THREE

𝙍𝙀𝙄𝙂𝙉 𝙊𝙁 𝘽𝙇𝙊𝙊𝘿

𝘾𝙃𝘼𝙋𝙏𝙀𝙍 𝙏𝙃𝙍𝙀𝙀
𝙸𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝙸𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚕

"Ah- start at the beginning. I want to know everything."

Micro stared at her as if he was looking at a stranger. It was possible that he was. No matter how long the siblings had spent in his hideout, he couldn't really know them. It was a part of their agreement, to keep things private. The less they knew about each other the better. It had begun as self-preservation, for Micro, but the longer they were there, the more he could see of their seriousness when it came to keeping hidden, the more he felt the need to know who exactly they were and what they were capable of.

He swallowed, the motion getting stuck in his throat. He hadn't realised how thirsty he was. The nerves didn't help. For teenagers, they were scary, especially given the fact that he wasn't even supposed to be alive now, and they most likely knew that fact and could use it at their will.

"I want to know everything, Micro," Wren said.

Her blunt hair fell onto her face, cutting down at her cheekbones. He hadn't noticed that she'd cut her hair. It was a stark white now too, a sharp contrast from her natural dark brown, only making her look more severe than she already was. The piercing stare, with eyes a pale blue, only added to the effect.

They underestimated him, Micro knew. It didn't take a genius to know as such, but his analyst mind-frame certainly could see through it. They underestimated him- but they could also want something from him if he worked it right. But his job had always been the detection, not the action.

"This works both ways. I tell you my shit, you tell me yours," he said, working up the gumption to sprout out the words.

"Fine. Whatever. Just get to it," Wren said with a roll of her eyes. Behind her, Liam just stood blankly, arms crossed over his wide chest.

They would make better friends than foes. Better allies than opponents. Micro knew that well enough to use it.

"Start at the beginning. There is no beginning. There are lots of little strings leading me here. No beginning," he said, throwing his head back in annoyance.

How often had he thought about the what-ifs, the if onlys? It killed him, to think about his family, left believing he was dead. His children left fatherless, his wife a widow, all while he wallowed in a secret, dingy warehouse, watching them from a distance. If only he'd buried the evidence when he'd been told to. If only he was a bad person. Because that was his reasoning, right?

We're teaching our kids to be good people, Sarah, and that's what this comes down to. Whether we're the good people we want our children to be.

God, he'd dreamed about returning to them. Returning a free man, a living corpse, an animated ghost. In his dreams, they were happy, overwhelmed to tears that their father was alive and a good person. It was only in his nightmares, that they cried because he had not died, and sobbed because the past year had been a lie. Nightmares were always more realistic.

"Don't make this difficult, Micro," Wren warned, leaning a hand on each arm of the chair.

Micro looked up at the two siblings, the two strangers. They were rough around the edges- harsher than any teenager, even the bad ones, should have been. For the first time since he'd first allowed them to take refuge in his hideout, he truly wondered what had led them to such a fucked up life at such a young age. He wanted to know. So he told them first.

"I was an NSA analyst. A damn good one, tasked to work on Afghanistan intelligence to assess received data, to find anything that might be useful. For the first five or so years, there was nothing, until I received a video from an anonymous soldier," he said, and from behind his sister, Liam perked up in interest. "It showed the torture and murder of a man heard begging for his life. I turned it in but my section chief decided to bury the footage, rather than risk the exposure of a major conspiracy within the Armed Forces. You could imagine the damage."

"I sent the video anonymously to the man's former partner, an agent with Homeland Security. Or at least I thought it had been anonymous. It was traced back to me and I was deemed a traitor who resisted arrest. They sent an armed team to dispose of me. Would have been killed if it wasn't for the lucky placement of a phone."

For a moment, Wren watched him, as if deciding if his story was good enough. It was Liam, who beat her to speaking, though.

"And what does this have to do with the Punisher?" He asked.

Micro could see the eagerness in their eyes. A desperation that would have seemed misplaced. Yet from what little he knew of them, it was fitting. Even he felt it, after spending so long underground. It was a need to know, to dig deeper into the hole they'd become trapped in. Frank Castle could be his make or break, and Micro had pulled them in enough that he could be theirs too.

"Frank Castle and I have common enemies," Micro said, only frustrating her further. "I've said my piece. It's time you say yours."

"We're hiding from Wilson Fisk."

She said the words so quickly that he almost didn't hear them. He had expected her to dwell over the words, to think them over and lay them out carefully, not splurge them as if it was gossip. The actual information shouldn't have been a surprise. Kingpin's name had been thrown about their conversations too often for it to be meaningless. The whole of New York knew to fear his name and yet the two siblings used it as commonly as their own.

"Fisk is in prison."

"That doesn't matter," Wren said, eyes darkening as she finally let go of his chair, turning to lean against the desk of computers. "No prison can hold Wilson Fisk. He has soldiers everywhere that carry out his will. It doesn't matter that our evidence would ruin him, he's already damned. It's the fact we even tried. Fisk kills for less."

"How do two teenagers get damning evidence on Wilson Fisk in the first place?"

It was as if he was seeing them through a new lens.

"Liam is quick enough to hack into Stark Tech. It wouldn't have been hard for someone who knew where to look," Wren said. "And we knew where to look."

By the tensed expression on her face and the rigid stance of her body, he could tell she would say no more.

But that didn't mean her brother would keep quiet.

"But it wasn't us who found it," Liam said, earning a glare from his sister. "Our mother left it to us, before she died."

"Before she was murdered," Wren said, and it was that withering look that bore down between them, that silenced the conversation.

"The whole Frank Castle thing," Micro began, looking up to them with a raised glance. He knew what he was doing. "It doesn't matter anyway. I think I'm going to have a tough time convincing him we're on the same side- that we want the same things."

Liam paused for a moment. "Maybe you just need us."

He was more predictable than Micro had first thought.

"What?"

"You said yourself that you're sick of being trapped in here," Liam said, ignoring the bark behind his sister's voice.

"Liam. We had an agreement," she snapped, fingers tugging on the blunt ends of her bleached hair.

"Which you just broke, Wren," he said, flashing her a sharp grin. "Come on, it'll be fun. You could be running with Frank Castle."

"Frank Castle doesn't work with anyone."

"You won't know until you try," he said before turning back to Micro. "I think we have a lot to gain from the Punisher. I mean, he goes after the bad guys, the ones the state won't punish. We'll help."

"Liam-"

"We'll help," he said calmly, and for once, she listened.





That was how Wren found herself trailing around New York, a fraying sports cap on her head, on the search for the Punisher. Micro wasn't the only ghost in New York. It was the first time in a while that she was truly nervous. The bright, white hair didn't help. Under the murky hangings of charcoal clouds and the grey radiance the city gave off, the colour was far too obvious for her liking. It hadn't been what she was going for, to say the least.

For being a dead man, Frank Castle was most certainly alive. It was not without work, that they found him again. Micro lived up to his analyst name- he was good, scary good.

Seeing the man in the flesh made Wren feel something she couldn't describe. To be mortal, made of flesh, didn't live up to the name that had graced the front pages of every newspaper for months. He should have been a God, a cruel, fickle one that both loathed and loved the humans that graced the earth- not a man built up of breakable bones, with hair that grew too long when neglected, and clothes that were holed and ageing.

And despite the worn look, when they'd finally identified him and tracked him to person, there was no denying that there was something... different about him. The very way he held himself begged for her to look. Perhaps that was only her inner brutality, waiting to be matched, but look she did.

Wren followed him through the streets of New York, losing him and finding him again minutes later with the help of Liam, tracking through the cameras as they'd practised too many times. Through the invisible earpiece, she could hear him bickering with Micro...

"You really got to stop doing that, man," she could hear Liam say, and anticipated the shaking of his head. "It's creepy."

"They're my family."

They were talking about the cameras he had set up to show his family's home, no doubt. Now that they knew, he took no measures to hide them anymore.

"You've been dead for a year," Liam said, a shiver somehow evident in his voice. "It's like you're haunting them."

Wren had to stifle her laugh, that time, ignoring them so she wouldn't give herself away. The knowledge that it was the Punisher who she was tracking, was exhilarating. She wouldn't fail over a joke from her brother.

It was as the conversation in her ear died down, that Frank suddenly slipped to his right. For a second, her breath was held, fear gripping her whole body. Had he noticed her? She forced her feet to move one after the other, keeping a normal rhythm. But then she spotted him again, sitting huddled by the side of a building, head and shoulders covered by a scarf she had not seen him hold.

Wren tucked herself into the side of the building adjacent as a woman stopped beside him, seeming to think him homeless as she handed him some cash.

"You need to get closer. We can't hear what they're saying on our end."

"I'm not getting closer," Wren hissed. "I can't hear anything either. I'll be gutted and hung from a flagpole if he realises I was following."

In the earpiece, Liam let out a groan. Wren was left to watch them from afar. The woman crossed her arms, looking down at him, lips parted and eyebrows drawn together.

"That is one beautiful woman," Wren blew the words out from between her teeth, watching as the blonde stepped closer to him, voice lowered. "A beautiful woman with bad taste in men."

"Hey, I think I recognise her," Liam chirped up.

"You do?"

"She was his lawyer."

They began to move away. No one would have noticed. Not unless they were watching. And Wren was watching every movement. Frank was becoming even more aware of his surroundings now, head checking around before he stood, following at a vast distance.

Wren shook her head. "I'm not going any further. It's Frank Castle we're talking about. There's no way he won't see me."

Wren turned away, but not without one last glance in his direction. Somehow, in the little time she'd known he was alive, she'd grown to feel as if she knew him. She only feared that soon enough, he would know them too.






𝙍𝙀𝙄𝙂𝙉 𝙊𝙁 𝘽𝙇𝙊𝙊𝘿

𝙍𝙀𝙄𝙂𝙉 𝙊𝙁 𝘽𝙇𝙊𝙊𝘿

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