Archive of Our Own

Later, in the newsroom, she’ll find a bruise on her arm or feel the pull of sore muscles in her thighs. She’ll use the restroom after her first coffee of the day and find her folds still plump and glistening with lingering arousal. Blushing, she'll wonder how anyone manages to work when there is fantastic sex to be had back at home.

And it is, mostly, fantastic. Frank is everything she sensed he’d be: attentive, intuitive, good-humored, deeply competent. She gets wet thinking about him, even just his name, which is frankly getting a little bit inconvenient as the days go on. Their bodies can’t seem to stay apart when they’re home together. She reads with her legs draped over his lap, dresses with the assistance of his eager hands, bathes with him lying on the floor beside the tub. They sleep curled together, too, and to her surprise neither of them has jerked awake from a nightmare yet. It’s been years since she woke up beside anyone, but nothing about Frank’s presence alarms her. Lying there, enveloped by his arms and legs and smell, could never add up to anything except ‘safe.’ 

Yet Karen can’t shake the suspicion that there is unfulfilled potential between them. There’s something just beyond reach even as she tumbles over into orgasm around Frank’s hands or mouth or cock. However deeply he fucks her, however tenderly he holds her, she finds herself wanting more.

Funnily enough, Matt is the one that helps her figure out why. 

***

It takes Matt ten days to find out about her and Frank. Looking back on it later, Karen’s surprised it took that long. Matt had gone to ground for a few days right after the battle, but Hell’s Kitchen is a small neighborhood when it comes down to it. 

So a week and a half after the battle she gets a cryptic text from Matt—are there any other kind from him?—and finds herself standing in the empty shell of their law firm, with everything she thought she knew about Matt crumbling around her. 

“I am Daredevil.” 

Karen is frozen for a minute, looking from the mask to Matt and back again. She scours her memories of the past year, looking for any piece of evidence that the Matt she knew and came close to loving could possibly overlap with the charismatic whirlwind of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. She remembers Daredevil’s many uncanny run-ins with her. She sees again Matt’s many bruises, winces, scrapes, ginger steps, and hungover mornings.

Then she bursts out laughing.

Matt jerks backward in surprise, eyebrows furrowing down beneath the lenses of his glasses. “What?"

Karen just shakes her head, laughing so hard she can’t catch her breath.

“I thought you were an alcoholic! I didn’t think you could get any more secretive, and it turns out you literally have a whole other life.” 

Matt’s speechless, actually, and Karen takes a mental snapshot to gloat over later. 

“I can’t—God, I keep remembering things, and they keep getting worse. I can’t believe I was so stupid. How many times have we talked about vigilantes? You sat there and pretended to be surprised when I talked about the great and wonderful Daredevil.”

“Karen, I—” 

“You asked me out! Tell me, how exactly did you think that was that going to end?” Matt looks pained at that, which is some small consolation. “If you never intended to tell me, what’s changed now?” 

“Everything, Karen,” he says, breaking his stoic silence. “Fisk is back. You almost died a half-dozen times in the last two weeks. The gangs are ducking and covering. I can’t play by the rules in the daytime and get creative at night, any more. It needs to be full-on war."

There’s so much to unpack there that Karen doesn’t know where to begin. “You are a Catholic lawyer advocating for vigilante justice, here.” 

Matt rolls his shoulders back, shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “I’ve only ever done this to defend people who need help quicker than the law can give it to them. Just, now, the problems are bigger than the law can handle."

“So we had some close calls. That’s how it’s always been! How is turning to the dark side going to keep us all safer? You’re telling me you’d rather, what, assassinate Fisk than help the police recapture him?"

“I don’t kill people,” he snaps.

“Oh, well, pardon me if I can’t find your moral lines,” Karen fires back. “So this is, what, saying your final goodbyes before you self-sacrifice?” 

“I can do more good this way.”

“That’s just not true, Matt. You did so much good here at Nelson & Murdock. You don’t need to give it all up—your career, your friends, your normal life.”

“I tried to have it both ways. Doesn’t work.” Matt clutches almost violently at the box in his hands. “I told you, that day in my apartment when you saw the glass was broken. I was recovering from, from a fight, and I wanted so badly for you to be the alternative. But I see now that putting that responsibility on you wasn’t fair. No one can replace what this mask does for me.” 

“You sound like an addict,” Karen says quietly. 

“Well, the drinking lie didn’t come out of nowhere. It fits, in some ways.” There’s bitterness in his voice that makes Karen want to run up and hug him.

“I am so worried for you, Matt,” she says quietly. “I look at you and all I can think about is what you’re going to do next.” 

“So how can you stand being around Castle, then?” he snaps. 

“What?” Karen jerks backward, her moment of softness broken. 

“I’m… Look, I’m trying to be honest with you.” Matt says, wearing his signature expression of painful indignation. "I heard you, one night when I was on patrol.” 

“Oh, God.” Karen closes her eyes, hands twitching with the urge to cover her face. 

“I didn’t mean to! I heard his voice, which isn’t unusual, but he was near your place so I went over to make sure he wasn’t getting too close. And once I... um, once I realized, I got out of there. I swear.” 

Karen lets out a bitter laugh. “This is such an invasion of privacy, I can’t believe it.” 

“I can’t choose what—” 

“I’m not stupid, Matt. Give me that, at least."

She sees him blink behind his glasses, as forcefully as if he’d been slapped. “I know. But listening to the neighborhood is what I do! I was just trying to protect you, to check on you from a distance. I tried,” he sighs, his impatience showing through, “I tried to give you space.”  

“You ended up acting invasive and creepy. Having these abilities doesn’t give you unlimited license to use them.”

“Listen, I’m sorry I found out. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Daredevil. But I didn’t say anything to you that wasn’t true.” 

“Do you hear yourself? You cannot spin this in any way the makes you look honest. You lied to me from the moment we met.” Karen’s a little surprised at how firmly she is holding her ground, but there will be time to feel hurt later.

“But you know who I am! I’m still Matt Murdock, I just… I have this part of my life, too. I tried to keep them compartmentalized but that wasn’t working. I lost Foggy, I lost the firm—” 

“You self-sabotaged, you mean.” 

“—and I can’t stand to lose anything else, so I’m trying this. The truth. You know me. And you know more than most people do about Daredevil. They’ve always both existed for you, but now… now they both exist in here.” He lays one hand on his own chest, and Karen can feel herself lurch toward sympathy until he adds, “But we have no idea what Castle is capable of, how far he’ll go.” 

Karen’s mouth quirks, and finally she feels her heart accept what her mind knew the second Matt pulled the mask out.

“I do, actually. I know his limits. And I didn’t think so until just now, but I know his character lot better than I know yours.” 

“That’s not—” 

“We met Frank,” she continues, speaking over him, “at the lowest point in his life. His worst sins were on trial for the world to see. We looked at crime scene photos before we met him. I knew the faces of his victims before I knew his. And he has never lied to me.” 

While she doesn't intend that last sentence to be an indictment, once it’s out there, she hopes Matt will hear the implication: He never lied like you did.

“He is not a good guy, Karen.” 

“Neither are you!” she shoots back, exasperated. “Neither am I. That’s the point. We’re all universes, remember? All of us contain good and bad—except Foggy, maybe. He probably thinks we’re all batshit.” They share a small smile, as painful as anything that’s come up in this room tonight. “But Frank is trying hard to keep the balance tilted toward the good. I really worry that yours is slipping the other way.” 

Matt’s head tilts backward, and Karen watches him search the textured soundscape of the ceiling. No answers to be found there, either.

“You haven’t asked me to, but I can’t endorse this, Karen.” 

“That’s fine, since I don’t need your approval. You can judge me or accept me as I am, but do not try to control me. Don't follow Frank, or patrol my block, or interfere with my work. Please.” 

Matt nods, once. “Is that it, then?” 

“I don’t know, Matt. This is a lot to take in, but you know where to find me,” Karen says, her voice soft. “Be safe.”

With a final tight smile, Matt leaves, the mask still clenched in his hand.

Karen watches him go. 

***

Frank gets back to the apartment two hours after she does. He has a place closer to the river that he uses to store his ‘supplies,’ as Karen euphemistically calls his arsenal, and he usually stops off there to change into civvies before joining her at her place most every night. When her lease is up Karen plans to find a bigger place with more vigilante-friendly features like multiple exits, roof access, and maybe even enough space for a queen bed. 

But for now, they make do. She watches Frank climb in through the window from where she sits on top of the kitchen counter. She smiles at him, glad to have him home, but her fidgety hands and bouncing foot tip him off to her mood.

Immediately he asks, “What happened?” 

“Am I really the last one to know about Matt?” 

“Oh, babe.” He holds her gaze, hands sliding carefully into his pockets. 

“How soon did you know?”  

Frank doesn’t answer right away, taking a moment to think through his answer. It’s one of the things Karen loves about him: deliberateness. Concentration. Not a word wasted, ever. 

“The first time you all saw me in the hospital. Daredevil found me the night I ambushed the Dogs of Hell, and I recognized his voice almost immediately when the three of you came in.” 

Karen nods, nostrils flaring, trying her best to separate her anger at Matt from the man standing in front of her. “And did you know I was in the dark?” 

“I suspected as much, yeah. He made little jokes about it during the trial that you and Nelson didn’t react to.” 

“God, what a moron I am,” Karen whispers.

Frank, steps forward with one arm outstretched. “Babe—” 

“I don’t need pity,” she says, hating her own tone already but helpless to put on any kind of veneer right now.

“What do you need?” He pauses, just a few feet away from her but absolutely unwilling to cross that boundary without permission. 

“I need not to be lied to!” She slides down off the counter. “I—I’m sorry. This isn’t about you, Frank, I just. God.” She rakes her hands through her hair, knuckles white. 

“I know.” 

“Everything is just—” She swallows, blinking back tears, eyes flitting all around like a cornered animal. She bets Frank knows the feeling.

“C’mere,” he says. He draws her into his arms, cradling her close. She’s damn tall but he’s twice as broad, thick arms and round shoulders curling protectively around her sharp edges. He pets her hair, her neck, feels her breathing start to slow. “Tell me what I can do."

Karen leans back, meeting his eyes. “Help me forget.”

Frank nods, and leans down to kiss her.

It feels like coming home. She wraps her arms around his neck, pressing herself as close to his strong warm body as she can. He’s got stale coffee on his breath and cigarette smoke clinging to his skin; Karen would not have it any other way.

Frank smooths his hands up and down her back, first over and then under her blouse. “Bed,” Karen whispers, and laughs for the first time all day when he hoists her up into his arms as she’d hoped he would. 

In just a few steps they’re horizontal on her haphazardly-made bed. Sometimes she likes to drag this part out, making out and feeling one another up over clothing until one of them can’t stand it any longer. Tonight, though, she needs touch. She sits up to strip off her own shirt and bra. He seems to get the memo and sheds his own, too; pants and underwear follow. 

Frank’s cock is half-hard and beautifully flushed—arguably Karen’s favorite version of it. “Hello, gorgeous,” she whispers, and pushes Frank down onto the bed. He rolls his eyes at her, but the touch of color high on his cheeks tell her he’s likes a little flattery as much as anyone. Then she ducks her head down and takes him into her mouth. 

“Oh, babe,” he murmurs, hands grabbing at the bedsheets.

Karen loves this part: feeling him grow harder in her mouth, velvety smooth and clean-tasting, swelling and stiffening with each long slow draw of suction. Not even a minute and he’s fully erect, thighs tense and straining, clearly holding back the urge to pushing further up into her mouth. Karen wishes he would—we’ll work on that, she thinks.

“Okay,” he gasps. He likes coming with either his cock or his tongue in her, so Karen pulls back, mouth slick and smiling. He sits up to kiss her again, licking his own taste out of her mouth.

They swap places on the bed, Karen stretching out on her back and Frank kneeling between her legs. She palms her breasts as he settles in, sliding her legs over his shoulders and his hands under her. “Beautiful,” he whispers, and licks long and slow up her slit.

Frank takes his time going down on her. He seems to savor each part of her, alternating between teeth, tongue, and suction. Karen most loves his occasional whimpers, involuntary bursts of sound that are fifteen times hotter than anything she’s known before.

“Harder, harder,” she gasps, arching her hips up to meet him. She grabs the hand he has stationed on her hip and brings it up to cup her breast. Frank looks up at her, smirking against her cunt as he starts to knead her breast. Karen shudders happily into his touch, pinching her other nipple. 

Frank is lapping at her, licking up the outer folds of her vulva with long rough strokes of his tongue. By now he knows how much Karen loves to be covered, and the hand he’s laid over her pubic bone is doing all kinds of good things for her. His thumb sweeps down over her clit as his fingers pinch her nipple, and she writhes.

“Yes,” she groans, “oh god, Frank, that’s it.” 

It takes no time at all for him to bring her off. He presses his warm wide tongue against her opening as she rides it out, back arching into his touch.  

“D’you have another in you?” he asks, pulling back from her cunt just enough to get the words out.

“Fuck yes.” She’s squirming against him already, clit oversensitive but skin still buzzing. 

“You sure?” he asks, smirking. He’s running his fingertips over her swollen cunt, giving just enough friction to stimulate her but not enough to satisfy. 

Karen pushes her hips down into his touch, hungry for that extra something that’s just beyond their reach. “I’m not gonna break, here!” 

“I know,” he says, “but—” 

“But nothing. Come on, am I sleeping with the Punisher or what?"

Frank’s eyes flash. Her stomach drops, and she knows she’s got him. She wonders for a second if she went too far, if she detected hurt in his eyes, but then he ducks down to bite down hard on her inner thigh.

“Yeah,” she breathes, hips squirming up toward him.

“You like that?”

He licks over the red-ringed bite, tongue rough over her sensitive skin, and then does it again. Suction, pressure, the sharp pain of teeth—

“Yes,” she gasps. 

“Ten-four.” Frank scrapes his teeth across her other thigh and slams his fingers up into her.

Finally, she thinks, her brain too busy parsing the sensations to think very much else. Three thick calloused fingers filling her, his palm against her clit, his mouth reddening every square inch of her thighs—it’s both too much and exactly enough.

She rides it out for a minute before grasping his forearm, hand curled around the bulging muscles there as they tense and relax with every stroke. “Come on,” she murmurs. “Want you in me."

She feels a shudder run through him, from the forehead pressed against her hip to the fingertips buried deep in her. But when he looks up at her his face is carefully, conspicuously neutral. “How do you want it?"

“Up,” she says, sliding her hand up his arm and behind his neck to pull him toward her. She kisses him, wet and open and lush, shivering at the pleasure of it.

“I want you, Frank. All of you.” She pulls back, face just far enough from his to focus on his eyes. “I want your chivalry and your sweetness and your strength."

“Emphasis on the strength?” he guesses in that relentlessly sexy, gravelly voice. He’s still flexing his fingers inside her, and fuck, Karen knocks her head against the wall behind her with the force of her shudder.

“Ah, yes, come on,” she says, no sooner getting the words out than he withdraws his fingers, sits back on his heels, and flips her over. Her stomach drops, and she grins.

“You gonna do what I say?” The bed dips as he kneels over her, knees on either side of her hips. 

“Yes,” Karen gasps, shuddering beneath him.

“You gonna tell me what you want next time instead of provoking me?” His voice is sharp but his hands are soft as he smooths her hair away from her face. She meets his eyes, nods.

“Can’t hear you down there,” he says, smirking. 

“Yes."

“And will you tell me if anything’s too much?” 

Karen rolls her eyes. “Is that a promise?”

“Not kidding, darlin."

“Yes, Frank, I will. Can you fuck me now?” 

He snorts, hauls her hips up, and nudges her knees forward so she’s got her ass up in the air. She tries to rise up on her elbows but he holds her down with one hand at the base of her neck. Karen can’t help but groan, shuddering back into his touch. He’s not trapping her, exactly, but he is in charge, and being told exactly what to do by someone she trusts implicitly is doing things for her.

“Come on, come on,” she mumbles, and he shushes her, thumb running back and forth across the first notch of her spine. He’s hurriedly rolling on a condom with his other hand, and later when Karen’s brain is back to full capacity she’ll have to remember to add “ambidextrous” to her list of reasons to date vigilante Marines.

Finally, finally, she feels him nudging at her opening, stroking teasingly over her folds. She’s dripping for him, wet on down to her inner thighs. 

“Fuck—”

“Quiet,” Frank growls, and slides right into her. 

Lord, Karen thinks, and finally. He pulls back slowly and thrusts forward again, savoring these first few strokes. Karen whimpers as he builds to a faster rhythm. Her face is pressed against the mattress, buried in her arms and half-obscured by the sweaty mess of her hair. Her breasts bounce with the force of his thrusts, her nipples rubbing against the sheets. Already her hips are beginning to ache, but she doesn’t care—she can’t think past this moment.

And there it is. There’s the singleminded bliss she knew they could reach. 

“Perfect,” she says, or something like it—she can’t think beyond the delicious drag of his thick cock filling her, the animal satisfaction as his hips thud against hers with each powerful thrust. Her spine curves up like a ski jump, straining back to meet Frank as he draws back and rams into her with the force she's been craving.

With his cock in her, his legs straddling her, and his huge calloused hands on her, Karen feels absolutely smothered. He’s still got a hand on her upper back holding her down on the bed, fingers spread wide so that his thumb and pinkie each dig into the tender muscle underneath her shoulder blades. Frank’s absurdly muscled legs bracket her thighs, keeping them in place even as they strain to open up further for him.

This is what she needs. She feels like she’s in a centrifuge, pulled and pushed and stretched and compressed in ten different directions. Frank’s thrusts are powerful and languorous, a combination that Karen did not even know existed. He's deliberate, promising, and in absolutely no rush.

Every meeting of their hips hits her like a blunt object, the force reverberating down her spine and throbbing through her cunt. Every time he bottoms out in her, painpleasure stabs up through her stomach and into her chest, knocking at the inside of her breastbone. She feels it skittering in her throat, the all-encompassing electricity of him.

A groan rumbles up out of her, deeper and more guttural than she’s ever heard from herself or any partner. She’s not really sure if it hurts, but she doesn’t give a shit—her every instinct is telling her to get more, deeper, and harder.

“Okay?” Frank huffs out.

“More,” is all she can manage. She’s wanton, subsumed into the new compound creature their bodies have formed. Her thoughts are displaced by sensation, inner monologue blissfully turned off.

She barely even registers the orgasm building deep in her until it erupts. She slumps further forward, limbs lax. Frank moans, his thrusts growing shallower and quicker as he builds toward climax himself.

Karen feels it when he’s close—his grip on her hip tightens, his hips strain forward, and just as he bends down to lay his chest along the long pale line of her back, he comes. 

They hang motionless for a moment. He kisses the back of Karen’s neck, rough pink tongue darting out to lick at the sweat gathered there. She grins sleepily, reaching backward to hook an arm around his waist and tip them over onto their sides.

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

Frank laughs. “That was not exactly a hardship.” 

“You know what I mean—I’m sorry I was so worked up. It’s not fair to use you for anger management.”

He nods against her neck, then leans back to knot the condom and drop it into the trash can Karen started keeping beside her bed. She turns over so they’re face to face, drapes a leg over his hip. 

“Felt good, though, huh?” he adds, eyes soft.

“Sure did.” There will be more to say, of course; hurts to work through, desires to voice, limits to set. Contrary to what Matt said, Frank doesn’t scare her one bit. What does make her nervous is the strength of their connection, how quickly and efficiently she got what she wanted out of him. Power is a new feeling for her, and she is determined to grow into it wisely. 

“Catch any bad guys today?” she asks. 

Frank smiles. “Trying to get a lead on tomorrow’s news?” 

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I have a very exclusive source in the New York crime world.” 

“Hmm, sounds like an important guy.” 

“Handsome, too.” 

He laughs. Karen, grinning, can’t help but lean in again to kiss him.