a deep, husky voice, never quite meeting her eye each time he paused to turn the page.
She didn’t know what he got up to at night while she slept. What she did know was that he would be back in his chair again by morning, with a new slew of bruises mottling his face, knuckles raw as he reached for her hand.
