aheroliveshere | [for man_without

He stands before her, his hands on her waist, shades of empathy and apology in his expression.

"Maybe that's not such a bad thing," he says after a moment. "It might just be a sign of how much this means to each of us."

It means a whole hell of a lot to him, which is a definite contributor to the fear of ruining it all.

She nods, and even though he's blind, she's glad the shower is beating down on them if it means he can't see the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

"I think I'm falling in love with you, Matt." There's joy in the confession, but yes, fear, too. It's too soon to even think about such things, but it's been happening for awhile.

And he's not alone. This means more to her than anything else in her life right now.

His mouth starts to open, but he doesn't know what to say.

The falling water does a fair job of washing the scent away, but he can still hear the crack in her voice, the small emotional hitch in her lungs.

Love.

There's elation attached to the word, surprise that she could be feeling such things for him and joy that she might, but hard on the heals of that is a cold dread. Uncertainty and... fear.

Good things don't befall the people he's loved. In his history the people he's cared about the most don't stay. Of all the scars he carries it is the unseen wounds from them that hurt the most.

The knee jerk instinct is to back off, to pull everything in and bow out before this destroys both of them. Only he can't, because despite his trepidation, and the pain of the past, he can't walk away from her. He wants this, he's here because he cares about her; his words to her last night about his feelings were true and they haven't changed any this morning.

Lifting a hand he cups her cheek, his touch firm so that she won't feel the tremor underneath.

"Karen, I... " He has to stop, taking a steadying breath before going on, hoping the words are right. "I don't know, but I can't say that I'm not falling for you, too."

So it might be that he is.

She laughs through her tears, because he isn't pulling away. She doesn't know what she expected to come from that kind of confession, but him bolting out of the apartment was at the top of the list. The convoluted double negative makes her giddy. Lawyers.

"It's okay. We're okay." She breathes the words against his lips. "Just gotta trust each other, okay? Little bit at a time. We got this."

He nods, a smile cracking through the anxiety and her laugh brushes away the dread.

She's right, they're okay.

"Okay," he agrees, tilting her face up to kiss her before letting his hand drop and nodding against her again. "Okay."

Later, after they'd taken their time in the shower together (and Karen's thighs had stopped feeling like jelly), she withdrew to let him get dressed. She threw on a robe to make breakfast for them both.

Eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice and the ubiquitous coffee. She'd started out humming under her breath, but the shadows loomed and stilled that quiet joy. She had to tell him. She needed to tell him. She really didn't want to tell him.

But this was how trust worked. And if she wanted to know why his nights were occupied with things that left him battered and bruised, instead of in her arms, then she had to be willing to open that door and invite him in.

She was pouring them two mugs of coffee when he emerged.

He's smiling to himself as he dresses, listening to her humming in the kitchen while he pulls on his clothes. For a moment it's a perfectly blissful domestic moment.

And then he pulls on his shirt, and the stiff fabric is scratchy against his shoulder and reminds him of the blood stain that's there and now dried. Pulling the article off he frowns at it, feeling the rough spot out with the pad of his thumb.

It makes him wonder if this is even possible. What happens if he doesn't tell her everything? And what happens if he does?

There's nothing to do for it right now, and so he puts on the shirt, doing up the buttons and straightening out the wrinkles as best he can, and wearing it like it's fresh and there's nothing wrong.

The first thing he notices when he enters the kitchen is that her humming has stopped. Still he puts on a smile, lifting his nose in an exaggeration of smelling the air.

"Coffee?"

"You know, sometimes it's uncanny what you can deduce by your nose alone." You may be amazing in bed, Matt, but she's not above being snarky at you first thing in the morning.

She takes the mugs over to the tiny kitchen table and sets one down for him. Only then does she turn and see that he's wearing the blood-stained shirt from the night before. She lets out a quiet little sigh of exasperation.

"Here. Take that off. I can get that stain out for you, and it'll be dry by the time you need to leave. You can wear one of my tshirts if you want."

He gives her a bemused expression and seeks out a chair. His hand falls on a chair back just as she turns to cluck at him.

"It's alright," he says, then adds jokingly, "Besides, I really don't know if your clothes would fit."

His coffee is already doctored to his liking. She's made it for him in the office enough times.

"Okay, point. So maybe it's just a ploy to get you to walk around without a shirt on so I can ogle you. So gimme."

"Is that the plan?" he asks, amused and smirking.

He doesn't want her having to clean the shirt for him, but he recognizes that there isn't much he can do to stop her. If he protests any more, even playfully, she'll more than likely set her feet and insist.

Smart enough not to enter a battle he isn't going to win, Matt sets to undoing buttons and soon hands the shirt over to her.

"Thank you."

She takes it from him and bends to nuzzle his cheek, leaning in to whisper in his ear.

"Thank you."

When she pulls back, her hand lingers on his cheek.

"How do you like your eggs?"

His resulting smile causes his stubble to rasp against her skin.

"Over-medium, please," he answers.

"Done and done."

A few minutes later, she sets a plate in front of him and slides into the seat beside him.

"I could get used to this," she murmurs, though there's a hint of melancholy to her voice. Like merely saying the words out loud are tempting fate.

He takes a moment to organize his place setting (plate, fork, juice glass, coffee... ), the ghost of a frown crossing his features at the sad tone under her voice.

"So could I." Or he'd like to, if fate and all the other workings of the world will allow. "It's nice."

Nice isn't really the right word, but he's a little afraid to tempt things himself.

"It is. Yeah. Nice." She smiles, watching his routine. There's a strange comfort in it. Just having him here.

She eats in companionable silence, resting one leg against his. He can feel her wrestling with something. There's a tension shifting in her body, in her heart beat and her breath.

He nudges her leg back and flashes her a smile before tucking into his breakfast.

There's a shift in the atmosphere around them, like an unseen cloud thickening the air over them. She lapses into a silence that makes hearing and sensing the signs of inner-conflict not only easy, but impossible to ignore.

The problem with reading the world the way he does is that there isn't always pretense to admit what he knows. Something is bothering her, and he's praying that it isn't regret, but a direct question asking her what it is is hard to voice without a reason.

When her glass is set down empty with still no further conversation he uses that as excuse enough and finally asks, "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," she answers too quickly.

A moment later her hand flies out and catches his, her grip fierce.

"It's not you. Not -- I mean..." She takes a deep breath and lets it out, her grip on his hand relaxing.

"Little bit at a time, okay? Only -- some parts, they aren't so little."

The action and the strength of her hold on his hand makes him stiffen in sudden alert.

He squeezes her fingers in attempted reassurance.

"Karen, what is it?"

She takes a breath to speak and holds it for a long moment. Standing on the edge of a precipice, looking down into the abyss.

Don't think, just jump.

"Matt, I killed Wesley."

The corner of his mouth twitches, like maybe there's a joke there somewhere and he's missing it but will still smile regardless.

It takes several long moments for her words to sink in, for their meaning to truly register. His head slowly cants and his expression shifts from uncomprehension to disbelief and denial.

"What? What do you mean? How-- when?"

"I shot him."

She can still hear the cold level tones of his voice. Feel the cotton in her mouth. The cold steel in her hand. She has to step out of the memory to tell him the truth, but it takes her a moment. She swallows, tries to find the words.

"After Ben and I found Fisk's mother. He kidnapped me. Drugged me. Thought he could threaten me into retracting everything. I told him I'd rather die."

In her memory a cellphone rings, and her hand is in motion the moment Wesley's eyes drop. That same white hot rage creeps into her voice.

"He said he'd kill Ben. Foggy. You.. And then, when everyone else was dead, he'd come for me."

Bang.

Bang bangbangbang bang.

"I got the gun away from him. He tried to tell me it wasn't loaded." Her hands are shaking now. "So I shot him. And I kept shooting until he was dead."

"Fisk's mother, Karen, what're you-- " he stops himself, wets his lips and holds his tongue, listening to the rest.

There's a heartbeat drumming loud in his ears and it takes him a moment to realize it's his own.

Her words fall like a hammer and the cold feeling steeling down his spine grows colder with every one.

Kidnapped. Drugged. Threats.

She killed Wesley. Shot him. And then...

"What did you do after?" His voice is level, the words deceptively calm.

His heart is still beating too loud and there's so much going on within him. Anger, worry, surprise, fear, shock; that she was in danger and he didn't know, that she did this, had it happen to her and pulled the trigger.

"I got rid of it. I wiped my fingerprints off everything. There's a reason I'm not already in the ground for it, Matt."

She's waiting for him to push away from the table. To walk away again. Which is what she deserves. And even with the specter of losing him looms large, there's a strange weightlessness to having finally said the words out loud.

Her blood pressure dips as her body remembers the emotional shock of what happened. As it prepares for what's about to happen.

He's trying to stay calm, to keep pulling in one slow, even breath after another even though his heart is trip-hammering in his chest and all of his thoughts are a chaotic, jumbled mess in his head as he tries to process what she's telling him.

Filtering through everything to find words to say, the next question to ask is, "Why didn't you call the police?"

[for man_without_fear]

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