fanfiction: give or take a night or two

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Title: give or take a night or two

Fandom: Daredevil

Pairing: Claire/Karen

Summary: Claire gets a call late at night that she knows she shouldn’t answer. She does anyway.

Rating: T

Warnings: Contains a (vague) description of a cut being stitched up, and references to background domestic abuse.

The first day she meets Karen Page, Claire takes a deep breath and reminds herself that this can’t go anywhere good.

Not that Karen’s as bad as Maddie- not quite. She has the same burning intensity, but not the violent streak. She doesn’t stalk the streets in a mask, at least, which is a considerable step up. Still, she works for Maddie, which might make the whole thing even worse. And she’s as tenacious as a dog with a bone, hard-nosed but deceptively soft-spoken. Once she gets her teeth in something, she won’t let go. And if she thinks something is wrong, there’s no holding her back from trying to see it fixed, come hell or high water.

Scratch that. She’s exactly as bad as Maddie.

But Claire doesn’t know that when she first picks up the phone and hears Karen’s voice on the other end. She’s fluttery, uncertain- nothing Claire would associate for the kind of bullheaded heroics she swore off getting involved with. She stumbles over an explanation of her call- she got the name out of Maddie’s phone, Maddie doesn’t know, but she’s hurt and she doesn’t want to tell Maddie or Foggy or go to the hospital- can Claire help?

It’s a terrible idea. It’s a terrible idea for so many reasons, up to and including lying to Maddie (not that Maddie doesn’t do her own fair share of lying- but it’s the principle of the thing), the fact that this woman could be trouble, or be in trouble for all Claire knows, and also there is no way that this little house call won’t involve Claire falling headfirst back into whatever quest Maddie and company are up to now. She knows this. She knows.

She goes anyway.

Karen had given her directions over the phone, and so it doesn’t take long for Claire to find the right building- a run-down squat surrounded on all sides by garbage and people asleep on the sidewalk- but what building in Hell’s Kitchen isn’t, these days? There’s no elevator, so Claire mounts the four flights of stairs, noticing with some concern that there’s drop of fresh blood splashed on the concrete edges. Not a good sign. Then again, Karen only called her- she checks her watch- ten minutes ago, and unless the bleeding got drastically worse in the time it took to give her a call, she probably hasn’t had time to pass out yet.

Maybe.

She still quickens her step, though, and pushes into the apartment without knocking. The lights are all out, but it’s a full moon night and the blinds are up, so she can see what she came for: a figure hunched over on the couch, long hair falling in a curtain over her face. “I’m glad you came,” she says by way of greeting. Her voice is thin. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I wasn’t sure either,” Claire says as she sets her bag down, because there’s no point in lying to someone who clearly already knows the game. “Do you have any rubbing alcohol in the house? Hydrogen peroxide?”

Karen nods to the end table next to the couch. “I already washed the cuts out.”

“Well, then.” Claire doesn’t ask where she picked that trick up; the mantra of don’t get involved, don’t get involved is still rotating through the back of her mind. “What exactly do you need me for . . . ?”

Karen extends one arm out in front of her. The sleeve has been pushed back, but it soaked through before she got it out of the way: solid red, up to the elbow. “Stitches,” she says. “I think, anyway. It looks pretty deep.”

Claire goes over to inspect the injury. There’s an ugly gash running ragged down Karen’s forearm, starting at the crease of the elbow and ending nearly at the wrist. A few inches to the left, and it would have hit an artery. “I’d say so,” she says, and picks up the bag, rummaging through it for her needle and thread. Karen watches her, blank-faced. When Claire resurfaces with the supplies, she hesitated. “I have to ask- did you do this to yourself?”

Karen gives a miniscule jerk of the head in denial. Claire allows herself to take this at face value, and spends several soothing moments sterilizing the needle and threading it. Karen doesn’t offer any more information, and Claire doesn’t ask for it. Don’t get involved. If Karen’s willing to help her out on that front, who is she to look a gift horse in the mouth? There’s the slightest intake of breath, a faint hiss as Claire first pierces Karen’s skin with the needle, but she’s quiet after that. Unnervingly quiet, almost. Maddie isn’t this quiet when Claire stitches her up, and Maddie seems to view the whole thing as an exercise in well-earned self-flagellation. She’s never met anyone who stays quiet while someone is stabbing them repeatedly with a needle- not this kind of frozen-lake quiet that seems to indicate that Karen’s not even really in the room. Like Claire’s stitching up a doll, or a chunk of marble. She wonders if Karen might be going into shock.

“So,” she says, hoping to inspire some flicker of life on Karen’s face, “how did you end up like this? Kitchen accident?”

Karen blinks. Once, but Claire catches the motion. That faint flicker of eyelashes was all she needed to see. “No.”

More silence.

Claire bites her lip. Don’t get involved, and yet . . . “It would help if I knew what kind of knife it was.”

Karen lifts her eyes until she’s looking directly at Claire. “No it wouldn’t,” she says. “you’re already almost finished.”

“I’m also the registered nurse here,” Claire retorts. Gentleness clearly isn’t going to her anywhere; maybe direct confrontation will. “And I’m doing you a favour. So maybe cut the bullshit and just give me a straight answer?”

For the first time, there’s a genuine spark in Karen’s eyes. A faint pinkness rises in her cheeks. “I went to talk to a witness for one of our cases,” she says. “A woman suing her boyfriend for emotional distress and battery. He came over unexpectedly and went at her with a knife. I got in the way."

It’s not a new story. Claire’s heard it before, a million times, with a million variations: a blunt object instead of a gun, the intended target being brought in instead of a bystander, broken bones instead of a gash. “Okay,” she says. She pauses, but she’s finally getting answers; why stop now? “Why don’t you want Maddie to know?”

Karen heaves a long sigh. “Because she and Foggy-” She takes a deep breath and starts over. “Do I have to have a reason? Maybe I just like keeping some things to myself.” A shadow crosses her face. “It’s- I don’t want to be a client instead of an employee, okay? I don’t fucking want that. And I don’t want Maddie to drop the case because of me, and I don’t want her and Foggy tiptoeing around me and refusing to let me do my job because of one asshole in a knife.” Her face is twisted into a snarl now, lips drawn back over her teeth. “I want to see this guy go to jail, and I can’t do that if I’m at home on compassionate leave or whatever excuse they’ll use. So I don’t want to tell Maddie. Does that answer your question?”

It’s then that Claire thinks, this can’t go anywhere good.

Out loud, she says “I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure you could charge the guy with assault over this. The cut speaks for itself.”

Karen snorts. “Want to know who he is?”

Claire inclines her head.

“He’s the police commissioner’s great-nephew,” Karen spits. “His uncle’s already complained to the D.A. twice about ‘overzealous prosecution’, and the case got pled down both times. The courts won’t do shit for her, and no other lawyer in this city’s going to touch her as long as they know that they’re gonna make enemies of the entire police department. Maddie’s all that’s left. So why would I fuck all that up for a scratch?”

You wouldn’t, Claire thinks, and I wouldn’t either. When she thinks about all the cuts she’s stitches and bones she’s set, children she’s coaxed into sitting quietly in the waiting room while she sponges off their mothers’ bloody faces- it makes Maddie flash behind her eyes again, that night on the rooftop while she peered through the mask at the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen beating a helpless man half to death. It makes her want to crack her knuckles and see men like the one who did this to Karen and his girlfriend and god only knew how many others flinch because they know she can do real damage. It makes her want to stop swallowing all the bile she chokes back as part of her job and unleash it instead, let the monster she’s nursed on impotent anger loose so that it can rain down hellfire on the people who most deserve it. Maddie had once said that she saw the world as being drenched in fire; for Claire’s money, it’s not burning down nearly fast enough.

“No,” she says finally. “Give him hell.”

A smile blooms on Karen’s face for the first time, and Claire thinks this is the girl Maddie called gentle? Maybe at a different time of day, in a different light, Claire might be able to see what she meant. But here, in the darkness and the blood, she sees an entirely different Karen from the pretty picture Maddie’s formed- maybe she has the capacity for gentleness, maybe her hands are soft and her smiles are free and she’s never thought of picking up a knife and cutting things to their simplest, most brutal conclusion. But that’s not the woman sitting in front of Claire now, with a bloody shirtsleeve and a stitched-up forearm and a smile that’s all teeth. This woman is something else entirely.

Don’t get involved.

Their teeth click together when they kiss, and Claire laughs into Karen’s mouth, because she wouldn’t expect anything different. Karen is insistent and unyielding as she wraps herself around Claire, heedless of her damaged arm of the medical kit teetering precariously on the arm of the couch, kissing like she’s trying to suck something vital out of her. Claire gives as good as she gets, fingers digging into Karen’s upper arms, thinking you were always fooling yourself, weren’t you? If there’s an answer, she doesn’t find it here, on Karen’s couch, in Karen’s body, probing the dark and secret places neither of them will admit in the light of day.

Answers are overrated anyway.