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A/N: I almost titled this after a song from Poppins Returns, so count yourself lucky. Go see that movie, though, especially if, like me, season two left you a little hurt. The moments we got were pretty great, but there’s still a big, Kastle-shaped hole in my heart that I’m attempting to fill here.
Title from “My Backwards Walk” by Frightened Rabbit.
I Wish We’d Never Met, Then Met Today
Frank leaves the bus depot on foot, and walks for what must be miles. It’s hard to tell, he only takes in one block at a time. There’s an ache in his chest at Amy’s absence, and it’s almost familiar, but not quite. He feels a little unburdened, but no lighter; relieved, but just as anxious for her wellbeing. He feels like a parent, he realizes somewhat belatedly. This is what it is to be a father.
There wasn’t enough time to figure it all out the first time around. His days at home between deployments were precious, and when he was with his family, most of his worries were easy ones, comparatively, like picking a restaurant when the kids were hungry and squabbling over what they wanted. He’s thought long and hard about what Maria must have shouldered when he was away, knows for certain that she’s to thank for so many of the happy memories.
And then they were just gone. The three of them at once, which makes it harder sometimes, to remember that they had ever really been here. Their laughs are fading, but today he can still hear them faintly amid the rustle of the leaves on the trees that line the city street. He remembers telling Karen about how deeply he feared that, remembers how she held his hand and assured him that he wasn’t forgetting, that he wasn’t that monster in his mind, back to finish them off for good.
And that’s when he realizes he’s on her block.
He should turn around and head back, Frank thinks, staring up at her window, where a flower pot sits empty on the sill, looking as weathered as he feels. He should go back to the shithole apartment he’s been crashing in ever since Amy declared the trailer unfit for humanity, and “just majorly sad, to boot.” He should, but he doesn’t.
Instead he waits in Karen’s hallway for maybe twenty minutes – all the time weighing the merits of scaling her fire escape instead – and just when he’s talked himself into calling it a day, she appears. She’s tired, he can tell by the droop of her shoulders and the drag of her feet, but he swears he can hears the angels singing at the very sight of her. It’s like when he woke up in the hospital, but this time, he’s just slightly more certain that he’s not dead.
“Hey, Frank.” She looks surprised at first, but then grins a little, like part of her knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away. Or maybe just hoped. He gives a small smile in return, and it doesn’t feel like a weakness.
“Hi, Karen.”
Her name is cotton candy on his tongue, light as air and so sweet, but vanishing in an instant. He’s longed to say it for months, he realizes, and now that he can, he wants to say it again. And again, and again, and again.
“You okay?” Her eyes meet his, bright blue and curious. He knows she’s got a million things she wants to ask him, a million questions about how and when and where and who. (The difference between her and everyone else is that she doesn’t have to ask why.) But she’s gentle with him, she always is.
He just grunts in response, wishing he had a better way to tell her that the mere sight of her feels like a balm on his shredded soul. “Am now.”
“You wanna come in?” There’s a flash of wariness across her features then, as she turns to unlock the door, and he realizes in an instant that she doesn’t really trust this. She’s happy to see him, but she doesn’t understand why he’s come.
It’s his fault, he knows, for the way he left things between them. So as soon as he follows her over the threshold, he asks the question he’s been turning over in the back of his skull for days, hoping it will bring them both some peace of mind.
“What was it you were gonna say?”
“What? When?” The furrow in her brow is just another thing he loves about her. The list is so fucking long at this point, he was kidding himself to think he’d ever be able to stay away.
“Back at the hospital, before the kid interrupted and we had to go,” Frank stammers out, trying his best to hold eye contact without wanting to throttle himself at the insecurity that’s painted across her face. “You–”
He touches his fingers to his chest, almost on instinct. Her eyes follow. You put your hand on my arm, he wants to tell her, so close to my heart. He wants to tell her the action itself, and the longing he had read in her careful expression, made him remember – for the first time in far too long – that there was still something beating inside his ribcage. There was something keeping him alive.
But even still, he’s so skittish when it comes to her. “You looked like you were going to say something,” he finishes, feeling lame. “What was it?”
She must know it’s not what he wanted to ask. She’s always been able to read him like a book. “I don’t think it really matters, Frank.”
He follows her gaze as it falls to her feet, swallowing the bitter way her doubt coats every word. He notices her shoes, black flats, and remembers the story Madani told him about the man in the morgue.
“Does to me.”
Karen’s steeled herself by the time she meets his eyes again. She’s made some kind of decision, and it pulls at the stitches around his heart when he hears what it is.
“I’m not going to put that on you,” she tells him, and he hears the tiniest tremor in her voice as she turns to busy herself pouring drinks that will sit ignored on the countertop. “I said what I needed to say. I’m not going to burden you with a battle you don’t even want to fight.”
Frank sighs, shaky, feeling the burn of unshed tears just behind his eyes. That’s what he told her, isn’t it? I don’t want to. (I don’t want you to risk yourself with me. I don’t want to choose you when I know it’s not really a choice at all. I don’t want to see you hurt and know that there’s something I could have done to prevent it.)
He’s always wanted her to recognize the worst in him, as a red flag warning for her own safety. The further away she is, the less likely she gets caught in the crossfire. It’s been a mantra for years now, he realizes, ever since she crossed that line in the hospital room to show just how far she was willing to go to vindicate him.
Except now, standing in her kitchen and looking into her anguished eyes, he knows it doesn’t really work. It wounds her when he pushes away, Frank recognizes that, especially when she can tell that he doesn’t want to. And truthfully, she wasn’t any safer with him gone – Curtis filled him in on Fisk and the lunatic running around in Red’s suit. She’s a menace, a magnet for danger, and, like every other backwards thing about him, it only draws them together more powerfully.
“Karen, listen to me.” His words are slow and deliberate, a conversation on a hair trigger. “I would have said anything in that moment if it meant getting you out of that building alive, and away from the shit that was headed for me.”
She shakes her head, quick and sharp, and makes a sound that would be a laugh if it weren’t quite so hollow. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
He probably deserves this, after taking off without a goodbye, and staying away while she nearly got herself killed, again. But now he’s back – and part of him always knew he would be – pulled back into the inevitable madness that is loving Karen Page.
“Yes, you do.” She’s a hurricane, and still he can’t stop looking her in the eye.
“Frank, I waited, and you–” She cuts herself off, but he knows how to finish the sentence, vividly aware of all the ways in which he’s failed her.
(“You never lie to me.” He remembers when she told him that for the first time, how he couldn’t believe that those blue eyes were looking straight at him with more trust than he’d ever seen.)
“Anything, Karen,” he repeats, hoping that she knows just how many hypotheticals they’re really talking about. “I would have said anything, done anything to keep you safe.”
He can’t help it, the moment her gaze softens on him, the “Attagirl” slips through his lips, unbidden. She rolls her eyes with a watery smile and a scoff, but rounds the island to take a few steps towards him all the same.
“I guess I don’t know why you’d be here otherwise,” she mumbles, almost to herself. “You’re a lot of things, Frank, but you’re not cruel.”
He tastes copper on the inside of his lower lip when he laughs aloud at that and it’s less bitter than the irony.
But she protests. Of course she does. “You’re not,” she tells him, with a softness he can almost feel against his cheek. “You’re vengeful, and bloodthirsty and … terrifying, when you need to be. But you’re not cruel.”
(“You’re not the monster,” she told him, and he had almost believed it. “You never were.”)
“Think there’s some that might argue with that if they could.” He doesn’t want to waste time with this, no amount of her journalistic semantics are going to save his soul. Not anymore. And there are so many more important things that need to be said.
“I could never be cruel to you, Karen,” he relents. “And I can’t seem to stay away. But the truth remains that you deserve better. I don’t want you to be a part of this life I gotta live.”
“Well I don’t want to be a part of any other.” This time he does feel her on his cheek, as her thumb traces away a tear he hadn’t even felt at the corner of his eye before she reaches out to take his hands in her own.
“Frank, I’ve been dealing with danger since long before I met you, and I know there’s more coming. But I’m tired of people making decisions for me about how things are going to go, when I know damn well what I want.”
She’s so close now that he can smell the last of the day’s perfume. He wonders if she dabs it behind her ears, or that pulse point on her neck. He wonders if there’s a world where he gets to find out.
“And I think you know that,” Karen finishes when he stays silent, lost in this reverie that comes over him every time she shows him her heart on her sleeve. “I think that’s why you’re here.”
He swallows hard, trying to find the words in the burn at the back of his throat. “It’s why I shouldn’t be, too.”
“Maybe,” she nods. “Maybe you should go again, maybe it would be safer for you, better. Maybe, if I were a more selfless, person, I’d make you.”
Of course she’s only thinking of him, he scoffs, forever moonstruck by the ardor she holds for his well being.
“But I want you here if you want to be here.” Her eyes flicker down and then back up to him, but there’s no trace of doubt this time. “Do you?”
“Yes.” The answer crosses his lips embarrassingly quickly, but it makes her smile and immediately he knows it’s worth it.
“Good. Then can’t that be enough?” Frank wants so much more for her than bargaining for the scraps he’s able to give. But somehow – miraculously, if he believed in that kind of thing – she just wants him. “Does it have to be everything, all at once? Life or death, heaven or hell?”
Yes, something dark and deep inside him whispers. Yes, this is going to be everything. “I don’t know,” he answers, because he never wants to lie to her again.
Karen just waits for more, trust scrawled across her face like a scarlet letter. He knows she’d wear it out into the world if she could, show anyone and everyone just how deep her conviction runs. It’s terrifying, the thought of it. But it’s a million other things, too.
“Tell me what you were going to say to me back in that hospital room,” he asks softly, surprising even himself. “I want to know what plan you had in that beautiful brain that was gonna save us.”
Her eyes cut away from his for just a moment, and she gives that sigh that he’s learning is just for him. It doesn’t change how I feel about you, she had told him. So damn stubborn.
“I didn’t have a plan, Frank.”
It’s a lie and he tells her as much. “Bullshit.”
She fires back, defiantly, immediately. “I would have said anything, just like you. I was going to tell you–”
His eyes flick to the smooth column of her throat when he hears it catch. “Tell me.”
“I was going to tell you that I love you.” She says it fast, one long breath and he feels it across his entire body, like a gale force. It’s the most terrified he’s ever seen her look. “Even though I knew it wouldn’t stop you, or solve anything. Even though it would’ve only made things worse, still might.”
Her hands squeeze at his and he’s glad because every other part of him is fumbling for something, anything, to hold onto. “Karen…”
“I was going to tell you that I love you, in spite of the fact that you don’t love yourself enough to believe it.” Sometimes Frank thinks he’ll believe anything, as long as she’s the one telling him. And it’s like she can read his mind, because she says it again.
“I love you, Frank. I do. And I’m sorry if it’s hard for you to hear that, but I needed to–”
And then, finally, he can’t hold himself back anymore. He can’t not give into the pull between them. He can’t not kiss her, not when they’ve come so close so many times. Make it mean something, she had whispered in the hospital, without once breaking her steely stare. He can grant her that, at least.
Karen meets him halfway, she always has. A gasp shapes her lips perfectly to meet his as he snakes one hand around her waist and another to tangle in her hair.
“Frank–” She takes a breath on the downbeat of his name, but then he feels the tips of her fingers twist around the hair at the nape of his neck and she’s kissing him again like she was born to do it.
“God, sweetheart…” I love you, I love you, I love you. He thinks they both probably know that he’s not ready, but his mind is already queuing up the admission as they tumble back onto her couch, all hands and lips and passionate veracity. “I missed you so much.”
Some time later, after minutes have melted into the long-simmering heat between them, Frank finds himself tangled up on her couch and thinking he could do this for a long time. Maybe forever.
She’s sprawled half across his lap, with an arm draped behind him and a palm splayed flat on his chest, and he can’t remember the last time he felt so content. “So, what happened to your sidekick?”
“On a bus down to Florida,” he tells her, feeling that little pang in his chest again. “Gonna try and find herself a life to have before it’s too late.”
Karen softens at that, and he knows she’s thinking of him. Or both of them, maybe, the years they’ve lost to the black and bloody. “I’m sorry, Frank. Seems like you two made a good team.”
He can’t quite tell if there’s the tiniest touch of jealousy there, amid the sweetness that she can’t seem to help. If there is, it’s just for him to savor.
“Yeah, maybe.” He drags his palm up and down her thigh, intent soothing them both. “But I hope she stays as far away from that kinda shit as possible from now on.”
She pulls back to look him in the eyes then, and for the first time in forever, her soft scrutiny doesn’t leave him with the itchy urge to run in the other direction. “And what about you?”
Of course, there’s still so much they’ve got to contend with. “I wasn’t lying before,” he admits. “I’m back in it sooner or later, I think we both know that.”
He drops his eyes from hers, but not for long. Karen’s palm moves from his chest to cup his cheek, urging him back up to look her in the eyes like she’s knows what’s coming next. “I can’t change,” he confesses, because it’s one of the few things he’s certain of right now. “Not now, maybe not ever.”
“Neither can I,” she answers, still beautifully defiant. “And I won’t ask you to. I just want you here.”
He still can’t quite believe that any of this is real. And the only thing louder than the voice in his head screaming that he doesn’t deserve it are her words, nestled so close, wound so tightly around him.
“Someone told me something recently,” Karen says, and it feels like the start of something – the mending of a rift. “They said, ‘When someone in need tries to push you away, you have to find the strength to hold on tighter.’”
Frank chuckles at the ghost of a memory that invokes. “Two hands, huh?”
She laughs too, and in the happy open space behind it, he hears the echo of three more. Maybe it wasn’t them he was on the verge of losing, after all. Maybe it was just happiness, contentment, the feeling of walking into a room and knowing it’s where you’re supposed to be.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says then, softly, resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m glad you stayed.”
“This is where I belong, Karen.” And he means the city and he means her apartment and he means the clutch of her arms around his chest and he means the feeling of peace that’s starting to feel almost possible, when her lips press gently to his temple. “This is home.”