Bitter Medicine

Krista Dumont has never been so entranced by dust motes in her life. How did she never notice before? They're like fairy dust, like Tinkerbell dander, flitting hither and yon in the glaring gold beams coming through her window. She's never noticed that before either- how you could actually see sunlight, how golden it turned everything.

The fuzzy caramel wash of the morphine drip has settled over her like the caramel warmth of the sun, pushing thought and care away. She doesn't want to fight it. What's the point? Right now, her only job is to heal so Billy can get her out of this mess.

Billy. He was going to be pleased to hear his training paid off. She had almost taken an armed, trained law enforcement agent. With a few more months under her belt, she would have won that fight, but then, she'd always been a survivor, hadn't she? Being in this bed is one more proof of that.

Krista's eyes suddenly refocus on what's on that bed. Her shattered left leg, immobilized and full of pins. Her shattered right arm, immobilized and full of pins. Her next breath brings the pins in her ribs back to her attention. It's a wonder they'd bothered with the protocol of cuffing her "good" arm to the bed. Healing is her most important job, but someone still has to pick up the remnants of her life while the doctors are picking up the remnants of her body.

The condo is a total loss as a dwelling, of course, but it should fetch a good price once the damage is repaired. Better she extract the money she put into it than the government that locked up Billy while giving the likes of Castle a brand-new life. When is that public defender going to show up? When she woke from surgery, the cop by her bed said...

The thought dissolves in a neural vapor trail as a mote catches her eye. This one's doing a darling little dance as it spirals up from the lower pane into the more direct glow of the upper pane. Just as a smile begins to tickle at her lips, she hears the clack of the door handle depressing and the fairy tale disappears back into the further corners. She turns her head and tenses, sending a burning spasm through her body.

The Homeland Security agent who had done this to her. Madani. Just standing there in a wrinkled white dress shirt splotched with great gouts of blood. Had she done that? She can't remember. The agent doesn't appear to be in pain, though, which instantly irritates Krista. "Did you come here to gloat?" she snaps.

"No," the woman soothes in a pitying, infuriating murmur. "No, I'm sorry this happened to you."

"Which part? Throwing me out of a window?"

"Billy dragging you into this."

"He didn't drag me into anything. I love him. Not that I expect you to understand." Part of Krista knows she shouldn't be confessing to any of this, but she can't seem to help it.

"I thought that too, once. Difference is, I had the sense to leave when I found out who he really was."

"That's not how I remember it. I was paid to be at his sickbed every day. I doubt you were." Madani stares back at her, jaw slackening. "Is he alive?"

The agent spreads her arms, exhaling with a long whistle. "Yeah. As far as we know."

Krista's eyes instantly sting with relief. It had somehow never occurred to her that she could lose Billy until just before the words came out of her mouth, but her reaction to the reply is so euphoric, it leaves her lightheaded. It must be written all over her face too, because the other woman is giving her a strange look.

"He ran," Madani says in rank disbelief. "He left you bleeding in the dirt!"

"He couldn't help either of us if he stayed; he knew that." Suddenly feeling that she'd said too much, she adds, "He knew I would want him to be free."

Madani's lips purse and her face hardens ominously. She drifts over to the foot of the bed, too deliberate to be purposeless, and props her elbows conversationally on the footboard. "You know, you were right- kinda. I did get the therapy I needed at your place. Not the talking, so much, but when I finally put three bullets in that murdering son of a bitch, that really felt like a clean break." She straightens and lifts a shirt-tail. "You see this blood? It's Billy's blood." A pause to let her captive audience take in the gruesome volume of red before leaning in to rest her hands on either side of the pincushion of a leg. "See, he's out there somewhere. Alone. In pain. Bleeding. Now the only question is whether he'll bleed his last before Frank Castle finds him. For his sake, you better hope it's the former."

The rage boiling over in Krista's belly spills from her mouth. "He came back for me." Silence. "You couldn't have put three bullets in him if he ran. He will survive. He's strong. And when the time is right, he'll come for me again."

She watches the ice melt away from the agent's face, leaving that grudging pity behind.
"God, maybe it's true, what they say about shrinks," Madani marvels. Wearily, she pushes back and heads for the door. "I'll let you know when we find the body."

"You know he'll kill you for what you did to me!"

"Oh, you did this to yourself." And the woman is gone.

The woman, but not the irritant. Krista maintains a vise-like grip on her confidence that Billy will survive. He has the money they collected and the weapons they bought. He has the safehouses they set up. He has the steel core that first hummed in sympathy with her own when they brought him into this very hospital. But if she were to allow herself a moment of concern...
The best case scenario is that he'll need time to recover from his wounds. Likely a lot of time. The government will keep her in this hospital until she's well enough to move, but after that, who knows? She catches her reflection in the polished onyx of the TV screen, noting wide eyes and furrowed brow. Even against the blackness, the circles inked under her eyes are visible.

The next thing she knows, Krista is opening her eyes to a missing reflection. A second's reflexive panic turns into the realization that the light in the room has changed. The clock says she's been asleep for nearly two hours. She buzzes for a nurse.

The newspaper requires authorization from the cop at her door and the morphine reduction requires authorization from the attending physician, but soon enough, she is looking at the newsprint spread over her lap with a clearer head. Also rather more pain, but it's been a long time since she feared that. The story she's looking for, the ongoing soapy saga of a politician accused of attempted murder, is on page two of the crime section and features a name that's popped up in connection with high profile cases before. Ah, there it is. She remembers now.

If she sells her condo and its contents, cashes out her 401K and liquidates her investments, that should leave her with enough ready cash to hire the top-flight defense team at Hogarth, Chao and Benowitz. It's not as if any of it'll matter when she's a fugitive anyway. They just need to keep her out of some black ops hole in the ground long enough for Billy to recover. Who knows, maybe they'll even prove good enough to win an acquittal. Hopefully, she won't be around that long.

Even more interesting is a tiny ad at the bottom of another page. It's just a black box with a bold, unadorned white typeface, but the first line is what catches her eye: Alias Investigations. Now there's a story you can't work in Hell's Kitchen without knowing. The proprietor of Alias Investigations had spectacularly outed herself as One Of Those People by snapping the neck of a mind controller who had been terrorizing the area. She scans the sampling of services offered. Pathetic. A powered person could do so much better.

That needs to change. If Jessica Jones likes to play vigilante, Krista Dumont has the perfect case for her.