Work Text:
12 Years Earlier
It was an early autumn day, which Paxton could only attest to because he saw dead leaves on the ground. Besides that, all sense of chronology had been lost. With a petri dish in one hand, a dripping syringe in the other, Paxton studied the two flies knocking into each other in the corner of the tallest window. He found that he liked to imagine the conflict between the creatures. He couldn't decide if it were more likely that they two were fighting over a mate or that they were mates themselves. Their petty drama tickled him so much that he began to laugh right there in his seat as the syringe dripped continuously into the dish.
"Page..." a voice bellowed from the doorway behind him. Paxton turned to see his colleague, Dr. Martin-something, he was fuzzy on the name at the moment. Martin held in his hand a manila folder with the latest findings of their experimental serum, which he'd just presented to the hospital Board of Directors.
"It didn't go well," Martin sighed. "They think it's too dangerous to even start animal testings." Martin rubbed his temple disheartened. "There's just too much radiation in it. It's going to kill people faster than it makes them better. Jeez. All this money, Paxton. All this time we put into this. For nothing." Martin moved towards Paxton, pulling out a metal stool beside him and taking a seat. Paxton looked down at his petri dish. While his concentration was broken, one of his beloved fighting flies found it's way into the dish. It's wings had eroded. It was twitching until it gave a final, fatal jerk.
Martin bowed over the petri dish to observe the fly as well.
"Oh that's just great," he spat before recoiling. Martin rose from his seat and began pacing behind Paxton in circles around the room.
"Ar-are, are we sure there's no other way? No other other formula we can try?", he rambled.
Paxton still held the syringe in his hand, now empty. He brought it down towards the fly and poked it repeatedly. It was certainly dead. He poked and he poked away at it.
"Could we perhaps tone down the levels of gamma slightly? Replace it with some sort of, some hard-bodied antibiotic?" Martin continued.
Paxton hovered the syringe over the dish staring at the mutilated fly. So this is what it does, he thought, a wry smile on his face. He lowered the syringe into the solution as he slowly released the pressure of his thumb.
"No that won't work," Martin was complaining. "It's the radioactivity... Page," Martin stalled. "Page, what the hell are you doing?"
Paxton stared back at him with hollow, bulging eyes. His smile was wide, but close-lipped, as if he were trying to swallow his teeth with his bottom lip. He held a full syringe in hand, and then he laughed.
* * *
Her father’s sickly fingers bore into her, his gaunt jaw pressed against her hair.
“Now what did I always tell you about interrupting daddy while he’s working?” he rasped. Karen was paralyzed, as if the blood had stopped rushing through her body and her neurons were speaking different languages. Her father forced one of her shoulders back, effectively spinning her around to face him. His smile was wicked, spread ear to ear, cartoon-like, his head cocked to the side. Karen could see the reflection, the glowing blue from the mechanism behind her, in his teeth. She tried desperately to speak.
“Da… D…” she stuttered.
“Yes, yes,, it’s me! I’m alright! Your dear ole’ daddy! I’m not a mute old man at all, am I?” He howled with laughter, digging his fingers deeper into her skin, his face inches away from hers. “But I played it well, don’t you think?”
Karen mustered up strength only to twist her neck around and look at her mother, IV’s of a pulge translucent blue liquid still pumping into her. Her eyes were closed, and her chest heaved rhythmically with slow breaths. The liquid made her veins bulge.
“She’s fine, sweetheart!” her father rasped to her. “Your mother’s fine! She’s my best patient, as a matter of fact! I think this is startin’ to work! What a shame.”
Karen swung back to look at him. After all Karen had been through, all the things she thought were only possible in the movies, this moment left her motionless, thoughtless, damn near breathless. Paxton carefully lead Karen over to a desk chair, on the other side of the room, humming and giggling all the while, even as duck taped her wrists to the arms of the chair.
“Da… dad,” Karen finally whimpered. “Dad, what… what’s going...? You… you’re not…”
Paxton gave Karen a pat on the head. “You always were the smart one.” His smile was significantly less. His lips were pursed together widely, like he smelt something foul and was happy about it. “I’m not sick at all, that’s right. Couldn’t go off killin’ everything east of Burlington without a good alibi, huh, sweetheart?” He pinched her right cheek tightly. “Nobody would have thought to blame the old demented guy, right?” He cackled again, leaving Karen and pacing over to Penelope in the machine.
"K-k-k.." Karen sputtered.
"K-k-k-KAREN! Spit it out, dear!" he howled.
“What… is that?” Karen gasped. “What are you...”
Paxton put a hand to his hip, and two fingers of the other held his chin curiously.
“Hmm,” he hummed. He turned his head toward Karen. “Should I start from the beginning?” He approached the tubes that ran between the great machine and her mother’s chair, picking one up in his fingers and twisting it around inquisitively.
“Funny enough,” he laughed. “I wanted to cure brain cancer! Imagine that! A partner and I, we had an idea, you see. Cobalt serum. Cobalt serum, and some gamma radiation, and we were going make history! We were going to be millionaires, Karen! It was supposed to be flawless! Foolproof! But,” Paxton shrugged his shoulder histrionically, tracing a wide, downward U with one hand that ended in a thumbs down. He blew his tongue between his lips. "Too dangerous! And they were right!" He cackled deeply as he paced back to Karen,
"I killed every damn rat I stole out of that lab!" he cried. He took a step forward and stopped, cocking his head up playfully, as if searching for a thought.
"And the horses out back..." he continued. He took another small step.
"And the dog... And the neighbors' dogs. And about... oh, say twenty, twenty-five deer. And five drifters your mother lured in from the diner." He took another step, still manic. "Maybe more!"
Karen was speechless, tears pouring down her face, so overwhelmed by the confusion and terror she felt. She looked back at her mother, still peacefully unconscious. Paxton caught on to this, and turned to look at her as well.
"Now see, your mother... oh, I always knew she was something special," he cooed. "I made change after change after change, and just kept killing things and killing things, and killing and killing and dying and dead," He waved his hands frantically in the air. "Nothing! So naturally, when your mother volunteered to be my little assistant, I didn't think it was going to work." Paxton bent his back forward, leaning in towards Karen. He held a hand to one side of his mouth, as if he were telling her a secret.
"I think all the radiation in the house may have made her a little, coo coo!" he whispered with a snicker. "Regardless, I was of course apprehensive, as I've said, but your mother she was adamant. I think she may have been tired of getting the loners to follow her back to the farm. She was always a little soft, you know. Good thing she didn't know about your brother."
Karen had to focus her eyes at his last statement. She squinted, still panting deeply from the shock.
"What do you mean, 'about your brother'?" she asked sternly. It was the first able-bodied sentiment she'd been able to project. Her father seemingly ignored her, as he continued his story.
"She's taken to the serum quite nicely, in comparison! It makes her a little more, dead-looking, but she's strong as an ox! She mows the field by herself know! Moved all the hay back into the barn!"
"What...", she started, her voice deep, growling. "Do you mean. 'About your brother'."
Paxton reach over to Karen, running his fingers through her hair. "My little girl," he said softly. "Like I said, you were always the smart one. So curious. I knew I'd have to keep an extra eye on you," he added as he lifted a finger to point to the separation between his eyeballs. He dropped both his hands to his side, and with a smirk he answered.
"I killed him!"
Karen's throat lurched as she cried loudly in disgust. The chair underneath her was rocking, banging up and down against the concrete floor from the force with which she shook. As she sat there listening to her father's rants, his confession, something within Karen was grasped tightly with two strong hands, smothered, completely dismantled, and pieces of it crumbled deep down, never to be seen again. The hair on her neck was standing straight as a dog's would as it howled and thrashed rabidly. Her screams and cries warped themselves together in an infinite wail. Her father's every limb maniacally mimicked her shaking as he cackled.
"Yes, yes, yes" he said languidly. "Now Kevin, Kevin wasn't the smart one, not at all."
"You fucking BASTARD!" Karen screamed. "HOW COULD YOU?! WHAT DID YOU DO?!"
"After all the times I told you two growing up that you were not to go into Daddy's lab without his permission, wouldn't you know it, the big oaf came clopping down here one day, looking for who knows what. He didn't know I was here, I," He pointed to a barely visible crawl space off in the corner. "I hid in there. He saw everything, Karen. I couldn't have that, no. You know what a big mouth he had. Kid could just talk, and talk, and talk." The crude puppet of Paxton's hand mocked open and closed. "He even talked to the horses! I couldn't have him walking around with all this. I just couldn't, Karen. You understand. I killed him the next day."
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?!" she yelled.
"Well I brought him out to the river to fish, you know how the story goes! Didn’t suspect a thing. Dense. Poor boy thought he ran into a thorn.” Paxton pointed back to the machine and IV’s.
“Not as strong as your mother, that’s for sure. Surprised he got as far up the road as he did, though. I gave him only a bit less than what I had to use on the horses.”
Karen's jaw quaked. Her teeth chattered together with the hottest sense of rage. She glued her teeth together, flashing them at her father now, the blue light reflecting off of them. She hissed furiously at him.
"You sent me away." That he did. Karen recalled the feeling of horrified embarrassment when she found out that Ellison, even Ben found the article about her brother’s death, the same article that mentioned that the boy’s older sister, Karen, had to be temporarily institutionalized, shipped away to a mental facility, because of “hysteria” caused by the death of her brother. It was all to cover up his disgusting, twisted, unearthly secret. He was a murderer. He was criminally insane.
"Oh, I know, my dear, and I'm sorry about that, truly, but it's like I said, you’ve always been too smart for your own good!” He reached his hand up to stroke her face, but Karen violently spat onto his hand. Paxton recoiled, his face slipping into a disconcerted frown for the first time this evening. His tone fell.
“You needed to be sent away. I couldn’t have everyone in town trying to dig up what happened to Kevin. Not that the Sheriff, that dingbat, or anybody in the hospital would ever be half-witted enough to look for traces of cobalt in Kevin’s blood stream.”
Paxton paced towards the machine again as he wiped Karen’s spit.
“The question now, I suppose,” he began, “Is what ever am I going to do with you?”
* * *
Frank awoke sometime after that night feeling as if he’d been stabbed through the head, a feeling he could realistically imagine. He was lying on his back, staring blurrily up at the red roof of the barn. In his stomach he could still feel a looming wave of nerves form what had happened only a few hours before. Remembering Karen, he closed his eyes again and rolled off to the side, naturally swinging his arm over to fall over Karen. The blanket where she was supposed to be was as chilly as the wind that whistled through the barn. Frank’s eyes whipped open. No Karen. He sprung up.
“Karen?” he rasped. No answer. “Karen?!” Louder, deeper this time. He jumped off the hay, too frantic to even put his shirt or jacket on. He ran outside until the house was visible. From a small window just above ground, the basement presumably, Frank could see an eerie blue glow. He thought about it for only a split second until he heard her. It sounded like someone was ripping her apart limb from limb; she was screaming, crying. Frank could hear the fluids in her face as the sound pierced through everything around them. He was in the house before she went silent.
* * *
“What are you gonna do with me, huh?” Karen mocked. “You wanna know what to do with me? I suggest you kill me right here, because if there’s a chance, any chance at all, that I get out of this chair, you are going to have hell to pay.”
“Ooh, is that so kitty cat?” Paxton giggled as he walked swiftly towards Karen. He took a knee in front of her, beaming upwards. “Oh, do you remember? You used to love when I called you kitty cat. You’d crawl around, meowing, pretending to lick your hand. You couldn’t have been more than six…”
As he reminisced, something from outside the office, through the opaque class windows, caught her eye. It flickered in the distance against the radiating blue, and Karen tried ardently to pretend she was listening to her father’s story instead of studying the object. It moved closer, blue moving through it, around it. Another sparkle appeared behind it, and that one was unmistakable. The second glimmer came from the thick, dark locks of Frank Castle’s hair. The first, she deciphered, must be his gun. Karen began to engage her father as Frank approached.
She sniffled. “I remember that,” she said with a laugh. “I remember I used to crawl up the stairs, and whenever Mom would carry the laundry downstairs, she would get so mad. Do you remember? What happened to you, Dad?” she asked, feigning desperation to connect. “How did this happen?”
Paxton laughed and began his reply, and by time he had, Frank had approached the doorway. She wasn’t sure what had possessed him to come into the house, as he looked like he rolled directly out of the barn, but she was thankful for his presence, more so for what he had brought with him. Frank first brought his attention to Penelope in the chair, furrowing his brow and mouthing things to himself. Paxton continued.
"Now, Karen, this may not come as a surprise to you, but you've always been my favorite. My little girl. And I think, I think there may be a good chance you'll take to this serum like your mother. Just once, one dose! That's all we'll do! Oh Karen, it's working now, can't you see! Look at all it's done for..."
As Paxton turned to Penelope, swinging his arm grandiosely to showcase her, he was met with Frank's heavy boot, connecting right into his frail cheekbone. Karen looked passed them; Frank had seemingly disconnected Penelope from the IV's, and she was slumped over in the chair, only semi-conscious and still buckled down. Paxton rolled onto his back, rubbing his cheek and looking up blankly at the ceiling, as Frank began to tear the tape off of Karen's wrists. She was anxious, no, not even anxious. Her every thought was now solely centered on delivering a walloping kick into her father's side, maybe even more.
"Oh, that's right," Paxton sighed. "I forgot you brought a friend. A little too, much for you Karen, I would say. You can do better."
Karen charged at Paxton, swearing at him furiously, but Frank caught her and held her back. Her legs swung in the air as their forces counteracted.
"You MONSTER!" she yelled. "You fucking monster!" Her swears synchronized with her screams and created one primal roar. Paxton, still on the ground, reached underneath a working desk besides him.
"GO. MOVE." Frank yelled, hugging Karen tightly, practically dragging her across to the study door as she flailed and kicked angrily.
"NO! NO!" she shouted back. Paxton began to chuckle. From under the desk, he had grabbed a hidden handgun, and now had it raised at Frank.
"Oh, no no no!" he chortled, scrambling up and planting himself in front of the doorway. "You two can't leave now!"
Suddenly, from behind Paxton in the open section of the basement, a large baseball bat came down upon his head and sent him folding forward. Behind him, Irina held the weapon, her face wrinkled in anger.
"No!" she huffed. "Not Miss Karen. You promised you won't hurt anyone else now that serum works."
Paxton swung upright, turning to Irina, ready to fire at her instead.
"Traitorous bitch!" he yelled. Dropping Karen to the ground, Frank flung himself at Paxton before he could fire. Paxton dropped his weapon as Frank began to pummel him. He was strong for his frame size, wrestling Frank up off the ground, throwing blows of his own. Karen wasted no time; she ran towards the gun Paxton dropped and immediately opened fire on the two men as they fought. Her first shot missed them, but pierced through the machine that had previously pumped serum into her mother's veins. The machine sparked, catching another wooden desk. The chemicals that seeped out fed the spark.
"KAREN!" Frank yelled, looking at her horrified, eyes wild, lips, the whole nine. Karen shot again, hitting the wall as the two men wrestled each other across the room. The third shot was a rather unfortunate misfire, Karen realized, but the rage pulsing through her, the adrenaline, caused her not to care. The slug hit her mother in the shoulder. Penelope's head rolled back as she released a long monotonous moan in her half-catatonic state. Paxton immediately reacted.
"NO, MY PENELOPE!" he yelled, pushing Frank off him powerfully and running to his wife in the chair. Frank took this moment to grab at Karen again, trying to push her out the door.
"You gotta stop," he yelled. "You gotta MOVE!"
Karen barely heard him. She watched her father fall onto her mother, caressing her face and hair, checking the wound. The desk was completely enflamed now, and it had spread passed the chair and to the opposite end of the study as the serum spilled. As Frank forced her out, Karen steadied her breathing. She was surprised she found the focus. In and out, it was second nature to her now. She steadied her feet like anchors on the concrete floor, making it harder and harder to push her. Everything began to slow down, her father's wails, Frank bellowing commands, the crackles of the flames. Karen lifted her arm one last time gracefully into the air. In. Out. Steady. Aim. It landed just as she'd planned.
Her father fell limply on the ground as she regained her surroundings, everything speeding up, the heat from the fire in her face. Frank was screaming, not words, but a deep, guttoral, inhuman thundering. Irina was gone, undoubtedly fleeing when the fire broke out. Karen's vision was whiting out, but she knew that Frank had pushed her all the way inside the car, leaving her to wait as he ran off to the barn and gathered their things quickly. Karen could hear sirens from far up the road, but before they came closer, Frank was back in the car, flooring it down the road in the opposite direction. It was a strange sensation she felt, as if her body was completely numbing itself from how fast everything inside her was moving. She felt everything and nothing simultaneously.
Frank was still screaming. She couldn't make out the words, but she could note every part of the sound, the tone, the volume. He didn't sound angry. Karen knew his angry voice by now, memorized that. Was it hurt? His voice quivered very obviously, but he remained loud, harsh. She could grasp the difference between his statements and questions, and when he was hounding her to answer. When some of the rush wore off, she finally did.
"You were right," she said simply.
"The fuck are you talkin' about?!" he yelled.
Karen slumped down in her seat and closed her eyes, the shadow of a smile on the farthest corner of her lip.
"It does get easier." She didn't know where the sentiment came from, from which part of her it slipped out of, but she meant it.
"No, don' you say that. Don't you fucking say that, you hear me?!" he grunted. "What you just did was STUPID."
Karen flopped her head to face him. "You did it," she said, her voice siring a natural defensiveness.
"No, no, no, don't pull that shit with me, Karen. Don't play with me like this. I know..." he paused, and restarted, composing himself, keeping something in. "I know what you're feeling right now, but you gotta stop. It's just some big bottomless pit you're fallin' into. You're not supposed to be like me, Karen. You're not me. You're better than me, Karen. You don't..." Frank slammed his hands down on the steering wheel. "Don't do this to me," he hissed. "You don't deserve this."
"Why not," Karen droned, unsure if she'd even posed a question.
"Let me ask you somethin'," he spat. "Did that... did that mean somethin' to you? Back there in the barn? The two of us rollin' in there like a couple of drunk shitheads?"
Karen had nearly forgotten it, honestly. She remembered the way he'd made her blood rush through every inch of her body, his rough body atop hers, and how she'd loved it, frankly. She felt like she'd swallowed her own heart and it bounded against the inside of her stomach dying to get out. That feeling was absolutely laughable, puny, in comparison to what she was feeling right now.
In the wake of her silence, he continued, gurgling.
"You can't do this," he begged. Karen's head fell back to the center, and she closed her eyes, a sheet of white remaining on the inside of her eyelids, violent flashes of the fire, he father, her brother appearing before her. Frank said nothing again. He only growled, and it feathered louder every time he exhaled. His hands strangled the steering wheel, and the air in the car grew thick, remaining so for the entire ride back to Hell's Kitchen.