Karen knows more of his scars than Frank does.

She doesn't stitch him back up every time he gets shot or bandage every cut, but when Frank can't do it himself or find Claire, she's able.

Not usually particularly willing, since it's a bloody reminder of his favorite pastime and chosen occupation and usually that's not something she prefers to think about, but she always does it. She doesn't know how not to stitch him back together. At this point, fixing Frank is basically a routine.

Scene start: Frank Castle enters the apartment, blood dripping from chest or head or limb. Karen Page gasps and puts her gun away. She reaches for the first-aid kit. He complains. He passes out on the couch. She curses as she pulls the bullet out and stitches the wound. He wakes up. He gruffly thanks her and disappears into the night. Cut; end scene.

Rinse and repeat. Literally.

Even the ones she doesn't do herself, she remembers. It's not hard to figure out where a wound was obtained when it's plastered across the newspapers. Frank may have somewhat superhuman healing, but she can tell how old a cut is on his body. She counts backwards to his last bloody battle and understands, her heart flipping over in its cage.

The worst ones, Frank usually takes to Claire. She's an actual trained nurse, after all, and is certainly more equipped for all of this. Claire has no nurse-patient confidentiality when it comes to Frank Castle. So every time Frank shows up at Claire's door, she stitches him up, keeps him safely unconscious, and texts Karen in between checking on her patient. Karen will probably never see Claire's name appear on her phone without a panic attack, but at least she knows he's okay.

Karen looks at Frank's torso and remember where he got each scar. Those on his arms were from prison, when Fisk sicced his lackeys on him. That poor stitching job was from the Russian mafia, right after Claire moved and Frank couldn't find her and Karen had to pull him back together before he bled out on her carpet. The scar through his hairline… that was when he defended her.

She knows that he doesn't look at his scars. It's just flesh, after all, just the body that gets him from rooftop to diner to apartment. Doesn't mean as much to him. And every time he glances at his chest, he sees the up and down movement of breath that reminds him he's still alive, despite every effort, and his family isn't. Their Frank wasn't marked like this.

When they've escaped from her most recent hostage situation and the trickle of blood from the slash on his upper arm is slowing, he leans forward and presses his forehead to hers. They breathe for a moment, Karen still working herself down from the adrenaline rush that comes with escaping the mafia. A part of her mind is writing her next article, figuring out how to release the information she's uncovered without completely giving herself away. Frank's pretty sure she was taken because she was convenient and he was the one getting too close, but they're never positive. The rest of her mind is focused on breathing him in, the smell of gunpowder and black coffee and blood. Safe.

Seconds or infinities later he closes the gap between them and, after the first startled second, she pulls him as close as possible, a jubilant voice in the back of her head thinking finally.

Eventually they make it to her bed, his arm still bleeding but neither of them willing to do much more about it. It's not the time to go any further than where they are now, Karen admits unwillingly to herself, at least not before they talk about it, so she pulls away. Somewhere along the way back to her bedroom he lost his shirt, and she traces the lines of his muscles, moving over and around the scars as she catches her breath.

Finally, her heart rate calms down and she feels Frank exhale slowly. They're peaceful in each other's arms, just as she knew they would be. She's the only one who's never really feared him, never been afraid of the monster he thinks he becomes. She's the only one, she thinks, who really brings him back from the line in the sand the Punisher wants him to cross again and again.

Her fingers trail down one of the few scars she doesn't recognize, a slashing line that looks like he ran into a sword. Maybe someday she'll get the story. "How can you… how can you look at them without flinching?" Frank whispers, his voice rasping.

Karen sighs, pushing a little closer into his unnatural warmth. "They're you. They're not all pretty, especially the ones I stitched, but they make up you."

"The Punisher," he says sardonically. "Bloodstained and broken." His arm isn't bleeding anymore, she notices.

Karen pokes his rib cage. Once she musters the willpower, she's going to start some pasta; she can see a few too many ribs. "You wouldn't be who you are without them, like it or not."

He mutters incomprehensibly to himself, pulling her even closer. Like he wants to sink into her, escape who he is, what he's become. "You should have escaped this great mess while you could, Miss Page. Not letting you go now, though."

She breathes out a relieved laugh, no desire to argue while they're finally figuring something out, and leans up to kiss him again. He grins into the kiss, and she thinks it's one of the first times he's smiled in a long, long time. She wants to take a picture and frame it and keep it forever.

His scars tell a story; not a pretty one, certainly, nowhere near any sort of fairy tale, but a story of a man's fight to live again. The Punisher bringing his justice upon the city. A wrongfully-accused man protecting a reporter. It's ugly and gashed and rough but it's his story.

It's hers too, really. Since the moment she broke into his house to figure him out, since she crossed a red line on the floor, since he pushed her into an elevator so she could save his life.

"I don't remember half of these," Frank inserts into her thoughts, his voice more interested than concerned as he glances down at his own chest. Karen holds her breath for a moment, hoping he won't sink back into guilt and anger and the Punisher. Right now, she wants Frank Castle in her bed. "Guess I was unconscious, huh," he concludes glibly.

Finally she pulls away from his embrace and leads him back to the kitchen. He tries to put his shirt back on before dinner, and she takes it from him and tosses it in her laundry basket. He tries to convince her not to publish an article about the kidnapping and she pretends to agree, both of them knowing that the paper will soon accuse a prominent New Yorker of corruption, her byline claiming it as hers. She convinces him to spend the night, and the surprised sparkle in his eye says that it wasn't a hard decision. She boils the pasta and he makes the sauce, and they eat spaghetti across the table from each other.

It's a normal night in a normal city. They're two normal people, testing out what could become a relationship. They eat their spaghetti between quiet conversation and banter, feet tangled beneath the table. Except that he's the Punisher, and she's the woman who calls him back home.

When they've cleaned up, she pushes him onto her bed and kisses every scar she can reach until she convinces him that he's not what his scars say he is; he is just a man who loves a girl. He finds the scars that mark her skin with unerring grace, learns her as well as she knows him, and she sees something like redemption in his eyes. Monster meets monster and becomes something beautiful.

After all, broken soul calls to damaged heart, and that's what they are.