Chapter Text
Going to war was supposed to make a difference.
It was the Last War. The Great War. The war that was supposed to help right all the wrongs committed way back, a hundred years ago. 2077, the propaganda posters proclaimed. The year that peace was forged with blood!
Frank knew better. Knew better the whole damn time because Maria never let him forget it. He went off to war with a warning at his back, and whenever he logged on to his terminal to read her messages, he found words from underground newspapers, their articles copied and pasted to him in attachments titled things like “pregnancy bump!” and “mom’s birthday!” All of them said the same kind of thing. Anti-propaganda propaganda. He scoffed at Maria’s boldness. Deleted the messages so his superiors wouldn’t see. Read through them first, though.
It wasn’t that he believed peace was possible. If he did, it was in a foolish, halfhearted sort of way. The way he started getting after a few beers with his wife curled up next to him on the sofa. Idyllic. Naïve. But if peace could be achieved, wasn’t it worth it? Wasn’t all his suffering, all his nights missing his wife, wasn’t it worth it?
For a little bit after the fighting stopped, it seemed like it had been.
Maria had a baby, a little girl. Lisa. They bought a nice house in the suburbs. Blue paint. Lawn he mowed every couple of days. Another baby on the way. Rumblings of war all the while, but some nights Maria could even be persuaded to turn off the radio and enjoy the quiet of life outside the city.
The sounds of war never left Frank, never let him feel peace, but he got better at making them shush for a while.
Central Park was his idea.
She never liked to leave the area around their house. They’d paid for a spot in a Vault, and she always worried when they went too far from it that the bombs would end up falling when they were away. But Central Park wasn’t all that long a drive, and it had seemed like a good morning for it.
When the sirens rang out, wailing across the grass, Frank reacted. Grabbed Lisa. Grabbed Maria’s hand. Sprinted after the folk who seemed to have half an idea where they were going. When they got to the Vault in the subway tunnel – Vault 80 – Frank flashed his dogtags, and the guy in fatigues checking peoples’ IDs hesitated. Then let him through.
“They’ll make room, Lieutenant,” he said as Frank passed. In the distance, they could hear the bombs beginning to fall. The whistling whine. The rumbling of approaching thunder.
Frank wondered what was going to happen to the people who didn’t make it past the guy in fatigues. Wondered how long before they overpowered him and forced their way in. Wondered if the guy in fatigues knew he was going to die up there to protect a bunch of rich assholes who probably didn’t deserve half of what that kid deserved.
The whole world was shaking by the time they got into the elevator, and Frank thought the bombs would roast his family where they stood, but they didn’t, and he was fine. He was fine. He was alive. And they descended down into the earth, where the bombs wouldn’t find them.
Maria was sobbing when they met Colonel Schoonover, who cooed over baby Lisa and let her play with his glasses. The Colonel was good at handling people. That was his job. He told Frank that everything would be all right. He handed Maria a tissue to dry her tears. He gave them their vault jumpsuits, told Maria she looked lovely when she changed into hers – made the shapeless blue fabric sound downright figure-flattering. Teased Frank about his jumpsuit being too tight on account of the muscles.
Only later would Frank realize that the man never answered a single question. Then again, what would Frank have done? Wasn’t like they had a lot of choice.
All the people who had come down in the elevator before them were all being led into pods. Little individual pods, like little showers. Claustrophobic looking, and Frank locked up, but the Colonel knew just what to say again, and he clamped Frank on the shoulder the way Military men do.
“Just like a set of power armor, eh, son?” he asked.
“What is it?”
“Decon unit. You ever see anything like it in the war?”
“No sir.”
“Well, consider yourself lucky. In wartime, these things mean you’re up shit’s creek. But right now, it’s just a precaution. Make sure you and your family are good to go. It’ll just cycle through, clean you off nice and good. Radiation travels fast, son. We need to be sure.”
Frank didn’t notice how stupid that was until the cryo tube was already freezing, was already putting him to sleep as he stared out the glass, watching it rapidly ice over, watching Maria’s head slump to the side, Lisa held in her arms.
This wasn’t any damn decon unit, was it?
He can’t move. Can’t do much more than twitch his head a little as he blinks the frost out of his eyelashes.
A man with red hair wipes at his window, peering in. Weird clothes: leather and linen, all beaten down and worn out. Stained with travel and age. Nothing like the neatly pleated pants, the pressed white shirts and sweater vests he saw on most of the guys down here. The man has a machete at his hip, and everything feels wrong.
It all happens fast, and Frank doesn’t like to remember the details, even when he can, but he watches them wake up Maria. He watches them shoot Maria in the head when she tries to fight them. He watches them take Lisa, tiny and fragile and still asleep, from her dead mother’s arms. They boot the cryo tubes back up as Frank is fighting to get free, is trying to claw his way out of the darkness even as it fights to overtake him.
He blacks out again, but then there’s an alarm, and he finally fights his way awake, and the cryo tube opens.
The first thing he does is try to open Maria’s, but it claims a power failure and it won’t budge.
Not that it matters. Her eyes are open and glassy. She’s dead. She’s dead.
He tries to open every single tube, even though they all give him the same message about power failure.
Lisa is gone. Lisa is gone. Maria is dead and Lisa is gone.
And there’s not a single breathing person in this vault with him.
He explores the whole of it anyway. Finds a pistol clutched in the hands of a rotted skeleton with a guard’s uniform hanging in tatters around his bones. Finds a police baton he can clip to his belt. Finds ammo, some bottled water, a pack to keep everything in. In Schoonover’s office, he finds the man’s rotted corpse clutching a pistol and a holotape that contains his last, wavering testament.
Those ‘decon chambers’ were supposed to stay sealed. The vault was supposed to stay sealed. None of them were ever supposed to wake up. Not for hundreds and hundreds of years. But something had gone wrong here, and Schoonover had ended his life rather than deal with the consequences of his failure.
And here’s Frank. The sole survivor, somehow alive, somehow awake when no one else in this vault made it. He checks every room, every single one of a thousand tubes, and not a single one contains a surviving person.
He considers ending it here. Taking the Colonel’s pistol and the coward’s way out. But Lisa. He remembers the man with the brown, homemade clothes. With the machete. That man has his baby, and he must have come from outside.
Time to go outside.
Outside is hell, is everything the propaganda films promised a nuclear apocalypse would bring. Crumbling buildings and a sea of grays and browns. Trees that haven’t seen leaves in years, maybe decades. However long he’s been asleep. The grass in the park is brittle, barely more than dust. Far off, through the trees, something’s moving that’s bigger than any animal Frank has ever seen in the city. He’s pretty sure it’s a rat. He’s pretty sure it’s a fucking huge rat.
The first person he meets is an unfriendly son of a bitch who tries to shoot Frank on sight. But Frank has two pistols, enough ammo, and the kind of aim men write marching songs about. Takes three shots to put the asshole down.
Frank tries to question him, but the man dies laughing, a sneer on his lips. Frank lets him, watches him. Wishes that redheaded fuck had killed him instead of leaving him here to deal with all this.
And then he gets to work.
He strips the body of anything useful, just like in war when they’d strip the fusion cores from the power armor of fallen enemies. The unfriendly son of a bitch has a shotgun that could use a little work and a load of stimpacks. Frank only ever saw these things in the infirmaries in the army; he had no idea they ever produced them for civilians. Then again, this one looks homemade. Still, he’s not exactly in a position to be picky, so he tucks it away to use if he gets into a bad enough spot.
There’s some kind of dried meat, too. Frank gnaws at it and sips some water as he crouches over the body like an animal. The guy also has leather armor pieces, but he’s too small, and Frank’s sure they won’t fit. It’s tempting to try and make it work – especially tempting when he thinks of the giant rat he saw earlier – but he doesn’t want to linger. The gunshots echoed loud over the busted up city, and he doesn’t want to know what kind of shit they’ll attract.
He keeps moving. Keeps his head down. Stays sharp. Just like the war.
It takes him the better part of a day to meet anyone friendly. She’s a tall woman, golden brown skin and God’s most perfect cheekbones. She’s wearing a brown hat and a white labcoat tied with a utility belt, the sleeves hacked off above the elbow. She arches her eyebrows at Frank’s vault suit as Frank approaches. Frank can’t stop staring at the beast she’s leading on an old rope: some kind of bulbous, two-headed cow.
“You look like you’ve never seen a Brahmin before,” the woman says.
“Ain’t never seen a Brahmin before,” Frank admits.
“Where’d you come from? Far as I knew, they had these suckers everywhere.”
“Can I ask you a kinda stupid question?”
“Long as you lower that shotgun, sure.”
Frank does.
“Sorry. Long day. What year is this?”
“Two-seven-seven. Why?”
“Two thousand seventy seven?”
Surely not; that was the year the bombs fell. The last year he remembers.
“Two thousand, two hundred seventy seven. You on a bad Jet trip, buddy?”
Frank’s head spins when he turns to look over his shoulder at the crumbling ruins of what used to be his city.
Two hundred years. Two hundred years.
“Well, fuck,” he finally says. The woman’s looking at him critically, and Frank sees no reason to lie. “I just woke up. Been frozen underground in a vault.”
“How long.”
“Since the beginning. Oh-seven-seven.”
The woman takes her hat off and wipes her brow, letting out a sharp breath.
“Sounds like you could use a drink.”
Claire Temple is a caravan doctor, traveling through the city from settlement to settlement, seeing to their aches. She hires Frank to be her bodyguard until they get to Hell’s Kitchen, where she has a clinic.
“My last guy ran off with a pretty adventurer duo,” she says with a snort. “Luke always was restless. I got a few people I can hire on in Hell’s Kitchen, but getting there is the issue. Probably take a few days to do it right. Could be weeks, depending. Hit up some of the smaller places on the way. I’ll pay you in caps. Teach you what I can.”
“Caps?”
“Bottle caps. Guess that’s lesson one. Paper money’s useless. It’s Nuka Cola caps now.”
“Christ. Why, though?”
“Why paper money? Who knows?”
“No, I mean…why you helping me?”
If he sounds distrustful, he hardly thinks he can be blamed. The last person he trusted was the Colonel.
“Because I need the muscle, and I’m curious. You’re a two hundred year old man can’t be older than forty.”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Thirty-eight. And I’m a doctor. Not the type to let a man die in the wastes alone if there’s a thing I can do to help. That enough reason for you?”
“Suppose it is, yeah.”
“Now, I can tell you want to ask me something.”
“Suppose I do. You hear things, right? Traveling like you do?”
“That’s right.”
“You hear anything about a group of men with a baby girl? Can’t have been too far ahead of me. Red haired guy. Wears a machete.”
“You just described every one of the Kitchen Irish, my friend. Red hair and machetes is kind of their thing. But little girls? That’s tougher. Irish aren’t into people. Their take is chems.”
“They seemed to need her for something. I don’t know what. I can barely…it’s in and out. Can’t always remember exactly what they said.”
He doesn’t say anything else, and Claire doesn’t ask. From the look on her face, she doesn’t have to.
She gives him a pile of caps at the next place they stop, a tiny boarded-up place that looks empty until she knocks on a basement window and satisfies a quick call and response. They’re let in through an alley entrance, the weird cow tied up outside, and Claire shoves the caps into his hands and tells him to head up the stairs to a third floor apartment where he can find a guy named Melvin.
“He’ll get you fitted up in some clothes,” she says. “Those vault suits are collectors’ items in a lot of places. Sell it in Hell’s Kitchen quick as you can. Don’t take less than a hundred for it. More, since this one only just opened, and no one else has got one with that number on the back, got it? But you shouldn’t be walking around in it. Raiders’ll kill you just ‘cause but they’ll try extra hard if they see you in that.”
Melvin is a tall, nervous man who takes Frank’s caps and gives him a whole lot of leather and denim; soft leather jacket, jeans, button up flannel shirt, white t-shirt only slightly worn out. He looks like some kind of greaser fuck when he puts the clothes on, but Melvin tells him he’ll want the layers when it gets cold at night.
The caps were enough to get him a beaten leather chestplate and some leather arm guards, which he takes way too long strapping on. Luckily, Melvin doesn’t seem to notice that he’s clearly never done this.
That was another thing Claire did for him: she told him to be careful who he tells about where he came from.
“People take advantage in The Apple,” she says. “They take advantage everywhere, but there’s a legacy here to uphold. Fast talking is part of our history. You’ll always find someone willing to take what you have right from your hands. Remember that.”
Frank thinks she’s right, and he thanks Melvin in as few words as possible and balls up his jumpsuit in the bottom of his bag.
When he gets out of the dressing room, Melvin claps his hands together once, proud.
“You look great,” he says. “Tell the doc I set you up nice, all right? Maybe she’ll give me a discount on some chems for Betsy.”
Frank isn’t sure who Betsy is, still isn’t sure what chems are, even, so he just nods and murmurs some kind of agreement.
Claire gives him a cursory glance and says he looks much better. She also says she lined up another job for him.
“Ain’t got time for another job,” he says. “You said the Kitchen Irish might have my girl, so I’m going with you to the Kitchen.”
“It isn’t that simple,” Claire replies. She squares off against him as if she’s ten feet tall, and she reminds him of this drill sergeant he had in the academy who scared the shit out of him. “You been asleep for two hundred years, stranger. The world’s different now. Folk are a lot more ruthless than you remember. I got you a job wiping out a den of Lionrats in an old subway station. Good caps, and those old places are full of loot. You might get lucky. When you’re done, you come back here and I’ll take you the rest of the way to the Kitchen. But I’m not gonna take you straight there. You’re liable to get yourself killed doing something foolish, and I won’t be a party to that, all right?”
He nods, not knowing what else to do, and she nods in the direction of a nervous-looking man down the hall, one hand wrapped in bloody, dirty bandages.
“Good. Talk to him. Get started.”
Frank does the job. Nearly gets his ass handed to him by the Lionrats, which turn out to be those giant rats he spotted earlier in the ruins of Central Park. They’re nasty and mean, but his shotgun serves him well, and he even finds some drifter’s old hideout in the station, loaded with enough caps to buy him a few upgrades from the guy across the hall from Melvin.
He’s feeling pretty good about himself, so he decides to head down the stairs and check out the tracks. That’s a mistake. Then again, Claire could have warned him.
He’s bending over a Nuka Cola machine, almost giddy with amusement when he sees that there’s an unbroken bottle of the soda waiting for him. He pops it open, takes a long drink. It tastes like it might have tasted yesterday, when he was at home with Maria and Lisa and there was nothing wrong in the world.
He leans his hip against the machine, and the police baton clanks against the plastic, and the pile of clothes he thought was another skeleton leaps up, skin burned and bubbling, limbs scrabbling and lanky and hairless. The eyes are enormous, the face puffy with infection and broken skin, ulcers and whatever else on its face.
Frank can’t move. He’s never been so fucking scared.
The thing screams, this guttural, horrible sound, and Frank manages to get his baton up just as it charges at him. It runs like it’s a marionette, all floppy lack of grace, and it’s so fucking funny for a second that he’s laughing even as he strikes out.
Luckily, as fast and as terrifying as that thing is, it still goes down pretty easy. Head bursts open like a dropped egg.
It’s got some ammo clutched in one grubby hand, and an examination of an engineer’s room reveals a whole box of the stuff, plus a workbench with a bunch of weapons modifications lying around. They aren’t in great shape, but he fixes up his shotgun nice and fashions a shoulder belt of shotgun shells to drape over his neck. He grabs a couple of scattered trinkets he thinks might be worth something, shoves them into his bag. And Claire was right about the caps. They’re everywhere.
When Frank Castle came back from the war, he was tired. And that exhaustion seeped into every aspect of his life. He’d be mowing the lawn and then stop suddenly, staring down at his hands and seeing a gun that wasn’t there, and this despair would come over him. What was the point? Not of the war, but of pretending that the war wasn’t happening? Smiling at Maria, trying to teach Lisa to say daddy, watching TV and listening to radio shows. What was the point of it? Building a life that could just be taken away in an instant.
One day in the wasteland, and Frank Castle already feels at home. Like he brought the war with him.
He gets back to Claire, gets the caps from the nervous man, and Claire tells him that she asked around about the redhaired man. She says there’s an enclave of raiders not too far from here, and he could check it out.
It goes on like that for a while. Easy to forget how fast time moves when you spend most of the day walking from one place to another, killing bad guys and rescuing people who need it. He brings loot back, sells it to Claire, sells it to people he meets along the way, and pretty soon he’s earned more than enough to buy his way into Hell’s Kitchen. He upgrades his armor, trades the leather for a nice fiberglass set that sends Melvin in to raptures when Frank commissions it. He kills more raiders, Irish, and this gang who call themselves Dogs of Hell. He makes a name for himself in The Apple and the surrounding areas. He hears people talking about him. The Punisher.
And the whole time, not one person knows anything about a little girl.
When Claire finally is ready to move on to Hell’s Kitchen, it’s been more than a month. Frank has helped put together three new settlements in the Wasteland, because Claire convinced him that it never hurt to give people something positive to remember. He’s found a new dog, Max, a pitbull and German Shepard mix who follows him loyally wherever he goes and always charges into battle to protect Frank, giving Frank a goddamn heart attack. He’s made friends, though most of those alliances are shaky at best: Microchip, the bizarre hacker who lives in an abandoned military bunker outside The Apple; Jess and Trish, the adventurer duo who stole Luke from Claire; Luke himself, a big man with brute strength who claims to be “part super mutant”, though he speaks in full sentences and looks like a man, and nothing like the bulbous, outrageously huge creatures who occupy most of what used to be Manhattan; and Hogarth, the proprietor of a nightclub called Afterlife in Brooklyn, who is on a one-woman quest to end the slave trade in The Apple, and who promises to keep an ear out for anything about a baby.
He’s sort of given up hope. Not that it isn’t always at the back of his mind, and not that he’s ever going to stop trying, but Claire was right when she said that it was complicated. This isn’t a place where people talk easy, and Frank isn’t friendly enough to get shit out of them. Even Claire has to resort to bribery more often than not.
“What you need is a sweet talker,” she says when they’re on their way to Hell’s Kitchen. She’s decked out in better armor, better clothes. Her Brahmin is loaded down with shit to sell. Their partnership has been good for her.
“I don’t need shit,” Frank argues, tossing a chunk of squirrel to Max, who prances ahead looking pleased like it’s the world’s finest steak. “Already got a partner.”
“You mean me or the dog? Because neither of us count. I got a fixed path through the city. Back and forth. You need to get out there and find your kid, or find and take out the people who took her. You need a partner who’s willing to go as far, and you need a partner who can talk to people. Because neither you nor the dog are any good at it.”
Frank frowns off into the distance, watching the tops of the buildings to make sure there are no snipers. Claire told him this was the most dangerous part of the route. Not quite far enough out for the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen to be patrolling. Just far enough for raiders to think it’s safe. There’s an old corpse hanging from a meat hook from one of the windows, like a reminder.
“You firing me?” he asks. Claire laughs.
“Yeah, baby bird. Spread your wings and fly, or whatever. Anyway, I’ve got someone in mind. Check out Nelson and Murdock’s. Ask for Bullseye. You’ll thank me. Promise.”
They don’t get attacked by raiders. Or super mutants. Or even a Deathclaw. Frank kind of wishes they would. He’s still sort of sore over being fired by the closest thing to a friend he has out here, and he’d love the opportunity to punch something for it. But Claire’s right that he can’t keep ducking out for little trips and then coming back in, coming back to her. He needs to be able to go wherever he wants. And it’s been two months. He doesn’t need her help the way he did at first.
“All right,” he mutters as they reach the gate to Hell’s Kitchen (complete with a ludicrous neon sign made to look like a devil basking in flames). “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Just…keep an open mind, all right?”
“You know me,” Frank says pointedly. And Claire laughs, rapping on the gate to be let in.
“Yeah. Exactly.”