She knows it was the right decision pretty early into their conversation. Without a third party present it’s easier to exchange and discuss everything, to compare his father to her mother, to know without fully saying it just how lonely each of them has been in the world.
When it’s time to confess to things that happened after the two of them met, they go from one event to another related event, then back to what happened in between them. They hash out Elektra as thoroughly as they can bear the moment her name first comes up. Matt gives a weird sort of slow motion flinch when he confesses to kissing her beneath Midland Circle, which Karen honestly doesn’t care about, given the circumstances there.
It’s what he did with Elektra the first time around that she’s going to need more time to forgive fully. He’s quick to explain she was in his bed because she was injured, but Karen by then has figured that out already; once she knew they’d been fighting ninjas, that became the obvious explanation. The worst moment for Karen is hearing he was planning to leave town with her. That was when she herself wanted nothing more to do with him, of course, but it crystalizes everything he did and felt in relation to his old flame from the start, and how the importance of her and Foggy to him just fell by the wayside.
She tells him how much it hurts, how hollow and rejected and made a fool of and alone he made her feel, and how his not cheating on her sexually doesn’t really change that much. When he opens his mouth to respond, she says, “No, don’t apologize. I know you’re sorry, at least now. I don’t need to hear that again. I just need to you know.” He takes every word of anger and pain from her after that with his head bent, and without protest.
Her various adventures with Frank get more split up, but that’s not an easy subject either. She now knows he knew when she told him a few lies about that, but she doesn’t think he was really prepared to hear about how deep she got in with him. It’s maybe not completely unlike his running around with Elektra, although there’s one major difference, which she ends up throwing in right after her account of what happened in the hotel: “I’m not in love with him, just so you know.”
“Didn’t think you were,” he says, and it sounds sincere. “I would only expect you to always care about him, of course; that’s just who you are, but he…he’s not about that for you, is he?”
“No,” she says. “It’s…maybe it’s worse. I identify with him.” It’s the first time she’s ever said it that baldly out loud.
“That’s understandable,” Matt says. “But you’re not him. And you never will be.” And they pretty much end up leaving it there.
Occasionally she asks a question about his senses, trying to keep things from getting too heavy. That doesn’t always even work, since it makes her aware of just how *much* he experiences as things to endure, from rough clothes to all the construction work in Hell’s Kitchen to everything in anything he happens to be drinking. But some of it’s fascinating; his description of rainstorms comes off as downright poetic.
It’s late in the evening when she tells him about hearing about him from Neda Kazemi, which is when she learns that that was actually an attempt to get himself killed. “Or at least that was what it turned into, and I’m not really sure what I had in mind when I left the church, but…”
Karen can’t even respond to that at first. Just the thought, that the incident that left her with real hope might have in fact been the end, and she never would have known. Matt would have destroyed himself when he was at his lowest, would have never come out of the dark, she and Foggy and the city would’ve all been left to their fates, and she would have never seen his face again.
“It’s all right now,” Matt says hastily, having presumably heard her breath stop and her heart start hammering. “I’m better now. Right now, I can’t see myself ever doing that again.”
“Neither can I,” Karen says, before she remembers she’s never told anyone about that, and she was never intending to. It wasn’t something either Matt or Foggy needed to know, not really.
But now that Matt’s heard that, and also heard how her system reacted when she realized what she’d just said, she might as well just surge forward with it. “When I finally got to college…well, the semester itself was okay, because just about every minute I was either in class, doing homework, or out working.” She’s told him a bit about this already, enough for him to get a good impression of what life was like for her then. Mostly.
“But then the semester ended, and I quite literally had nowhere to go. We weren’t allowed to stay in the dorms between semesters, and then my dad actually cashed one of the checks I’d sent him, when my ability to afford any place at all had depended on him rejecting it. Then a job fell through, and I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to feed myself. And the night after I did my last exam, I went for a walk, didn’t even go too far from the building, and there was this kid right there. One look at him and I knew he was selling; I always know when they’re selling, even now. It was like he’d deliberately come for me.
I woke up the next morning feeling like complete and utter shit, and not knowing how long I could stop myself from going out there to find another fix. And in my head all I could hear was my father, telling me what a failure I was, how I definitely couldn’t try to go home to him now, I’d just get him killed too, and also there was my brother, crying that he’d died for nothing, and I should’ve been the one to die that night, and all I wanted was for them to just shut up, because I couldn’t stand it, and I could only think of two ways I could get them to, and no reason why I shouldn’t…I thought at the time my roommate had left already, and I was lucky she came back before going with her parents to lunch, otherwise no one would have found me in time.”
Matt gets up from where he’s been seated in one of the chairs with a, “I really want to hug you right now.”
“That makes two of us.” Karen stands up herself, and a moment later they’re held tight in each other’s arms. Karen presses her head shamelessly into his neck, and he actually takes a hand and guides it, until his pulse is beating against her cheek. It’s pounding fast and hard, and his breathing is ragged in his distress. The heat coming off his body feels striking, as does the power in his arms as they squeeze her.
Karen’s rarely been like this with another person, with this kind of awareness of them, of them being alive against her. Not even during sex, when she’s usually been focused on more specific things. Maybe she came close with Matt that one time in the office, that night after she’d killed Westley, and he’d had that really shitty night, and now, of course, she knows the details about that. But even then, he wasn’t quite this undone.
She remembers holding her hand against his heart as well. He’s said he genuinely believed what he claimed at the time, and she believes him there. But that moment never felt as true as this one does.
“I never relapsed again after that,” she says into his skin, and is glad to add, “I think that was at least partly because I was scared that if I did, I’d try again, and I might actually succeed.” Her voice is shaking.
“And you would have died then.” His voice too. “There are so many things you would never have done.”
It’s a thought that’s haunted Karen herself a time or two, maybe. More since she got tangled up with her pair of lawyers, and then had her career as a journalist-although she doesn’t regret leaving that behind now, not when she still can’t think about it without seeing all her colleagues dead because of her. When she’s had reasons to live other than just to exist.
She suspects, however, that Matt is more upset about the whole thing right now than she’s ever gotten around to being. That still feels a little crazy to her, that someone should care about her that much after all these years. She’s known Matt does, even if it sometimes hasn’t felt like it, and she’s had Foggy and Frank both take their turns demonstrating to her that they do too. That’s even made her mind boggle before, that she has three people who do. But being brought face to face with it like this makes part of her want to yell in protest, especially when she still can’t help but think that caring about her gets people hurt.
Then again, caring about Matt gets people hurt too, sometimes even by his being an idiot and pushing them away. And Karen knew that wasn’t going to stop her, or at least two other people who were with her on that. So she can’t really say anything to him on the matter.
So she just stays there, silent, until Matt says, “I’m terrified for you now. I don’t really have the right to complain about that, and I’m the one putting myself in a lot more danger on a regular basis, but…”
“And after…” she starts.
His only response to that is a fierce, whispered, “I love you.”
That, Karen knows instantly, is the best way he could have ever said that to her for the first time. When it’s not even exactly a declaration of romantic interest-although between the two of them that remains implied, but rather, a way of saying to her, “I know all the hard parts, the painful parts, even the worst parts of you now, and it doesn’t make me cherish you any less.”
Karen keeps holding on to this man, this man full of goodness, kindness and love, and also rage and violence, he who both practices and breaks the law, who is still struggling to accept himself and let that be enough, who has given her some of the happiest times of her life, and some of the most painful, and says, “I love you, too. Don’t hide from me again.”