(first part, trigger warning for violent/intrusive thoughts. karen isn't doing too well.)
It feels like a worm, Karen decides one night as she stares up at the darkened ceiling of her bedroom. Foggy is on the far side of the bed, sprawled out like he's trying to take up as much space as humanly possible, while Matt lays between them, curled into a half-ball with one arm pillowing his cheek. They're asleep but she's awake because this feeling inside her, the constant twist in her gut, the tired stickiness behind her eyes that never seems to go away, the jittery nerves that have nothing to do with caffeine, feels like a parasite in her body that shouldn't be there. Something tiny but rotting and ready to die, crawling inside her so her body might feed the brood ready to burst forth from its corpse.
She has a lot of thoughts like this, recently. About death. About decay. About plagues and gore and the amount of pressure it takes to penetrate a human skull and how people slowly drown in their own blood sometimes when lungs get punctured. By, say, a bullet or two or more.
About how very, very bright the color red is. About how hard it was to get the stains from her carpet.
"It gets easier," Fisk say in her nightmares before killing her, again and again. He promises she'll get used to it. That she'll start to like it. That this is only the first step on a very, very long path.
She's guilty because she doesn't mourn his death, the man she killed. She should. Everyone deserves to live and no one deserves a body riddled by bullets, no matter what they've done. But what she mourns isn't the loss of his life so much as the ruination of her own. There's something in her dying right now with every sleepless night. She has been scared of so many things in her life, but she never thought she'd have to be scared of the possibilities lurking inside herself, too.
Karen rolls out of bed before the dawn birds even start chirping, when the traffic outside is still a small stream of all the other unfortunate souls having to wake up early or come home after a night shift. The street lamps cast a sickly, yellow-orange haze through the slats of her blinds. She pauses for a moment when Matt shifts at the sudden coolness against his side, only relaxing once he twists around and burrows into Foggy. Foggy lets out a tremendous snore and octopuses his limbs around Matt, muttering something incoherent before falling back into a deeper sleep.
Watching her boys always makes her heart ache, just a little. There's nothing good about what's happened to her, what happened to Daniel, but if she could in good conscience say there were a bright side to all this she'd have to point to the two men currently asleep in her bed. This... thing that they do, way they fit together as a threesome in a way they maybe couldn't apart, or as one of them tacked onto a couple, how they're all free to find other partners and somehow that binds them together even tighter, it's the best and most unexpected outcome she could have expected when she first saw Matt and Foggy after her world fell apart for the first time. There's a sense of completion here, a natural flow of energy and emotion she just hasn't felt in any other relationship. It's something she never knew she lacked until she had it. And looking at them now, a month after they brought down Fisk and subsequently fell into bed together (funny how those two events are connected), she can't help but feel the fragility of this endeavor.
She knows how final death is. She knows what it is to have blood on her hands. She knows now how this city would chew them up and spit them out without a second thought. Daniel, Fisk's assistant, Ben. She doesn't want to add Matt and Foggy's names to that list if she doesn't have to.
The shower is as hot as she can stand it, quickly bringing an angry flush of red to her skin. She imagines burning the parasites inside her from the inside out, digging them out with her nails and drowning them in a torrent of hot water and soap. She scrubs harder than she should. There's blood behind her eyes when she closes them, and no blood when she looks at her trembling hands; she's not sure which of those is more distressing.
She's falling apart and she doesn't know what to do.
...
Foggy is getting really fucking sick of his friends not being okay. Really, amazingly, stupendously tired about the whole thing. He complains about it to the only person who'll listen, much to her chagrin. Marcy complains about his complaining and then they're bickering over really unimportant shit and then they have another fun bout of angry fighting sex that always blows his mind (among other places) and helps him put some of his worries away.
"It's really obvious, you know?" Foggy says, trying and failing to blow some sweat-slicked hair out of his eyes after their last round. "Like, she's super quiet all the time and he bottles everything up like you wouldn't believe, and I'm at the point where I think we should just put a therapist on retainer because I don't think I can keep up with this-"
"Then put a therapist on retainer and stop talking about other partners when you come see me." Marcy pushes a pillow in his face and gives a cruel twist of her hips before she rolls off him completely.
Foggy makes the appropriately regretful noises and pushes the pillow away to glare at her. Marcy stretches, sighs, and flops down beside him. How anyone can make a flop graceful is beyond him, but Foggy's long since been sure his ex-ex-girlfriend is like, a demon witch of the wilds or something.
"Look," she says, "if there were anyone in this city who weren't depressed, traumatized, or just plain unhappy over something that happened in the past few years, that's when I'd be concerned. Sounds like your colleagues-" And the way she pronounces that word makes it sound so filthy, as those she imagines all they do at Nelson and Murdock is have sex in the office all day. "-are just paying attention."
"But there's something wrong," he insists. "I know she doesn't think I can see it, but Matt and I both know, you know?"
"Uh-huh. And have you shared this insight with her?"
"Yeah, we ask her all the time how she's doing-"
"Foggy."
"What am I supposed to do when all she says 'sure, everything's just peachy keen!' and looks dead inside?"
Marci pushes up on one elbow. "You are the most permissive person I've ever met and that's part of the reason we're broken up."
"I thought we got back together," Foggy grumbles.
"Details," Marci says with a wave of her hand. She reaches out to tug lightly on a stray lock of hair. "You let me get away with anything, no matter what you thought. There's a different between 'I'm fine, now stop asking' and 'I'm really not fine, actually give a fuck and get the answer from me.'"
Foggy makes a face as he pushes into the touch like a cat. "But like, I don't want to overstep her boundaries by pushing. Sometimes you're not okay and you just don't want to talk about it, right? And that makes other people a jerk to keep asking."
"And sometimes you're so not okay you don't even know how to begin asking for help." Marci scritches at his temples and gives him what might be a sympathetic smirk - again, how does she even do these things - before pressing in close. "I don't really care what happens with your other girl Foggy bear, I just want you to stop complaining about it in between fucking me senseless. Okay?"
She doesn't wait for a response, just kisses him and slings a leg around his middle again. And he lets her, because he's sick of being worried sick and needs to get lost in a partner he isn't afraid for. Marci may be many things, but being in immediate danger of breaking is not one of them.
penance, 1/?
It feels like a worm, Karen decides one night as she stares up at the darkened ceiling of her bedroom. Foggy is on the far side of the bed, sprawled out like he's trying to take up as much space as humanly possible, while Matt lays between them, curled into a half-ball with one arm pillowing his cheek. They're asleep but she's awake because this feeling inside her, the constant twist in her gut, the tired stickiness behind her eyes that never seems to go away, the jittery nerves that have nothing to do with caffeine, feels like a parasite in her body that shouldn't be there. Something tiny but rotting and ready to die, crawling inside her so her body might feed the brood ready to burst forth from its corpse.
She has a lot of thoughts like this, recently. About death. About decay. About plagues and gore and the amount of pressure it takes to penetrate a human skull and how people slowly drown in their own blood sometimes when lungs get punctured. By, say, a bullet or two or more.
About how very, very bright the color red is. About how hard it was to get the stains from her carpet.
"It gets easier," Fisk say in her nightmares before killing her, again and again. He promises she'll get used to it. That she'll start to like it. That this is only the first step on a very, very long path.
She's guilty because she doesn't mourn his death, the man she killed. She should. Everyone deserves to live and no one deserves a body riddled by bullets, no matter what they've done. But what she mourns isn't the loss of his life so much as the ruination of her own. There's something in her dying right now with every sleepless night. She has been scared of so many things in her life, but she never thought she'd have to be scared of the possibilities lurking inside herself, too.
Karen rolls out of bed before the dawn birds even start chirping, when the traffic outside is still a small stream of all the other unfortunate souls having to wake up early or come home after a night shift. The street lamps cast a sickly, yellow-orange haze through the slats of her blinds. She pauses for a moment when Matt shifts at the sudden coolness against his side, only relaxing once he twists around and burrows into Foggy. Foggy lets out a tremendous snore and octopuses his limbs around Matt, muttering something incoherent before falling back into a deeper sleep.
Watching her boys always makes her heart ache, just a little. There's nothing good about what's happened to her, what happened to Daniel, but if she could in good conscience say there were a bright side to all this she'd have to point to the two men currently asleep in her bed. This... thing that they do, way they fit together as a threesome in a way they maybe couldn't apart, or as one of them tacked onto a couple, how they're all free to find other partners and somehow that binds them together even tighter, it's the best and most unexpected outcome she could have expected when she first saw Matt and Foggy after her world fell apart for the first time. There's a sense of completion here, a natural flow of energy and emotion she just hasn't felt in any other relationship. It's something she never knew she lacked until she had it. And looking at them now, a month after they brought down Fisk and subsequently fell into bed together (funny how those two events are connected), she can't help but feel the fragility of this endeavor.
She knows how final death is. She knows what it is to have blood on her hands. She knows now how this city would chew them up and spit them out without a second thought. Daniel, Fisk's assistant, Ben. She doesn't want to add Matt and Foggy's names to that list if she doesn't have to.
The shower is as hot as she can stand it, quickly bringing an angry flush of red to her skin. She imagines burning the parasites inside her from the inside out, digging them out with her nails and drowning them in a torrent of hot water and soap. She scrubs harder than she should. There's blood behind her eyes when she closes them, and no blood when she looks at her trembling hands; she's not sure which of those is more distressing.
She's falling apart and she doesn't know what to do.
...
Foggy is getting really fucking sick of his friends not being okay. Really, amazingly, stupendously tired about the whole thing. He complains about it to the only person who'll listen, much to her chagrin. Marcy complains about his complaining and then they're bickering over really unimportant shit and then they have another fun bout of angry fighting sex that always blows his mind (among other places) and helps him put some of his worries away.
"It's really obvious, you know?" Foggy says, trying and failing to blow some sweat-slicked hair out of his eyes after their last round. "Like, she's super quiet all the time and he bottles everything up like you wouldn't believe, and I'm at the point where I think we should just put a therapist on retainer because I don't think I can keep up with this-"
"Then put a therapist on retainer and stop talking about other partners when you come see me." Marcy pushes a pillow in his face and gives a cruel twist of her hips before she rolls off him completely.
Foggy makes the appropriately regretful noises and pushes the pillow away to glare at her. Marcy stretches, sighs, and flops down beside him. How anyone can make a flop graceful is beyond him, but Foggy's long since been sure his ex-ex-girlfriend is like, a demon witch of the wilds or something.
"Look," she says, "if there were anyone in this city who weren't depressed, traumatized, or just plain unhappy over something that happened in the past few years, that's when I'd be concerned. Sounds like your colleagues-" And the way she pronounces that word makes it sound so filthy, as those she imagines all they do at Nelson and Murdock is have sex in the office all day. "-are just paying attention."
"But there's something wrong," he insists. "I know she doesn't think I can see it, but Matt and I both know, you know?"
"Uh-huh. And have you shared this insight with her?"
"Yeah, we ask her all the time how she's doing-"
"Foggy."
"What am I supposed to do when all she says 'sure, everything's just peachy keen!' and looks dead inside?"
Marci pushes up on one elbow. "You are the most permissive person I've ever met and that's part of the reason we're broken up."
"I thought we got back together," Foggy grumbles.
"Details," Marci says with a wave of her hand. She reaches out to tug lightly on a stray lock of hair. "You let me get away with anything, no matter what you thought. There's a different between 'I'm fine, now stop asking' and 'I'm really not fine, actually give a fuck and get the answer from me.'"
Foggy makes a face as he pushes into the touch like a cat. "But like, I don't want to overstep her boundaries by pushing. Sometimes you're not okay and you just don't want to talk about it, right? And that makes other people a jerk to keep asking."
"And sometimes you're so not okay you don't even know how to begin asking for help." Marci scritches at his temples and gives him what might be a sympathetic smirk - again, how does she even do these things - before pressing in close. "I don't really care what happens with your other girl Foggy bear, I just want you to stop complaining about it in between fucking me senseless. Okay?"
She doesn't wait for a response, just kisses him and slings a leg around his middle again. And he lets her, because he's sick of being worried sick and needs to get lost in a partner he isn't afraid for. Marci may be many things, but being in immediate danger of breaking is not one of them.