VIRTUE, frank castle

CHAPTER TWO

"You're paying me back."

What the fuck was she meant to do here? No, seriously, what was she supposed to do? Was she supposed to call an ambulance and hope he didn't die in that time frame? Did she pray for the poor bastard currently ruining her carpet? What did she do? It was safe to say that Mallory was panicking as she paced across the floor, practically going in circles around the possible corpse and unable to tear her gaze away from the man, her neighbour, Frank something or other who'd once held the door open for her and she'd spent the next ten minutes in her apartment hyperventilating because his arm had almost brushed over her own.

Was it already too late? Was he dead? What the fuck happened? He looked at though he'd went in a match with a fucking bulldozer, and then apparently decided that climbing through her window, all the while looking like on of Daredevils victims, was the nest option for his survival? Perhaps that big head had some kind of brain damage, well, he might of, except she was pretty sure he was fucking dead...and yet just as that thought was about to send her into another wave of panic, he suddenly let out a weak groan that seemed to be punched out of his large chest as he flinched.

Okay, okay so he wasn't dead, she could work with that, Mallory nodded her head frantically, rubbing her palms together and feeling her skin tingle and blister like an ominous warning. She didn't want to do this, she didn't want to do this, to risk her sanity, her life for a man that just so happened to be her fucking neighbour...but the other option didn't seem to be exactly perfect for her either. If he died, it would of been in her apartment with her covered in his blood and her suspicious past that followed her like haunting ghosts trying to drag her down into hells fiery pits...yes, she really didn't see this going well for her, at all.

"Please don't die you bastard, please, please, please." She kept muttering desperately under her breath like it was a prayer, bringing herself down to her knees beside him like a mocking saint, her pained gaze flickering at his every bruise with something critical and dark beginning to cloud over her exhausted features, as she ever so slowly began to peel off the thick gloves that had been her armour, her salvation for years now, grimacing at the sensitivity of her trembling skin as a breeze from the broken widow brushed over her cursed flesh, leaving goosebumps in its wake that actually hurt.

But then she swallowed tightly, taking a deep breath with her eyes aching with unurshed tears, before hovering her shaking hands over his immobile body carefully, her fingertips dancing over his familar face gently, softly, like he was made of glass underneath her ruination, his crimson sin staining her fingers with red as she focused and sobbed and took...and that's when she felt something yank at her veins, pulling hard and making everything hurt and burn as Frank's skin began to knit together, blood drying and seeping back up into the cuts that had spilled his morality everywhere.

Taking, that's what she'd called her curse once, a simple term that didn't really carry the weight of what she could do, what she shouldn't of been able to do with veins that would blister and curl as her young body would fill with a devastating pain that maimed her like salt to a wound.

Of course, it hadn't always been there, that darkness beneath her flesh, the simple rot that laced her skin, hollowing her out until she was nothing but bone and damned blood, stealing her peace and her humanity and making her half heaven and half hell. It, like many things in the disaster they called life, had developed slowly, day by day, moment by moment, unnoticeable to Mallory who grew more and more drained with every fleeting touch that she'd been blessed with on the most rarest of occasions, never quite understanding the sudden agony that would blossom inside her while the others around her seemed to thrive.