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dust2dust34 · 6 years

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Maybe (Kastle, Post-S1, T)

Summary: Frank and Karen fall into a pattern, one they don’t even realize they’re doing until it’s well-established: every Tuesday morning, they meet at a crap-ass diner a couple blocks from Karen’s apartment.

(I dumped water all over myself yesterday and my brain just... went here. It's kind of weirdly fluffy? I don't know. Let’s say this is well past Season 1. I have a lot of Kastle feelings and I don't know what to do with all of them. I'm still trying to find their voices, but I kicked this out pretty quickly so I'm going with it.)

(read on AO3)

Maybe

It started with a check-in.

Karen had put the roses in her window, wanting to make sure he was okay. That was all. It’d been several weeks since the hotel (since the elevator) and while she knew he was alive, that he’d taken care of what he’d set out to do, she wanted to see him, to make sure. (To see if he was doing more than just existing.) (She didn’t tell him when she finally saw him that she’d thought about putting those damn roses in her window for three weeks straight, and that it was only after a bottle of wine that she finally did it.) It was a cold day when she went to their spot on the waterfront, cold enough that her lungs ached with each breath. When Frank didn’t show up, she didn’t let herself think about why, because when she did it wasn’t just the frigid air that made her insides twist and cramp.

She left a note, and she hoped.

He found her the next day, a Tuesday.

Frank was okay, as okay as he could be. Maybe even good. It looked like he was growing a beard again, but it wasn’t as wild as the first time she’d seen him. It was peppered with bits of grey this time, emphasizing the scars that littered his skin. No new bruises, she’d noted, not sure what she’d expected. He was slowly adding bricks and mortar to Pete Castiglione’s life - a new job, a new apartment. He talked about a dog he ran by every morning and she wondered how long it’d be before he got one. He went to group with Curtis and he even owned up to seeing the Liebermans every once in a while. Karen didn’t ask why not her, not this time. She had a place in Frank Castle’s life. She didn’t know where she stood with Pete Castiglione.

The answer to her unspoken question came a month later, when Frank appeared out of the blue.

He found her sitting at the bar on a Tuesday morning, drinking coffee, flipping through a stack of papers. (It would only be later that she’d tell him she went back each Tuesday with hope, and he would tell her that he’d fought going back until he couldn’t. When he saw her in the window that day, the word ‘inevitable’ was the only way to describe the feeling that filled him. (He didn’t tell her that part, though. Not yet.)) He went inside and he joined her… and then again two weeks later, and then the next week, again and again until it was a weekly occurrence.

(Frank went by the diner on the other mornings, when he was on his way to his new job - to Pete’s new job - but Tuesdays were the only day she was there. It would be a long while before he knew why.)

It was stilted for a while. Surface. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just easier that way. Everything meaningful, everything heavy, everything that pierced through the bullshit with a goddamned machete was left to sighs in place of words, to the glances that lingered, the hesitant touches that made their skin burn, to quiet smiles that filled in the jagged cracks deep inside. So much had happened between them, more than what happened in a lifetime for some people, and it felt impossible to capture all of that when the only tools they had were their own voices, when something wasn’t pushing them together, forcing them to cut through the bullshit.

(For a while Frank found himself thinking he’d almost rather have a shower of bullets and conspiracies that rotted people’s lives over this fucking awkward shit.)

Things were quiet, soft, easy… they were, that is, until Karen dumped water all over herself.

It was so silly, so innocuous, so ridiculous: Karen went to take a drink and tilted it too soon, sending water dribbling all over her mouth and chin, slipping down her neck and spattering all over the front of her cardigan.

Frank wasn’t looking at her at the time, concentrating on slathering his toast with his eggs, but he saw it from the corner of his eye.

Karen froze, her eyes widening, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment as she just… stopped. Maybe if she’d kept moving, pretended like nothing had happened, the moment would have slipped by, but she didn’t. Her eyes burned a hole in the side of his head and he knew she was wondering if he’d seen her, if he was going to say something.

It was in those tiny few seconds that he found the laughter that bubbled up inside his chest.

She’d never heard him laugh, not like this. It was so easy, so natural, so unencumbered, and oddly infectious. It started as a rumble deep in his chest, low and gritty just like his voice, rusty and uneven, like he had to remember how to do it at all. But it was there and it grew, especially when he tried to tamp it down. That only made it worse and before Karen knew what was happening, she was joining him.

“Sorry,” Frank said, shaking his head after a moment. He wiped his face, almost like he was trying to ease the ill-used muscles. The ghost of a smile still sat on his lips. “I didn’t mean to laugh, that was just, uh…”

He drifted off, leaving her mind to fill in the blanks.

(He’d been thinking, Cute. Later he’d tell her, “It was so goddamn cute the way you froze, right, like maybe nobody’d see you if you weren’t moving.”)

The silence that followed his dangling sentence had Karen’s heart climbing up her throat and she quickly shook it away with a breathy, “No.” She grinned, wiping the rest of the water away. “I’ll gladly make a fool of myself if it means seeing a smile.”

It was the truth, but Karen found herself holding her breath all the same, freezing again, for a different reason this time. Frank Castle was a caged animal on his good days, and she knew better than most what happened when you pushed too hard, too fast. But instead of pulling away, Frank huffed.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Guess I don’t do that too often, huh?”

“Definitely not often enough,” Karen agreed. She went back to her breakfast, adding a breezy, “Who knows, though, maybe that’ll change.”

She didn’t look up, focusing on collecting every single piece of her hash brown that she could on her plate, but all that concentration wasn’t enough to take away from the sensation of his eyes boring into the top of her head. His gaze burned into her…

“Yeah,” he said. She looked up and her insides bottomed out when he didn’t look away. They disappeared completely when a peculiar look colored his face as he said, “Maybe.”

“What?” Karen asked.

“Nothing,” Frank said quietly. And it was quiet. Soft. A tone she’d only ever heard when things were going horribly wrong and he was looking at her like he’d never see her again. That look wasn’t there, but the tone was. Karen’s blood pumped a little faster, her breaths coming a little too quick as she furrowed her brow in question. Frank read her perfectly. “Something Sarah asked me once,” he supplied. “David’s Sarah, back before all that shit went down.”

Her voice was equally soft. “What’d she ask?”

“I, uh…” Frank looked down, going back to that moment, to when Sarah had looked so incredibly lost, when he’d known that her entire world would be changing soon, that she would be getting back the thing she’d lost. And that he wouldn’t be, but also… also that that reality didn’t gut him quite as much as it used to. He cleared his throat. “She was struggling, with the kids, with missing David, and I told her… I told her the only way out is to find something you care about, you know? You find something and you hold onto it.”

The words were so reminiscent of the first time they’d been in a diner it took Karen’s breath away.

Frank continued. “And she asked me… she asked me if I’d found something to do that for me.”

“What’d you say?” Karen asked.

“Maybe,” he replied, meeting Karen’s gaze… and leaving absolutely no room for doubt in what he meant. “I said maybe.”

Karen smiled, a slow-growing pull of her lips that she tried to contain. “Maybe’s good.”

“Yeah,” he said, so softly she barely heard it. But she did. She always did.

“Yeah.”

(And it was good, especially when maybe became definitely.)

The End

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Reviews literally feed the soul and muse!

#kastle #kastle fic #kastle fanfic #kastle fanfiction #frank castle #karen page #the punisher #fanfiction #my fics #my fics: kastle #dust2dust34 #my first kastle fic #i'm nervous as sin my friends #i always get nervous with new couples #especially when the first thing i post is weirdly fluffy?!#it's the exact opposite of what i've been writing lately #so maybe i'm looking for balance

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