Daisy hadn't expected a random afternoon drive to land her in the middle of this.
She tried to remember: who patched Frank Castle up after the shooting? She dug through her memory and came up empty. That detail wasn't in any version of the story she knew.
Before she could think it through any further, Frank's breathing grew fainter. She extended her sense — that subtle vibration awareness — and read his heartbeat directly. She wasn't a doctor, but she didn't need to be. He was counting down.
She looked around. No one was coming. No miracle was coming.
This isn't supposed to be on me, she thought. This is too strange.
She hesitated a few more seconds, watching him fade, then swore under her breath and pressed her hand to his sternum.
A thread of vibration, feather-light, channeled directly into his heart. Just enough to restart it.
"—AAH—"
Frank's body jackknifed upright on pure reflex. His muscles couldn't hold the position. He made it to forty-five degrees, then crashed back down.
Blood welled freely from every wound.
His reflex speed is insane, she thought, slightly appalled. And my technique clearly needs work.
He was unconscious again before she could speak to him. She sat back, staring at the ceiling.
Calling an ambulance wasn't an option. Whoever had done this to Frank had serious reach. She'd send him to the hospital and he'd either disappear or take her down with him when someone came asking questions.
She'd have to do it herself.
Her past life as a writer had given her theoretical medical knowledge — picked up from fiction, but not nothing. The original Daisy had scrapped with classmates enough to have basic first-aid experience. Together: theory plus practice, imperfect but workable.
She checked the ground. A faint blood trail led from somewhere inside the park all the way to her car, like a neon sign pointing at the vehicle.
Daisy drove out of Central Park fast, turned into a narrow side alley, and stopped. She ran into a nearby pharmacy for gauze, rubbing alcohol, and suture thread, then pulled up a basic field-surgery guide on her phone and got to work.
Alcohol swab. Use vibration to work the bullets out — no groping around with instruments. Suture. She moved faster than most seasoned surgeons, but the technique was rough. By the time she finished, Frank looked like a badly wrapped mummy.
She slapped him awake. Open-palm, five or six times, until he dragged himself back to consciousness.
He looked up at her. Blank. Didn't recognize her.
"I was passing by," she said. "You looked like you were having a rough day. I can't bring you home — you'd scare my roommate to death. Is there somewhere I can drop you?"
Frank stared at her. His eyes were empty. Not the emptiness of someone who couldn't understand — the emptiness of someone who had stopped caring whether they lived or died.
She waited several seconds. He didn't answer.
She found an unoccupied house nearby — it looked like nobody had lived there in months, maybe longer — and vibrated the lock open. She half-carried, half-dragged the future Punisher inside. He didn't fight her. He didn't say a word.
The place was old and dusty. She lowered him onto the bed.
"I don't know you," she said, moving toward the door. "Getting you this far is more than I owed you. You're on your own from here."
Her left foot crossed the threshold.
She stopped.
She went back and checked his wallet.
Empty. Not a single dollar. He'd apparently spent years in the military operating entirely without cash. Even soldiers needed something to live on.
"...I'm not exactly rich either," she muttered. "But here's two hundred. Don't give me grief about it."
She counted out two hundred from her shrinking savings and stuffed it into his wallet, then left.
The dust on every surface suggested the original occupant wasn't coming back anytime soon. Frank would recover without outside help. She'd read enough about him to know that. He was a genuine war machine — the kind of soldier who healed from things that would keep a normal person bedridden for months. He didn't need a caretaker.
She drove home, opened her laptop, and searched.
The internet had almost nothing. One brief report: an exchange of gunfire in Central Park, some witnesses reporting bodies being removed, identities and casualty counts unknown.
She thought about the Punisher's family — what they'd been through, what was still coming — and felt a pang of something quiet and heavy.
She practiced her ability for a while, then lay down on her bed, fingers resting on her wallet: five hundred dollars left. Five hundred dollars.
She drifted in and out, half-thinking about how other transmigrators in the novels always seemed to conjure their first big score from nothing, half-convinced she was forgetting something. Sleep pulled her under before she worked it out.
The next morning, Daisy brushed her teeth, splashed her face, grabbed a bread roll, and sat at the table poking at the air with a fork.
She genuinely could not think of a business.
Software was a possibility in theory — she had some ideas from the future that could make real money — but all of them required resources. Even just human resources. She wasn't spending six months locked in a room writing code. That wasn't the life she was building here.
Beyond that, nothing.
She couldn't recreate Harry Potter. Well — technically that series didn't exist in this world, but even if she transcribed it from memory, there was no guarantee it would land. And she couldn't remember it well enough to try.
Draw comics about Superman and Wonder Woman from next door? She couldn't draw.
She pushed back from the table, walked outside, and opened the car door.
The smell hit her like a wall.
Oh. Right.
She'd completely forgotten. The back seat was still a mess from yesterday. She'd meant to clean it last night.
It had been sitting overnight.
She needed to return this car. She could not return it like this.
One car, full of blood. How would she even explain that?
She stood on the sidewalk thinking. Regular car washes were out of the question — too many questions. She'd have to go somewhere that didn't ask questions. Somewhere with mob backing, where a bloodstained back seat was just another Tuesday.
She searched her memory.
There was a place called Veles Taxi. Russian mob territory — they handled paint jobs, custom modifications, and yes, car washing, among other things. The kind of establishment that had seen everything and remembered nothing.
She pulled a mask up over her face. The chance of things getting violent was roughly eighty percent. She was fine with that, honestly. She was almost a little excited.
The only problem was weapons. She had the original Daisy's personal defense taser, and that was it. She wasn't going to buy a gun just to get a car washed. That was insane.
She'd improvise.
She wound through the back streets of Hell's Kitchen and pulled into the underground parking garage that served as the Russian mob's base of operations.
It was daytime; turnout was light.
Two men stood in the center of the space, talking. One of them Daisy recognized immediately: James Wesley, Kingpin's fixer, the same man who'd come to her school. He was in another perfectly fitted suit, glasses on, looking entirely composed — a striking contrast to the wall of muscle spread around him.
Across from Wesley stood a thin man. The two of them were arguing in low voices.
The sound of her engine made both men turn.
The thin man gestured to one of his people. Go check.
A large man walked up to her window and said, with zero finesse: "What do you want?"
Daisy winced internally. The timing was terrible. But she'd come this far. She pitched her voice low, added some gravel to it: "Car wash."