Title: Kiss It Better
Paring: Frank Castle X Reader
Spoilers: none! I tried to not spoil anything from the show.
Warnings: fluff, angst. The usual.
Author's note: I had this idea after watching Beauty and The Beast (2017) and if y'all know me, I love a good literary reference. Bear with me, it's not quite like the usual BATB fics you read. And if Frank is OOC please forgive me. It's been a while since I watched Daredevil.
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You are what you do. And that is what Frank Castle learned. When good men go to war, they come back with shadows in their souls, that follow their footsteps to their graves. He was not a terrible man before the smell of gunpowder tickled his nose in the mornings, counting the dead as they day wore on. He had a family, his children, a loving wife. But when a good man goes to war, and live to tell the tale, more than shadows follow him home. You are what you do, and that is true. Frank Castle came home with the battle in his eyes, but fairy tales are not tales once they come true. The peacetime in his life ended by a ride with pretty ponies, and screams of those whom he loved, leaving him there, sitting in the shadow of atrocities, from his past, his present, and the offerings of future that was to come.
You are what you do. And Frank Castle, a man made of blood, and gun shells, turned into what he was inside. A beast.
Life in Hell's Kitchen was as always, interesting. Not much went on, and if something happened, it was the same news as it always was. It wasn't like the big city, not Tony Stark's side of town, for sure. While aliens were falling out of the sky shooting up cafes, Hell's Kitchen had an underground drug dealing ring, which the police were at odds trying to trace. And apart from that, everyone just worried about their next pay-packet and if they'd be able to keep their one room. Perhaps that was just you. As a neonatal nurse, you worked in the ward with the children, doing your best to make their lives and their tired parents better. The little ones who came in were never the same; there were little ones with tight curls, or bald, with all their limbs, or no, with wide smiles or long howls.
To make it clear, you were quite different than the other nurses. Perhaps it was because as a child, you had been in an accident, and ever since, had a certain...ability where you changed the behaviour of people around you. A quick Googling spree brought you to the realisation that you were like an animal, and could release a pheromone that calmed people. It worked very well when fights broke out in the ER, as you were often paged down to take care of rouges with too much adrenaline. But babies...no matter what, they made your life feel like there was a meaning. Even if you weren't ready to have your own children, seeing the babies of the couples and single parents, the little ones who were off to be adopted away, the ones who had not yet been taken, it made your day. And you made theirs, thanks to your gift.
But, life in Hell's Kitchen, despite your day job and the goings-on of city, was as always, interesting. After bouts of violence, a vigilante named Daredevil rose to the street, and for once, it made you feel like you could at least walk home after a shift at night, without the cold stare of a person lurking in the dark upon the back of your neck. Babies grew up, babies got better, and like the circle of life, more babies were born – and your position continued in the Metro-General Hospital.
It was perhaps on a rainy Tuesday one terrible, terrible September when the Earth seemed to be soaking the tears of the heavens for future times to come when you came from the bus to the downpour, and found yourself drenched in a moment's notice. But, what was even more worse, was that there was a sizeable divot in the pavement that mustn't have been there last time you had been rendered unable to walk to work, and almost at once, you felt yourself flying -- nose over toes, head over heels, toward the water-slicked walk-way.
But in that moment, there was a saviour, who himself would not call himself one, and you were soon to slightly forget him due to the fact that the day ahead was to be busy, and full of babies and people to calm. But there was a saviour. And his arms caught yours, and righted yourself. In the dimness of the rainstorm, you did not properly see his face. Perhaps due to the dimness, yes, or that he wore a hood that clung to his face in the soaking wet, or that you simply weren't looking right.
But he righted you. And with the next words from your lips, you set a trajectory on his path, one which he hadn't thought of, or even considered in the years he'd spent being tortured from the inside out.
"Thank you so much," The words cascaded from your lips, but as his fingers released your arms, the call to work, the need to flee the oncoming storm reined superior in your mind. "You're a kind person - thank you for saving me a broken nose."
Frank Castle was a beast in the way he worked. His eyes calculated the prey, those who had preyed on those whom he loved, he breathed down the necks of killers, was the killer of killers, dreamed of days where the sun rose only to show what the night had brought for the likes of Frank Castle. To show what he had purged. He had been on his own for so long, and for so long, he had been with his own thoughts and the reflection of himself at the bottom of the whiskey bottle. And that moment he had been passing through the 'Kitchen, had found himself picking up a neonatal nurse from certain nasal fractures and impact pain, something changed.
He wasn't sure if it was that he didn't get to see her face in the dimness of the oncoming weather, or that he didn't look hard enough, or that her hair had been a right mess and covered all that was to see from his viewing. He wasn't sure if it was because even beasts could feel remorse - Devil of Hell's Kitchen, forbid - but he felt bad that he didn't walk her into the hospital, where her clothes suggested she worked, or even asked for her name, or read the shiny white badge upon her chest.
You are what you do. And in that moment, Frank Castle felt a twinge in his chest, almost like a palpitation. It passed, and so did his thoughts, and the day as well. He soon forgot that he even helped a young nurse from a certain accident. But the action...that was never forgotten.
Life in Hell's Kitchen was as always, interesting. Months passed between the sightings and the condemnation of a man wearing a skull upon his chest, who destroyed operations of which the police could not do. They called him a punisher, the Punisher, and in all the hypertension and melee of the people and the media, you found yourself once again felt a little safer.
When heroes rise, villains do too, but there was something about the killer of killers who encapsulated your attention. Maybe it was because he was neither a hero, or a villain. Maybe it was because the picture of the man, whose name was simply quite ordinary, reminded of you of a shadow of a face who had saved your day once upon a time. Or maybe not, the world doesn't write stories with lives, it wreaks havoc within poetry that cannot be read until the final period is reached.
But from then on, you shared your secret moment that you suspected with none. None, unless you confess to confiding that there was a man who had saved your day once on a rainy Tuesday in September, to the little ones who were but hours old. It was another rainy day, but not a Tuesday, or a September when you found yourself once more intertwined with the fate of the Punisher.
It was a rainy Friday, one which had lurked on barometers and the weather man's map for ages before revealing itself. It was a Friday when the business of a mob of men intruded on the hospital, speaking a language you couldn't understand, and threatened you and the children with lead within guns and horrid deaths. You stood there, frozen, unable to breathe or scream, but unlike other times when you had been frozen, the part of you that had been transformed as a child was released, and at once, all the frightened babies and nurses in the room stilled their beating hearts.
It was in that moment, or perhaps many moments after, that the man's face which had been all over the internet, the newspapers, the TV reports of massacre, appeared, and your feet unfroze themselves, and approached slowly toward him. The man who had threatened raised his gun, right to your head, but unlike all the other times in your life of which you had been afraid -- the rainy Tuesday, of all the horrid monsters in the movies, of beasts that lurked beneath the bed -- you approached him.
"Ma'am," he raised a hand, cocking his own gun, "Stay where you are."
You nodded, releasing a breathy sort of reply. It was only then that the gravity of the situation had resumed in normal time to your mind, and brought you back from the land of shock. But unlike other people who had witnessed the work of the beastly Punisher, there was no blood shed that night from artillery within the hospital; be it that a primary evolutionary function had been awakened, or that you had truly only been standing beside a vent that flowed throughout the whole hospital.
Either way, the invaders left without protest, and the wailing of the children in the back of your mind reminded you that there was almost very nearly a moment in which the walls were nearly painted a shade of your blood. At once, Frank Castle's gaze was upon your own, his gun returned to the pouch of which it was attached to him. There was a quizzical look in his eyes, and they searched your own to find answers that could not be found in the windows to the soul.
"Have I met you?" His voice crackled, frowning. "Doll?"
You found yourself unsure of what to say, for there were many ways to answer it. You lived in Hell's Kitchen, and while the district of the city was relatively small, small was nothing in comparison to that of a town desolate in the Himalayas with three hundred in its walls. "I'm not quite sure, Mr. Castle," you find yourself frowning, recalling the moment you had slightly forgotten, "I would have fallen if not for a man who went out of his way to help a stranger."
He inclines his head, licking those lips of his. "I'm sure anyone would do such a thing, ma'am," he declines the kindness.
"They call you a killer of killers," you whisper, the words finding their way into his ears.
"I'm the Punisher," he replied.
"I'm _________," You retort, almost as soon as the words leave his mouth. The people within the hospital seemed to be waking from the trance of your pheromone, realising that there had been a massacre averted within the walls of the Metro-General Hospital. "But Frank, please know, you're a man," you remind him. "And you're a kind person."
You are what you do. That night, Frank Castle lay in his bed, the rickety single mattress which he had salvaged years ago, and placed within his safe house, where all the things he tried to keep for himself were stored. Even his mind. But his mind could not rest, unlike the other times it could truly switch off, and now, he lay there, the moonlight filtering through the smog of the city, into the dirty old window onto his face, leaving him awake, wondering once more about the nurse he had happened onto twice in the span of six months, whose face haunted him.
You're a kind person.
He was the damn Punisher.
There could have been another headline coming in the morning, one with once more a photograph of him underneath, and beautifully ugly words spoken by people on the street. But there was not, and he wanted to know more. It had been so long since his heart beat for anything but the drums of war, but that night, Frank Castle lay in his bed, and thought of a nurse whose name she had spared aloud.
________.
The trajectory he hadn't known himself to be set onto was becoming clear with every breath he took, and even less understandable with every twitch of his trigger-happy fingers. But at that moment, he didn't feel like he was the beastly man who had been born from the blood of his past. He felt like Frank. Just Frank.
You are what you do. And that night, Frank did not kill a soul. All because his stars were lucky enough to align with a nearby moon in orbit, a moon which had been following his retrograde for longer than he had believed possible.
It was neither night or a Tuesday nor Friday, or even a September when you found yourself unsheathing the window, finding a man you were often seeing from the rooftop of your apartment, off in the distance serving a dish best served cold to the evil that sat in the darkness. But as you led him through the window from the fire escape, you noticed a very terrible thing; Frank Castle was not whole. Not in the metaphysical sense, wherein there was a tear in the fabric of his heart, no, but in the quite literal sense, that was dripping upon the sill, onto your bare feet.
"Oh, Frank," you whisper, and throwing his arm over your shoulder, you lead him toward the tub that lay nestled in the corner of the room. "I'm going to have to look at your wounds - thank whoever I'm a registered nurse..." you whisper, stripping the big bad wolf of a man from his coat, his jacket, until the final layer was cut from his stained skin. "I don't think people who fantasise of meeting obscure men ever dream of having to sew them together..." you grit out.
He laughs, a dark chuckle that reveals a row of teeth in good humour. "You dream of me, _______?"
You roll your eyes. "Only while awake, Mr. Castle," you harrow, placing antiseptic onto his midsection, preparing the needle and thread to take on a new stitching project without fabric but skin. Without warning, you took to the job at hand, and not an hour later, there were neat stitches across his body, and a silence in the apartment.
"Thank you," he grunts, propping himself up against the wall. The blood was cleaned up, even that which had fallen upon the boards of floor as he entered. If anyone was to see the sight, of the neonatal nurse and the soldier at war with himself, it would be declared odd, quite odd indeed. "________-,"
You interrupt him.
You're not an interrupting type of person; there had never been a time in your life for as long as you could remember in which you were in a temperament other than pleasant, and happy for reasons unbeknown to you. You placed a hand upon his mighty paw, the great hand that had been against cold metal and away from a pulse for so long, and stilled the twitch that was not to stop on its own.
"You are what you do," you tell him, "And from what conflict I see in you, I can see someone who will soon be without a purpose at the rate you work your way around the city. I work with children, little babies and their squirming bodies, their fickle temperament. And I see you, and I see a man who came into this world covered in blood, and not afraid to leave the same way," you feel a tear fall from your eye, splash upon the top of his shoe, "You have seen awful things and done them and yes, you are what you do, but Frank, you are what you love, not what loves you," you feel another tear, and another fall. "I'm nothing to you. Just a nurse. But it kills me to see you like this."
He nods. The pair of you are quiet for the rest of the evening, until he disappears into the night.
You are what you do.
You are what you love, not what loves you.
And after these times, after all what he has been through, it has taken this long to realise that, and all because of a little nurse with a heart bigger than he can comprehend has uttered it. After all of it, Frank Castle takes a week off, sitting upon the single bed in his bunker, sitting with his head between his knees. His enemies see him as a man who is not afraid to wash his face in their blood, to grin as he descends to hell. It's true. But as of late, he is also a man who is not afraid to cry on his own, to turn the photos around of the family he once had, who is not afraid to look at himself in the mirror and stare at the face looking back at him without hating it for once.
But it takes a week for Frank Castle to realise that even though he's done all that he has, and he doesn't relish war but the triumphs it brings after. It takes a week for Frank to realise that he loves the neonatal nurse from the Metro-General, and war loves Frank Castle, and it's then a week later he finds himself at her door.
Knocking.
"_________ -," he goes to knock once more, but the door is open, and her arms are around his own, and he's being pulled into her one-bedroom place and honestly, it just feels right. "How - how'd you know, doll?"
She laughs, pulling his lips to her height, and kisses him with all the force she can muster. "I'm pretty sure I know when I'm in love with the guy who needs me to sew up his sores and kiss it better." He lays his forehead against hers - because it's so very true, and hell, Frank knows it. "I can't cure history, but I can help forge a future. And don't tell me I could get hurt with you, we both know I can take care of myself -,"
He shakes his head, interrupting, " - just kiss me, ________," he whispers. "Make it better."