I Write Stuff!

Hello! I'm a (fanfiction) blog. I write for Marvel mostly! I hope I know what I'm doing. 💗💜💙 18+ minors dni. Click Here for my Masterlist

[aquaticmercy]

Aquaticmercy's Request Guidelines

Hey all! Before you send a request my way, I’d appreciate it if you took a moment to read through this.

Characters I will write for include :

Bucky Barnes (the most popular character I write for)

Benjamin Poindexter

John Walker

Bob Reynolds

Yelena Belova

Sam Wilson

Carol Danvers

Agatha Harkness

Natasha Romanoff

Joaquin Torres

If the Marvel character you’re thinking about isn’t on this list, shoot me a message, and I’ll let you know if I’m open to it!

Pairings :

I write in x reader stories in 2nd person POV.

I do not write for ships unless the reader is part of the dynamic.

I will write throuple/poly relationships if the reader is involved (Sambucky x Reader, WinterAgent x Reader, SentryAgents x Reader, GhostWidow x Reader, etc. If you're unsure, just ask.)

All my readers are fem!readers, just because that’s what I know best. There are plenty of other very talented writers who write for male!reader or gn!reader, so show them some love!

I do not write parent!character x child!reader dynamic as the main plot. I write romantic or platonic dynamics.

NSFW content :

I love writing intimacy, but I do not do graphic smut.

I’m very comfortable writing sensual, emotional, and R-rated or suggestive stories. I like focusing on tension, steamy scenes and emotional connection rather than graphic details. (references for these type of stories: Siren and Unholy Trinity)

I won't write :

Incest

Anything that romanticises substance abuse (that’s a very personal boundary for me as someone who struggles with that myself).

Non-con (but I’ll write power dynamics and dub-con to a limited extent)

How to Request :

You’re more than welcome to send in requests through my Tumblr asks. Just know that while I read every message, I can't guarantee that every request will be written. I get a lot of asks, and I choose what to write based on what clicks with me creatively.

If you’d like a guarantee of having your request written...

I’m starting to be active on Ko-fi again, so any requests made through my Ko-fi will be prioritised and written within a month as long as they follow these guidelines as my way of saying thank you for the support and helping me keep this hobby sustainable.

buy me a ko-fi here!

At the end of the day, this is something I do for love, not profit. It’s free labour, and I’m writing because it brings me joy, and this community keeps that joy alive.

I may not always be able to respond to every comment or ask, but I love y'all, and I’m grateful for this fandom ❤️

Happy requesting!

[aquaticmercy]

i need what makes a good man!reader and dex to have a pregnancy scare!!! well it would be a scare for reader because reader would be like no! nows not the time and ben would be like 😍😏

but dex secretly just wants to experience you pregnant and holding his teeny tiny baby 🥲

You and Dex Have a Pregnancy Scare

TW false positives, birth control mention, Dex is in a perpetual state of baby fever with you, domestic fluff, a bit of hurt/comfort. You and Dex have a son called Leo, Husband! Dex x Wife! Reader (lmk if you I missed anything)

WC 1.2k

Part of What Makes a Good Man? (I think it could still be read as a one shot, but a couple of references would be missed)

The pregnancy test was positive.

It was faintly positive, barely positive. And you didn’t trust it because the line looked like it had been drawn by a ghost with an emptying dry-erase marker. But it was there. 

It was there, and it was the last test in the house, and the pharmacies were closed because it was late the universe had chosen today, a specifically long day, to become theatrical.

So for one full day, you had to live with the possibility that you might have a baby in you. Again.

It was one full day of walking around your own house like your body had become a sealed envelope. One full day of trying not to touch your stomach. One full day of mentally rearranging your entire life around the possibility.

Leo was still little. You were still tired. Dex had literally just come back six months ago. You had only just started feeling like a whole person. 

You loved your life, as complicated as it may be. You loved your husband and son more than oxygen. 

But another baby?

Now?

Your brain kept tripping over the word. 

Baby. Baby. Baby. 

Tiny socks. Sleepless nights. Appointments. 

Your body changing again. 

Leo’s cute little face looking at a newborn in your arms. Dex’s hands on your stomach. Dex, being handed the knowledge that you were carrying his baby again, and this time. He would be here to witness the process.

Oh, fuck.

Dex was the actual problem.

He was trying to be normal about it, and failing. Because when was he ever good at concealing his emotions, huh?

You told him twenty minutes ago, and told him it was nothing until you could take another test, but he kept looking at you like you were glowing. His eyes kept finding your stomach. His hand kept hovering by your back.

He kept doing tiny things, maddening things. He was bringing you water before you asked, taking the laundry basket out of your hands, watching you walk up the stairs of the building like you were already wobbly.

“Dex,” you said once, flatly.

He looked up too fast. “What?”

“Stop looking so happy.”

His mouth curled up into a smile.

You nearly threw a cushion at his head.

You were properly spiralling. You even stood in the kitchen staring at a mug for two full minutes because you couldn’t remember whether you wanted tea or whether caffeine was suddenly a horrible idea. You opened your calendar to put down one of Leo’s school events and immediately closed it again because you were reminded that your period was late. You looked at Leo eating cereal for dinner with his little spoon and almost cried because he was your baby, your baby, and how were you supposed to have another one when you still sometimes looked at him and felt like he was born yesterday. 

And then, of course, Leo overheard Dex comforting you. Dex tried, but he didn’t really help. He clearly wanted another one. 

“Mommy has baby?”

Apparently, he couldn’t hear you when you asked them to put their shoes on, but they could apparently detect a private conversation through the wall. 

You turned so fast your neck hurt. Dex froze beside you, one hand still on the counter, his face stupid and hopeful that made you want to kiss him and kill him in equal measure.

Leo stood in the doorway with a toy car in one hand, looking between you and Dex. He didn’t even know where babies came from! How did he even get the gist of the conversation? 

You crouched immediately. “We don’t know yet, baby.”

Leo frowned, unconvinced by his father’s unearned excitement. 

Because Dex, behind you, looked like he was fucking vibrating.

You could feel the horrible little smile he was trying to swallow. The emotional equivalent of hehehehehehehe. 

He wasn’t laughing at you. He would never. But he was delighted and already picturing Leo as a big brother, already picturing a tiny baby in the crook of his arm, already picturing you pregnant and tired and letting him fuss over you like a full-time occupation.

Leo frowned. “But maybe?”

“Maybe,” Dex said immediately.

You turned your head slowly. “Dex.”

He straightened, clearly still wanting to please you. “… or maybe not?”

Still, your husband wasn’t pressuring you. He knew you were scared, and because he loved you, your fear mattered more than his wants or needs. But you could see the want anyway. You could see how badly he wanted to be allowed to be happy.

And for one full day, he was.

For one day, Dex lived like there might be another little life coming. 

When the pharmacies finally opened, you bought three tests. Dex came with you, hovering at your side like a bodyguard to your uterus, carrying Leo on his hip while pretending he was not staring at the boxes like they contained his future.

Then you got home.

Then you took them.

Negative.

Negative.

Negative. 

Oh. 

Your knees nearly went soft with relief. You laughed once, then covered your mouth, then laughed again because the sound had nowhere else to go. 

You were not pregnant. Your life was not changing today.

And then you looked at Dex.

Oh, fuck. 

Outwardly, he was smiling because you were relieved, because that was the correct thing to do, because Dex would set himself on fire before making you feel bad for feeling happy. But underneath it, you saw his heart drop. The future he had let himself hold for one day just slipped through his fingers, and he tried to pretend it didn’t hurt when it hit the floor.

Oh, Benjamin. 

“Dex.”

“I’m good.”

“Don’t do that.”

He looked away, and that was worse. “It’s good. You’re relieved.”

“I am.”

“Then it’s good.”

“Dex.”

His teeth tightened. Dex was clearly trying to make himself smaller than his disappointment. Dex was trying to be good for you by wanting less.

So you pulled him in.

He came apart so quietly it almost killed you. He pressed his forehead to your stomach, and his arms wrapped around knowing your womb was empty after spending the entire night fantasising about watching you grow.

“It’s not never,” you whispered. “It’s just not now.”

He breathed out, and it came out long and shaky.

Then Leo appeared, because apparently this family had no concept of emotional privacy.

He looked at you. Then Dex. 

“No baby?” He asked, as if he knew it was the answer all along.

You swallowed a laugh and a sob at the same time. “No baby, sweetheart.”

Leo’s little face twisted, confused and offended, like everyone had missed something extremely obvious.

“It’s okay, daddy,” Leo insisted, “I’m baby.”

Dex let out a sound so pathetic and wounded that you had to press your lips together to keep from falling apart. Leo toddled over with great seriousness patting his face because he knew Dex was the one who needed comforting.

Dex wrapped one arm around him and kept the other around you. “Yeah buddy,” he murmured, “You are.”

And you stood there with your terrifying man clinging to you and your son defending his title.

That was how you knew, with awful certainty, that when the time came, Dex would knock you up again in a heartbeat.

All you had to do was ask. 

—

Note : I’m going through all your kind comments and asks!! I feel so loved, thank you for all the support for this series 🫶

[aquaticmercy]

Starfallen

Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.

Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU

Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)

Word count : 7.7k

Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!

You were raised Imperial.

Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.

For a long time, you believed them too.

As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.

You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.

And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you. 

Frankly, you feel… gaslit. 

By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.

So you ran.

You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force. 

The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.

Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust. 

But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived. 

No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.

It was a simple life.

Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.

Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.

No one knew. No one cared.

Oh. 

For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone. 

You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone. 

Then something bright streaked across the stars.

A shooting star.

You almost laughed.

Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.

Your breath hitched.

That was not a star. That was a ship.

It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.

Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.

A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.

By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.

It was Imperial. No doubt about it.

Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design. 

You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”

The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.

You were.

To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.

So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.

The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.

Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely. 

No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors. 

Good.

You got to work.

The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.

Then you reached the cargo manifest.

You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact. 

Still, you scrolled through the manifest:

Medical equipment.

Restricted military hardware.

Carbonite containment.

High-value asset. 

You went still. High value asset???

“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”

You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.

The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.

At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.

You expected maybe weapons or credits.

Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.

For a long moment, you only stared at him.

He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.

Not treasure.

Your stomach sank.

“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”

Because this wasn’t what you wanted.

You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.

You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.

You knew you should have left him.

The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.

Or he could be someone the Empire had used.

Oh, stars. 

You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die. 

So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?

You swore under your breath.

“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”

Getting him home was miserable.

The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.

By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.

You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.

For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.

He said nothing. Obviously.

You pointed at him anyway.

“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”

You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.

The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.

By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.

Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.

The lights flickered when the machine powered on.

You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.

A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.

But you were neither. 

So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.

The machine groaned.

Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…

Oh. His left arm was metal.

It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.

You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.

Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy. 

“What the fuck?” you whispered.

The carbonite released with a violent crack.

The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.

Damn.

He was heavy.

That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?

Just…

Damn.

The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.

He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering  like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”

He didn’t answer.

After that, he was feverish for days.

Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.

To be fair, things made him panic at first.

He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.

He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.

So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.

You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.

He still didn’t speak, though.

You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”

His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.

Nothing.

You waited.

Still nothing.

So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”

That became his name in your head after that.

Scary Carbonite Man.

Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.

And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut. 

You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.

Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.

But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.

You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.

You stared at him. He stared back.

The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.

You cleared your throat.

“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”

His mouth barely lifted, a little. 

It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.

It was worse how quickly you got used to him.

Especially because you should’ve known better.

You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.

But your hut had been so quiet before him.

You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.

Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.

You were no longer lonely. 

You liked telling him things.

He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.

You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.

But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated. 

And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.

You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.

You told yourself a lot of things.

Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”

Silence.

You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.

When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.

“Bucky.”

You went still.

He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”

For a second, you couldn’t speak.

Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.

“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”

After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.

Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.

A name, sometimes.

Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.

He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.

Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.

You learned not to ask too much.

Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.

So you stopped making memory feel like a test.

You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.

Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.

You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.

So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.  

And Bucky listened.

He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle. 

He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.

And oh, it was humiliating.

Even then, the nightmares still came.

Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.

Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.

“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”

But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.

You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.

You opened your eyes.

For a second, you just stared at the wall.

You were so tired.

So, so tired.

Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”

And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.

You got out of bed.

You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.

His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.

You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.

Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.

He froze.

You gave the smallest tug.

“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”

He stared up at you, still breathing hard.

So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”

And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.

He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.

Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine. 

You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.

“Here.”

He hesitated.

You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”

That was all, just his name.

He came to you.

Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.

Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.

You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.

You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.

Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.

“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”

Bucky didn’t move at first.

For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.

So you didn’t push.

You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.

You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.

Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.

His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.

You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.

The nightmare didn't come back.

Neither of you said anything else.

You just slept.

And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.

In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.

Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.

Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.

You blinked. He blinked.

Neither of you spoke for a while.

Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”

For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.

Oh, that was dangerous.

Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.

Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.

That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.

You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.

“Alone?”

He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.

He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”

You stared at him. He stared back.

You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”

Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”

He did.

He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.

He knew your life now.

Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”

His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”

“Things?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.

Bucky looked away.

Oh, that was definitely suspicious.

You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”

His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”

You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened. 

Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.

Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”

You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”

“I know.”

“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”

Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”

You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”

He did.

The hut felt too quiet the second he left.

You tried to ignore it.

You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.

You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.

You froze.

That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky. 

Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.

Then, white armour filled the room.

Stormtroopers.

For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t  make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.

Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.

Then one of them raised a blaster.

The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.

You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.

A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.

Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.

You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.

So they did.

A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.

Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.

The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.

A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.

Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.

That brought the room back into focus.

A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You blinked through the pain. “What?”

The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”

Asset.

What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?

Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly. 

Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You laughed.

It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”

He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.

A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it. 

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”

You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”

The blaster pressed harder on your skin.

You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die. 

You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.

Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.

Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.

The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”

You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.

Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.

But you had been raised by Imperials.

You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.

And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again.  So you bared your bloody teeth.

“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”

The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.

That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!

Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.

The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.

For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears

Then the body dropped hard.

You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.

Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.

At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.

A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.

You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.

It was Bucky, you realised. 

Oh.

Bucky.

He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.

He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart. 

And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.

He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.

Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.

You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.

Bucky ducked under the shot.

Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.

He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.

It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.

This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.

This was the weapon they had come for.

This was the Winter Soldier.

And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.

A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.

Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.

Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.

Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.

He backed away from you now.

Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.

Bucky turned his head.

The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.

You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.

Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.

Then, there was only blissful silence. 

Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.

And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.

For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.

You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.

Bucky turned so fast it scared you.

The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.

What was left was your Bucky.

He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.

He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”

His voice barely worked.

He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.

“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”

You tried.

Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.

His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.

His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.

“No,” he breathed.

It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.

“No.”

You wanted to make him stop looking like that.

You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.

But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.

Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.

“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”

His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped.

You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.

Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.

You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.

Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.

His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.

His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

You blinked slowly.

Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

That was all he could manage.

Not I’m sorry I killed them.

No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you. 

He was just sorry that you saw.

Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.

It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.

His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.

Oh, Bucky.

Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.

You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.

Bucky caught your wrist gently. 

He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.

You made a small sound of frustration.

His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”

You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.

So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled

You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough. 

His breath hitched

“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it.  “You don’t—”

You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.

Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.

Bucky went utterly still.

For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.

Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.

His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.

When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.

His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.

Bucky’s breath shuddered.

“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.

That was more than enough.

Your fingers loosened in his shirt.

For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.

Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something. 

His face changed.

You frowned weakly. “What?”

Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.

His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.

For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.

It wasn’t.

A necklace slipped from his fingers.

It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven. 

It was… lovely.

So lovely your breath hitched.

Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.

“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.

You blinked at him, throat closing.

He stared at the necklace, not at you.

“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”

You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.

“You remembered?”

Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.

“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”

You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date. 

Your birthday.

Your stupid, lonely birthday.

You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.

But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.

Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.

It didn’t matter.

He had remembered.

Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.

Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.

A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”

You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.

“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”

“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.

His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.

“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said. 

“Bucky….”

“I saved credits from repairs.”

“I know, Buck.”

His eyes flicked to yours.

“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.

His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.

“I wanted you to have something from me.”

Your lips parted.

Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.

His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”

Oh.

Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved. 

You only wanted him. 

Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.

The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.

You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.

Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.

The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.

Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.

Then he pulled away like he had no right.

You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”

He looked at you.

You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.

He had saved you.

Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t  get to own every part of him.

That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.

But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.

So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”

He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.

“Always,” he said.

Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters. 

But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.

And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.

—end.

[aquaticmercy]

Reblog for General Bucky taglist pt 1:

@hotlinepanda @snflwr-vol6 @ruexj283 @2honeybees @read-just-cant

 @shanksstrawhat @mystictf @globetrotter28 @thebuckybarnesvault @average-vibe

@winchestert101 @mystictf @globetrotter28 @boy--wonder--187 @scariusaquarius

@reckless007 @hextech-bros @daydreamgoddess14 @96jnie @pono-pura-vida

@buckyslove1917 @notsostrangerthing @flow33didontsmoke @qvynrand @blackbirdwitch22

@torntaltos @seventeen-x @ren-ni @iilsenewman @slayerofthevampire

@hiphip-horray @jbbucketlist @melotyy @ethereal-witch24 @samfunko

@lilteef @hi172826 @pklol @average-vibe @shanksstrawhat

@shower-me-with-roses @athenabarnes @scarwidow @thriving-n-jiving @dilfsaresohot

@helloxgoodbi @undf-stuff @sapphirebarnes @hzdhrtss @softhornymess

@samfunko @wh1sp @anonymousreader4d7 @mathcat345 @escapefromrealitylol

[aquaticmercy]

Reblog for General Bucky taglist pt 2:

@cjand10 @nerdreader @am-3-thyst @wingstoyourdreams @lori19

@goldengubs @maryevm @helen-2003 @maryssong23 @fan4astic

@yesshewrites1 @thewiselionessss @sangsterizada @jaderabbitt @softpia 

@hopeofwinter @nevereclipse @tellybearryyyy @buckybarneswife125

@imaginecrushes @phoenixes-and-wizards @rowanthomasknapp @daystarpoet @thefandomplace

@biaswreckedbybuckybarnes @herejustforbuckybarnes @kitasownworld @shortandb1tchy @roxyym

@badl4nder @natalia42069 @silverdoragon @juliet-is-the-sun12 @nightlight486

@buckmybarnes @folkloreofyennefer @buckmjz @lonelyghosts-stuff @wildcherryspark

@ozwriterchick @imjusthere1161 @sleepysongbirdsings @fuckybarnes @rlphunter

@yn-stories-are-my-life @ahrahrahraha @erina00 @maybeafaerie

[aquaticmercy]

Starfallen

Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.

Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU

Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)

Word count : 7.7k

Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!

You were raised Imperial.

Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.

For a long time, you believed them too.

As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.

You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.

And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you. 

Frankly, you feel… gaslit. 

By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.

So you ran.

You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force. 

The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.

Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust. 

But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived. 

No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.

It was a simple life.

Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.

Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.

No one knew. No one cared.

Oh. 

For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone. 

You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone. 

Then something bright streaked across the stars.

A shooting star.

You almost laughed.

Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.

Your breath hitched.

That was not a star. That was a ship.

It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.

Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.

A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.

By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.

It was Imperial. No doubt about it.

Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design. 

You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”

The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.

You were.

To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.

So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.

The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.

Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely. 

No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors. 

Good.

You got to work.

The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.

Then you reached the cargo manifest.

You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact. 

Still, you scrolled through the manifest:

Medical equipment.

Restricted military hardware.

Carbonite containment.

High-value asset. 

You went still. High value asset???

“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”

You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.

The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.

At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.

You expected maybe weapons or credits.

Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.

For a long moment, you only stared at him.

He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.

Not treasure.

Your stomach sank.

“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”

Because this wasn’t what you wanted.

You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.

You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.

You knew you should have left him.

The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.

Or he could be someone the Empire had used.

Oh, stars. 

You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die. 

So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?

You swore under your breath.

“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”

Getting him home was miserable.

The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.

By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.

You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.

For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.

He said nothing. Obviously.

You pointed at him anyway.

“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”

You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.

The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.

By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.

Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.

The lights flickered when the machine powered on.

You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.

A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.

But you were neither. 

So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.

The machine groaned.

Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…

Oh. His left arm was metal.

It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.

You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.

Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy. 

“What the fuck?” you whispered.

The carbonite released with a violent crack.

The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.

Damn.

He was heavy.

That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?

Just…

Damn.

The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.

He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering  like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”

He didn’t answer.

After that, he was feverish for days.

Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.

To be fair, things made him panic at first.

He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.

He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.

So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.

You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.

He still didn’t speak, though.

You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”

His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.

Nothing.

You waited.

Still nothing.

So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”

That became his name in your head after that.

Scary Carbonite Man.

Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.

And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut. 

You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.

Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.

But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.

You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.

You stared at him. He stared back.

The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.

You cleared your throat.

“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”

His mouth barely lifted, a little. 

It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.

It was worse how quickly you got used to him.

Especially because you should’ve known better.

You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.

But your hut had been so quiet before him.

You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.

Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.

You were no longer lonely. 

You liked telling him things.

He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.

You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.

But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated. 

And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.

You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.

You told yourself a lot of things.

Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”

Silence.

You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.

When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.

“Bucky.”

You went still.

He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”

For a second, you couldn’t speak.

Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.

“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”

After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.

Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.

A name, sometimes.

Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.

He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.

Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.

You learned not to ask too much.

Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.

So you stopped making memory feel like a test.

You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.

Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.

You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.

So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.  

And Bucky listened.

He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle. 

He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.

And oh, it was humiliating.

Even then, the nightmares still came.

Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.

Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.

“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”

But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.

You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.

You opened your eyes.

For a second, you just stared at the wall.

You were so tired.

So, so tired.

Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”

And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.

You got out of bed.

You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.

His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.

You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.

Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.

He froze.

You gave the smallest tug.

“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”

He stared up at you, still breathing hard.

So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”

And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.

He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.

Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine. 

You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.

“Here.”

He hesitated.

You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”

That was all, just his name.

He came to you.

Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.

Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.

You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.

You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.

Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.

“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”

Bucky didn’t move at first.

For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.

So you didn’t push.

You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.

You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.

Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.

His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.

You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.

The nightmare didn't come back.

Neither of you said anything else.

You just slept.

And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.

In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.

Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.

Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.

You blinked. He blinked.

Neither of you spoke for a while.

Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”

For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.

Oh, that was dangerous.

Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.

Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.

That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.

You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.

“Alone?”

He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.

He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”

You stared at him. He stared back.

You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”

Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”

He did.

He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.

He knew your life now.

Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”

His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”

“Things?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.

Bucky looked away.

Oh, that was definitely suspicious.

You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”

His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”

You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened. 

Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.

Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”

You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”

“I know.”

“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”

Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”

You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”

He did.

The hut felt too quiet the second he left.

You tried to ignore it.

You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.

You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.

You froze.

That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky. 

Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.

Then, white armour filled the room.

Stormtroopers.

For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t  make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.

Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.

Then one of them raised a blaster.

The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.

You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.

A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.

Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.

You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.

So they did.

A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.

Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.

The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.

A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.

Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.

That brought the room back into focus.

A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You blinked through the pain. “What?”

The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”

Asset.

What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?

Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly. 

Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You laughed.

It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”

He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.

A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it. 

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”

You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”

The blaster pressed harder on your skin.

You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die. 

You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.

Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.

Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.

The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”

You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.

Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.

But you had been raised by Imperials.

You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.

And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again.  So you bared your bloody teeth.

“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”

The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.

That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!

Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.

The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.

For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears

Then the body dropped hard.

You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.

Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.

At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.

A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.

You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.

It was Bucky, you realised. 

Oh.

Bucky.

He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.

He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart. 

And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.

He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.

Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.

You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.

Bucky ducked under the shot.

Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.

He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.

It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.

This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.

This was the weapon they had come for.

This was the Winter Soldier.

And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.

A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.

Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.

Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.

Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.

He backed away from you now.

Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.

Bucky turned his head.

The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.

You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.

Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.

Then, there was only blissful silence. 

Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.

And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.

For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.

You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.

Bucky turned so fast it scared you.

The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.

What was left was your Bucky.

He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.

He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”

His voice barely worked.

He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.

“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”

You tried.

Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.

His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.

His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.

“No,” he breathed.

It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.

“No.”

You wanted to make him stop looking like that.

You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.

But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.

Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.

“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”

His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped.

You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.

Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.

You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.

Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.

His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.

His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

You blinked slowly.

Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

That was all he could manage.

Not I’m sorry I killed them.

No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you. 

He was just sorry that you saw.

Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.

It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.

His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.

Oh, Bucky.

Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.

You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.

Bucky caught your wrist gently. 

He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.

You made a small sound of frustration.

His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”

You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.

So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled

You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough. 

His breath hitched

“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it.  “You don’t—”

You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.

Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.

Bucky went utterly still.

For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.

Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.

His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.

When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.

His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.

Bucky’s breath shuddered.

“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.

That was more than enough.

Your fingers loosened in his shirt.

For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.

Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something. 

His face changed.

You frowned weakly. “What?”

Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.

His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.

For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.

It wasn’t.

A necklace slipped from his fingers.

It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven. 

It was… lovely.

So lovely your breath hitched.

Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.

“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.

You blinked at him, throat closing.

He stared at the necklace, not at you.

“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”

You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.

“You remembered?”

Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.

“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”

You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date. 

Your birthday.

Your stupid, lonely birthday.

You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.

But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.

Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.

It didn’t matter.

He had remembered.

Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.

Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.

A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”

You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.

“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”

“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.

His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.

“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said. 

“Bucky….”

“I saved credits from repairs.”

“I know, Buck.”

His eyes flicked to yours.

“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.

His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.

“I wanted you to have something from me.”

Your lips parted.

Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.

His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”

Oh.

Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved. 

You only wanted him. 

Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.

The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.

You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.

Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.

The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.

Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.

Then he pulled away like he had no right.

You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”

He looked at you.

You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.

He had saved you.

Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t  get to own every part of him.

That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.

But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.

So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”

He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.

“Always,” he said.

Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters. 

But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.

And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.

—end.

[aquaticmercy]

Reblog for General Bucky taglist pt 1:

@hotlinepanda @snflwr-vol6 @ruexj283 @2honeybees @read-just-cant

 @shanksstrawhat @mystictf @globetrotter28 @thebuckybarnesvault @average-vibe

@winchestert101 @mystictf @globetrotter28 @boy--wonder--187 @scariusaquarius

@reckless007 @hextech-bros @daydreamgoddess14 @96jnie @pono-pura-vida

@buckyslove1917 @notsostrangerthing @flow33didontsmoke @qvynrand @blackbirdwitch22

@torntaltos @seventeen-x @ren-ni @iilsenewman @slayerofthevampire

@hiphip-horray @jbbucketlist @melotyy @ethereal-witch24 @samfunko

@lilteef @hi172826 @pklol @average-vibe @shanksstrawhat

@shower-me-with-roses @athenabarnes @scarwidow @thriving-n-jiving @dilfsaresohot

@helloxgoodbi @undf-stuff @sapphirebarnes @hzdhrtss @softhornymess

@samfunko @wh1sp @anonymousreader4d7 @mathcat345 @escapefromrealitylol

[aquaticmercy]

Starfallen

Summary : You wish on a shooting star, but unfortunately, it’s not a star at all. It’s an Imperial transport crash-landing with Bucky Barnes inside.

Pairing : Imperial Asset! Bucky Barnes x Scavanger! reader (she/her) | Star Wars AU

Warnings/tags : toxic parents, crash site/bodies, amnesia, PTSD, nightmares, forced proximity(?), slow burn, home invasion by stormtroopers, interrogation/torture, blood/injury, protective Bucky, hurt/comfort, (Let me know if I missed anything!)

Word count : 7.7k

Note : It was supposed to be a hear me out but I went overboard. Enjoy!

You were raised Imperial.

Your parents worked for the Empire, and they expected you to do the same when you grow up. They believed in order, in obedience. They believed some worlds needed to be conquered for their own good. They believed the fear of the native population was useful. They believed mercy was weakness and they were owed the power they wielded.

For a long time, you believed them too.

As children usually do. But then, you got older. And you woke up.

You started feeling disgusted by the way your parents spoke about mineral-rich planets like they were economic opportunities instead of homes. You started hating them when they discussed occupation routes during dinner. You eventually realize that your comfortable childhood, your privileged life, had been paid for by people who had never asked to be ruled and used by the empire while your parents and the other senior officers reaped their rewards.

And every time you tried to bring it up, they dismissed you. They told you that you were ungrateful for their hard work. They told you they were protecting you. They told you that you’d never survive out there without the safety that the empire afforded you. 

Frankly, you feel… gaslit. 

By the time you turned eighteen, you knew one thing with absolute certainty: You would rather live a hard life than make someone else’s harder.

So you ran.

You packed what you could carry, emptied the credits you had from the savings account your parents had set for you, and disappeared into the Outer Rim before your parents could drag you back and talk you into joining the imperial work force. 

The life you built there was not easy. But really, nothing in the Outer Rim ever was.

Your hut leaked during acid rain. Your speeder broke down every other cycle. Half your meals came from tins with faded labels, and the other half came from whatever you could barter, fix, steal, or scavenge. Your hands were always bruised. Your boots were always full of dust. 

But it was yours. That mattered because you proved your parents wrong. You survived. 

No one was demanding you to salute. No one barked orders at you. No one asked you to kill a witness. You weren’t contributing to war crimes. You scavenged wrecks, repaired junk, sold parts, kept your head down, and survived.

It was a simple life.

Lonely, sometimes, but simple. You told yourself company was overrated anyway. Most days, you even believed it.

Then one night several years later, on what would have been your birthday back on your home planet, you sat outside your hut with a cup of bitter caf going cold in your hands and realised you had no one to celebrate it with.

No one knew. No one cared.

Oh. 

For the first time since you left, you felt truly alone. 

You cried quietly under the wide black sky, angry at yourself for it, because loneliness felt too much like weakness and you had spent your whole life making sure you didn’t need anyone. 

Then something bright streaked across the stars.

A shooting star.

You almost laughed.

Some stupid, embarrassing part of you closed its eyes and made a wish:

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Then the star broke apart. The light flared and it grew larger.

Your breath hitched.

That was not a star. That was a ship.

It tore through the atmosphere in a burning line of fire, vanishing beyond the ridge with a distant, shaking boom. For a long moment, you just stared.

Then you wiped your tears off with the heel of your hand.

A ship always meant one thing: Payday tomorrow.

By morning’s first light, you were standing by the wreckage of the ship, assessing the damage.

It was Imperial. No doubt about it.

Even half-buried in the sand, you could recognise the grey plating and militarised design. 

You stared at it for a moment, before spitting into the dust. “Figures.”

The crash had carved a long, black mark through the flats. Debris scattered everywhere, glittering in the early sun like treasure if you were desperate enough.

You were.

To be fair, a wreck like this could keep you fed for weeks if you were careful. Power cells. Rations. Med supplies. Navigation parts. Maybe even weapon components, if the fire had been kind.

So you pulled your scarf over your mouth and climbed inside.

The pilot was dead, and so were the others you found.

Stormtroopers, mostly. Bodies broken by impact, armour cracked open against the walls because they’re useless. The empire always gave their grunt workers the weakest, flimsiest armors. You stepped around them without looking too closely. 

No movement, according to your scanner, which likely meant there were no survivors. 

Good.

You got to work.

The first hour was easy. You filled your bag with ration packs, two intact med kits, a coil of wiring, a handful of power cells, and one data cylinder that looked sealed enough to be worth something. You found a half-crushed crate of thermal blankets and marked it for later.

Then you reached the cargo manifest.

You usually uploaded files and sold their intel. Most of the display was damaged, lines of text blinking in and out on the cracked screen, corrupted by impact. 

Still, you scrolled through the manifest:

Medical equipment.

Restricted military hardware.

Carbonite containment.

High-value asset. 

You went still. High value asset???

“Well,” you murmured. “That sounds expensive.”

You followed the remaining power trail deeper into the hold.

The air changed the lower you went. Frost clung to the walls despite the heat outside, and your breath fogged in front of your face. The emergency lights pulsed red along the floor, turning the corridor bloody in flashes.

At the end of it, behind a jammed door you had to cut open with your torch, you found a containment chamber.

You expected maybe weapons or credits.

Instead, you found a man frozen in carbonite.

For a long moment, you only stared at him.

He stood upright in the transport frame, trapped beneath a thick, dull sheen of carbonite. His face was barely visible, but clearly it was tactical clothes under the freeze. Human, as far as you could tell.

Not treasure.

Your stomach sank.

“No,” you whispered, already angry. “No, no, no.”

Because this wasn’t what you wanted.

You wanted parts. You wanted credits. You wanted something you could pull apart, sell, eat from, survive on.

You didn’t want a moral crisis in the shape of a frozen man.

You knew you should have left him.

The Empire did not freeze harmless people and label them high-value assets. He could be dangerous. He could wake up and kill you. He could be someone so terrible that even the Empire had decided to keep him locked away.

Or he could be someone the Empire had used.

Oh, stars. 

You thought of your parents, explaining that occupation was necessary, that rebellion was disorder, that some planets simply needed a firmer hand. You remember them telling you some people deserved to die. 

So if you left him here, trapped in a dead Imperial ship because saving him was inconvenient, you were no better than them, were you?

You swore under your breath.

“Maker,” you muttered. “I hate this.”

Getting him home was miserable.

The carbonite slab was too heavy and your makeshift hover-sled kept dragging to one side. You cursed him the entire way across the flats. You cursed the Empire. You cursed your own conscience most of all.

By the time you reached your hut, your back hurt, your arms shook, and the first sun was already high enough to turn the sand bright and cruel.

You dragged the slab inside and left him propped against the far wall.

For a while, you just stood there, breathing hard.

He said nothing. Obviously.

You pointed at him anyway.

“You’re already a problem.” Then, quietly, because you hated yourself for caring, you said. “Don’t make me regret this.”

You went back for the defrosting equipment after a cup of caf and half an hour of lying on your floor questioning every decision you had ever made.

The chamber was too big to move whole, so you stripped what you could: Heat regulators, pressure valves, control panel, cables, anything that looked remotely necessary and only mildly likely to explode.

By the time you got it all home and wired it into your generator, the night had started to creep over the desert.

Your hut smelled like dust, old metal, and overheating circuits.

The lights flickered when the machine powered on.

You stood in front of the carbonite slab, hand on the defrost switch in the other.

A sensible person would have stopped. A smarter person would have sold his location.

But you were neither. 

So you took one steadying breath and hit the switch.

The machine groaned.

Heat hissed through the slab. Frost melted in streaks. Carbonite softened, shining wet under the light of your hut. The man’s shape became clearer by degrees: his face, his chest, his shoulders…

Oh. His left arm was metal.

It was silver, segmented, and impossibly well-crafted, catching the light in a way that made your scanner chirp sharply from your workbench.

You glanced at the reading, then back at the arm.

Your mouth went dry. Beskar alloy. 

“What the fuck?” you whispered.

The carbonite released with a violent crack.

The man fell forward, and you barely caught him.

Damn.

He was heavy.

That was your first thought when the man came crashing out of the carbonite and nearly took you down with him. Not he’s alive. Not what did the Empire do to him? Not even why in the stars does he have a stupidly expensive arm?

Just…

Damn.

The Empire really had frozen the densest man in the galaxy and made him your problem.

He hit the floor hard, half on top of you, shivering  like his body had forgotten how to be a body. His lungs dragged in air with a terrible, broken sound. His metal hand scraped against the floor. His eyes were open, but cloudy and unfocused, staring through you like he was still trapped. “Hey,” you said, breathless under half his weight. “Hey. Easy. Don’t die on me now. I worked very hard to steal you.”

He didn’t answer.

After that, he was feverish for days.

Carbonite sickness, you guessed. He must’ve been frozen long enough that he could barely see, barely stand, barely make it three steps without his knees giving out. You had to help him drink. Help him sit up. Help him stumble to the fresher with one of your hands braced carefully around his waist and the other hovering near his arm, because you still were not sure whether touching the metal would make him panic.

To be fair, things made him panic at first.

He flinched when the kettle screamed, when the generator kicked on, when your boots scuffed the floor too suddenly, when your hand came too close without warning.

He never attacked you, not really, but sometimes he woke up with a terrified inhale and that beskar hand clenched hard enough to dent the edge of your cot. Sometimes he stared at the wall for hours. Sometimes he looked down at his own arm like he had woken up expecting it not to be there.

So you learned to speak before entering the room. You told him what you were doing before you touched him. You left food within reach and pretended not to notice that he only ate when your back was turned.

You gave him the living room because you only had one bedchamber and you were kind, not stupid. The first few nights, he sat upright against the wall instead of lying down, blanket untouched beside him. By the fourth night, he slept under it. By the sixth, he stopped flinching when you walked across the room. By the eighth, he let you change the bandage around a raw patch of skin near the edge of his metal shoulder without looking like he wanted to disappear through the floor.

He still didn’t speak, though.

You asked once, because you could not help yourself. “Do you have a name?”

His teeth clenched and his eyes lowered.

Nothing.

You waited.

Still nothing.

So you sighed and raised both hands. “Fine. Keep your secrets, scary carbonite man.”

That became his name in your head after that.

Scary Carbonite Man.

Scary Carbonite Man sat silently at your table while you repaired circuit boards. Scary Carbonite Man watched the door like he expected the whole galaxy to come through it with a blaster. Scary Carbonite Man drank broth like it was a task he’d been assigned and not nourishment.

And then, somewhere between one cycle and the next, Scary Carbonite Man started helping around the hut. 

You woke up one morning to find the loose panel by the door screwed back into place.

Another day, the water filter stopped making that awful grinding noise it had made for cycles. You had been meaning to fix it. You had also been meaning to fix the roof, the heater, the left stabiliser on your speeder, and your entire life, so the filter had been low on the list.

But he fixed it as if he was trying to make himself useful enough to be allowed to stay.

You came home from the market one afternoon and found him crouched beside your faulty generator, brows drawn together, metal fingers surprisingly delicate around the wiring. He froze when you stepped inside, like he had been caught stealing instead of repairing the only thing keeping your hut warm at night.

You stared at him. He stared back.

The generator hummed smoother than it had in years.

You cleared your throat.

“I…,” you said, setting your bag down. “Thank you, Scary Carbonite Man.”

His mouth barely lifted, a little. 

It was embarrassing, how much you noticed.

It was worse how quickly you got used to him.

Especially because you should’ve known better.

You knew better than to let a strange man stay in your house, especially one the Empire had frozen, transported, and labelled important enough to hide behind ten layers of encryption. You knew better than to sleep under the same roof as someone who could dent durasteel with his bare hand. You knew better than to start trusting someone who hadn’t even told you his name.

But your hut had been so quiet before him.

You hadn’t realised how quiet until it wasn’t anymore.

Now there was the shift of another person breathing in the living room. The scrape of a chair being moved back into place. The clink of him washing the bowl you had left beside him. The small, strange comfort of coming home and knowing you were not walking into emptiness.

You were no longer lonely. 

You liked telling him things.

He never answered, but you talked anyway.About the trader in town who was absolutely watering down his fuel and lying about it. About the woman at the market who sold you bruised fruit at half price because she liked your attitude, which probably meant she was insane. About your speeder making a new noise, which you described to him in great detail while he listened with the seriousness of a man receiving military orders.

You told him about the sandstorms. The broken latch on the supply shed. The stupid little lizard that kept getting into your storage crate. Nothing important.

But he listened. And you knew he listened because he fixed what he could. The speeder and latch were fixed. The lizard was relocated. 

And after a while, you started leaving pauses like maybe one day he would fill them.

You told yourself you were only letting him stay until he was well enough to leave.

You told yourself a lot of things.

Then one evening, as the suns sank low and painted the walls of your hut in warm amber light, you placed a bowl of broth in front of him and asked, not really expecting an answer anymore, “Do you remember anything yet?”

Silence.

You sat across from him, spooning your own food around the bowl. Then he looked down at his hands and his throat moved.

When he spoke, his voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a scrape.

“Bucky.”

You went still.

He swallowed, like the name hurt coming out. “My name,” he said quietly. “I think.”

For a second, you couldn’t speak.

Your chest gasped so suddenly it almost scared you. So you smiled instead.

“Well,” you said gently, “welcome back, Bucky.”

After that, Bucky started remembering in pieces.

Not enough to make a full picture. Just little scraps of a life that had been torn apart and scattered somewhere he couldn’t reach.

A name, sometimes.

Winnie, Steve, Rebecca, Howard.

He said them once while helping you repair the water filter, so quietly you almost thought you imagined it.

Another time, he said, “There was snow.” And then nothing else for the rest of the day.

You learned not to ask too much.

Bucky didn’t like being asked for things he couldn’t give. You saw it in the way his jaw clicked, the way his eyes dropped, the way his flesh curled against his knee like he was punishing himself for not knowing more.

So you stopped making memory feel like a test.

You let him offer what he could. A mountain. A freight. A fall.

Sometimes, he looked at his metal arm like it belonged to the nightmare and not to him.

You never told him it was okay. You thought maybe he had been told too many things were okay when they were not.

So instead, you sat beside him and said ordinary things. You told him the caf trader in town was still a thief. You told him the left stabiliser on your speeder was making a suspicious noise again. You told him you were fairly certain the little lizard he moved had children and those children were migrating back.  

And Bucky listened.

He was still scary if someone in the market looked at him (or you) wrong. But inside your hut, around you, he had started to become careful and gentle. 

He put your tools back exactly where you liked them. He moved hot pans away from the edge of the counter after seeing you burn your fingers once. He pretended not to watch you struggle with heavier scrap until you sighed and said, “Fine,” and then he carried it like it weighed nothing.

And oh, it was humiliating.

Even then, the nightmares still came.

Some nights, you heard him from the living room, breathing too fast, shifting on the couch like he was trying not to scream.

Usually, you got up. Usually, you sat near him in the dark and said his name until he came back to himself.

“Bucky. You’re here. You’re safe. It’s just me.”

But one night, you were too tired to do it properly.

You had spent all day in the heat, hauling scrap and bargaining with a man who deserved to be bitten by a sand rat. Your whole body ached. Your eyes burned. You were half-buried under your blanket, right on the edge of sleep, when you heard him give a small, heartbreaking sound from the living room.

You opened your eyes.

For a second, you just stared at the wall.

You were so tired.

So, so tired.

Then you heard him whisper, rough and afraid, “No.”

And that was it. You couldn’t leave him to face the darkness alone.

You got out of bed.

You shuffled out half-asleep, blanket still wrapped around your shoulders, hair a mess, eyes barely open. Bucky was sitting upright on the mat in the living room, his back against the wall, chest rising and falling too quickly.

His metal hand was curled tight. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really seeing the room.

You stood in front of him for a moment, swaying with exhaustion.

Then you reached down and gently took his wrist. It was warm beneath your fingers, because you wanted him to know where you were before he had to decide whether to touch you back.

He froze.

You gave the smallest tug.

“Bucky,” you mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “Come on.”

He stared up at you, still breathing hard.

So you tugged again, softer this time. “Come on, Buck.”

And he eventually followed like a tired man hearing his name from the only safe place he knew.

He stood. Perhaps he was half expecting you to do the usual routine of sit-with-Bucky-on-the-couch until he calms down.

Instead, you just led him into your room, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, your blanket trailing behind you on the floor. You were too tired to overthink it. Too tired to be embarrassed. Too tired to remember the usual routine. 

You climbed into bed first, then looked back at him. You patted the space beside you.

“Here.”

He hesitated.

You sighed, but there was no bite in it. “Bucky.”

That was all, just his name.

He came to you.

Carefully, like your bed was fragile and he was afraid his body would ruin it by being there. He lay down beside you with far too much space between you, stiff and silent and barely breathing.

Absolutely ridiculous, heartbreaking man.

You lasted maybe five seconds before scooting closer.

You curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the galaxy. Like you had not spent years sleeping alone and insisting you preferred it. Like he had always been there. Your arm slipped over his middle.

Your cheek pressed gently to his shoulder.

“There,” you whispered. “That’s better.”

Bucky didn’t move at first.

For a few breaths, he stayed painfully still, like this comfort was another kind of danger.

So you didn’t push.

You just stayed sleepy and warm and stubborn.

You held him like it was no big thing, like he wasn’t an ex-Imperial asset with a beskar arm and a head full of broken memories.

Slowly, his breathing changed. His shoulders lowered. The tension left him in tiny pieces.

His flesh hand hovered above your arm, uncertain and careful, before settling over you.

You smiled against him, too sleepy to hide it.

The nightmare didn't come back.

Neither of you said anything else.

You just slept.

And for the first time since he fell out of the sky and into your life, Bucky slept like he was allowed to rest.

In the morning, you woke up tucked against him, warm all the way through.

Your arm was still around his waist. His hand was still over yours.

Bucky was awake, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still like he had been afraid to move and ruin it.

You blinked. He blinked.

Neither of you spoke for a while.

Then, because you were you, and feelings were horrifying, you said, “If you tell anyone I’m nice, I’ll deny it.”

For one second, nothing happened. Then Bucky smiled.

Oh, that was dangerous.

Because you had dragged a frozen man out of an Imperial wreck.

Because you had rescued a frozen man from an Imperial wreck, let him sleep in your living room, fed him your terrible broth, given him your spare blanket, and now he was smiling in your bed like maybe he had found his way back to the galaxy through you.

That morning, Bucky announced he was going to the market alone.

You almost dropped the credit chips you were counting.

“Alone?”

He stood near the door, already dressed for the heat, hair tied back in a way you had started pretending didn’t do anything to you. His cloak was pulled over the arm, because people had seen it and you both agreed the attention wasn’t worth it.

He looked at you and nodded once. “Yeah.”

You stared at him. He stared back.

You looked down at the credits spread across the table, then back at him. “Are you sure?”

Bucky’s expression didn’t change much, because it rarely did, but a flicker of amusement went through his eyes. “I know the way.”

He did.

He knew the way because he had been going with you for weeks now. He knew which stalls sold honest parts and which ones sold faulty ones. He knew the woman who kept spare copper wiring under the table. He knew the mechanic who paid you late but always paid eventually. He even helped when you took freelance repair jobs.

He knew your life now.

Still, you frowned. “What do you even need from the market?”

His face went blank too quickly. “Things.”

“Things?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not an answer.” You narrowed your eyes.

Bucky looked away.

Oh, that was definitely suspicious.

You sat back in your chair, credits forgotten beneath your fingers. “You’re being weird.”

His mouth twitched. Then he adjusted the strap of his satchel and said, “I’ll be back before the second sun gets high.”

You wanted to argue, and not because you didn’t trust him. You did, more than you should have. More than you liked admitting to yourself. But the thought of him walking into town alone made you frightened. 

Because if he didn’t return, you’d be alone again.

Bucky noticed and softened his voice. “I’ll come back.”

You hated how badly you needed to hear that. So you rolled your eyes and looked back down at the credits. “You better. I still need you to fix the west panel before the next sandstorm.”

“I know.”

“And if you get robbed, I’m not rescuing you.”

Then Bucky said, very quietly, “you think I’d need rescue?”

You waved him off without looking up, because your face had gotten warm for absolutely no reason. “Go away.”

He did.

The hut felt too quiet the second he left.

You tried to ignore it.

You sorted credits. You wrote down what you owed for fuel. Checked the payment from the repair job you had done three days ago and cursed the client under your breath because he had absolutely shorted you. Then you started organising scrap by resale value, because apparently you were the kind of person who needed busy hands to avoid thinking about a man going to the market alone.

You were halfway through separating usable wiring from junk when the first shadow passed the window.

You froze.

That was way too many footsteps to be Bucky. 

Your hand moved toward your blaster. The door blew inward before your fingers reached it.

Then, white armour filled the room.

Stormtroopers.

For one stupid second, your mind couldn’t  make sense of them inside your hut. They belonged on ships. In garrisons. In your childhood.

Not here. Not in the doorway Bucky had fixed. Not stepping over the threshold of the one place in the galaxy you had made for yourself.

Then one of them raised a blaster.

The first shot scorched the wall where your head had been.

You grabbed the knife from under the table and drove it into the gap beneath the nearest trooper’s helmet. He went down choking. Another one lunged at you. You slammed your elbow into his throat plate and tried to reach your blaster, but there were too many of them, too fast, too loud.

A rifle butt caught you across the ribs and you hit the floor hard.

Still, you kicked, bit, and scrambled.

You got one by the ankle and dragged him down with you, feral and furious, because if the Empire wanted you back on your knees, they would have to break you first.

So they did.

A trooper’s boot came down on your leg, and the pain was instant and blinding.

Your bone broke, and you screamed before you could stop yourself.

The sound ripped out of you, ugly and raw, and for a moment the whole room went white. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past it. Your hands clawed at the floor as pain tore up from your shin into your hip.

A trooper grabbed your hair and yanked your head back.

Then, you felt the cold metal of a blaster pressed to your temple.

That brought the room back into focus.

A trooper crouched in front of you. His helmet tilted slightly, almost curious.“Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You blinked through the pain. “What?”

The blaster dug harder into your skin. “The asset. Where is he?”

Asset.

What, was Bucky this mysterious Winter Soldier? The high value asset they were transporting in carbonite?

Because Bucky wasn’t that to you. He wasn’t a weapon or a thing. When you thought of him, you thought of him sitting at your table with a bowl of broth in his hands. Bucky repairing your generator without saying a word. Bucky lying stiff beside you in bed, afraid to breathe too loudly. 

Your fear turned into hatred pretty quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The trooper hit you. Your cheek split sideways and blood filled your mouth. “Where is the Winter Soldier?”

You laughed.

It was a terrible sound, wet and shaky and half-mad from pain. “I don’t know what a Winter Soldier is.”

He landed another hit. This time, your vision blurred.

A trooper stepped on your broken leg again, not hard enough to finish it, just enough to make sure you remembered they could. You choked on a sob and hated yourself for it. 

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“The asset was tracked to this dwelling.”

You swallowed blood. “Well,” you rasped, “your tracker’s a pile of shaak shit.”

The blaster pressed harder on your skin.

You could feel the circle of it now. You knew if you stopped being useful, you were going to die. 

You thought, absurdly, of Bucky at the market.

Bucky, choosing fruit with too much consideration. Bucky. trying not to get overcharged. Bucky walking back under the suns with that careful focus of his, maybe carrying whatever mysterious things he had refused to explain.

Now, your hopes have changed. You hoped he stayed away. You hoped he ran.

The trooper leaned closer. “Last chance.”

You looked at the black visor where a face should have been.

Your whole body shook. After all, the hurt made the edges of the room pulse. You were terrified. Only idiots and dead people pretended not to be.

But you had been raised by Imperials.

You knew this game. You knew what they wanted.

And you would never let Bucky become one of theirs ever again.  So you bared your bloody teeth.

“I said,” you whispered, “I don’t know.”

The trooper’s finger shifted on the trigger.

That’s all, folks! You thought cynically to yourself. It was a short life, and not necessarily a good one, but at least I don’t regret anything!

Then the trooper’s helmet snapped sideways. A giant crack crack split through white plastoid.

The blaster meant for your brains went off into the ceiling.

For half a second, the whole room flashed bright in your ears

Then the body dropped hard.

You flinched against the floor, blinking through blood and dust and the watery edge of your own vision. Your ears rang so badly the entire world seemed like it was underwater. You couldn’t breathe right. Every inhale pulled pain sharp through your muscles. Your broken leg throbbed in bright, sick waves that made the edges of the hut bend and smear.

Another stormtrooper went down. Then another.

At first, you didn’t understand what you were seeing.

A shadow moved through the doorway where your door used to be.

You saw a hint of dark cloak and loose hair. After adjusting your focus, you saw a silver arm catching the light.

It was Bucky, you realised. 

Oh.

Bucky.

He didn’t shout your name or make some grand heroic entrance.

He just did what had to be done. Tactical, cold, and frighteningly smart. 

And stars, you had never seen anyone fight like that.

He strode into the room like the violence he was about to commit had already happened in his head and his body was only catching up. When a trooper lifted a rifle, Bucky’s beskar hand closed around the barrel and crushed it inward with a shriek of ruined metal. His other hand struck once beneath the helmet. The trooper dropped before the broken weapon hit the floor.

Another turned, but he was too slow. Bucky was already there.

You tried to keep your eyes open, but everything came in pieces: A flash of beskar, A boot sliding through blood, A white helmet hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. A gloved hand reaching for him and then bone bending the wrong way. A blaster firing wildly.

Bucky ducked under the shot.

Bucky turned the blaster around and ended the trooper with a shot meant for him.

He didn’t waste motion. There was no anger in it, not the way you understood anger. Just cold, brutal certainty.

It was beautiful in a way that made your stomach twist with grief, because this was what they had wanted from him. This was what the Empire had built out of a broken man and called useful.

This was not the Bucky who fixed your heater. Not the man who listened to you complain about watered-down fuel with the seriousness of a battlefield report.

This was the weapon they had come for.

This was the Winter Soldier.

And you hated them for it so much it burned through the fear.

A stormtrooper stumbled backward over a body, trying to raise both hands.

Bucky didn’t hesitate. You blinked, and the trooper was on the floor.

Another tried to run. He didn’t make it past the threshold.

Then there was only one left. The one whose boot had pressed into your broken leg until your scream tore out of you.

He backed away from you now.

Not far enough. Never far enough for Bucky.

Bucky turned his head.

The man raised his blaster with shaking hands. Bucky closed the gap between them before he could fire.

You didn’t see the killing blow clearly.

Maybe that was mercy. Maybe your body simply gave up on looking.

Then, there was only blissful silence. 

Your hut smelled like blaster smoke, hot metal, blood, dust, and the bitter remains of your caf from that morning still sitting on the table. The west panel that Bucky had promised to fix hung crooked from the wall. Your door was gone. Your floor was covered in dead men.

And Bucky stood in the middle of it all, breathing hard.

For one moment, he just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, like he didn’t know where to put them now that there was no one left to hurt.

You tried to say his name, but it only came out as a broken, wet, little sound.

Bucky turned so fast it scared you.

The bloodlust emptied out of his face, and just like the Winter Soldier vanished.

What was left was your Bucky.

He looked mildly horrified, though he could bring himself to regret what he did. His skin was pale beneath the dust. His cerulean blue eyes blown wide as he studied in your cheek, your mouth, your leg, the blood under you, the way you were curled around the pain like your body was trying to protect itself from being alive.

He dropped to his knees so hard you heard it.l“Hey.”

His voice barely worked.

He crawled the last distance to you, hands hovering over you, not touching yet. His metal fingers flexed open, closed, open again, like he was afraid they would forget how to be gentle.

“Hey,” he said again, softer, rougher. “Look at me.”

You tried.

Your left eye, for lack of a better word, was failing. Your vision kept dipping in and out, Bucky’s face breaking apart and coming back together.

His hand moved toward your leg, then stopped when he saw the wrong angle of it.

His mouth parted, but sound came out at first.

“No,” he breathed.

It was almost nothing but a ruin of a word.

“No.”

You wanted to make him stop looking like that.

You wanted to tell him you were fine, even though you were very much not fine. You wanted to tell him his repairs were going to be useless if he kept letting stormtroopers blow doors off their hinges. You wanted to say something sarcastic enough to make this less frightening.

But your tongue was heavy and your teeth were red. Your leg was a star going supernova beneath your skin.

Bucky swallowed hard and slid one arm beneath your shoulders.

“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”

His other arm went beneath your knees, careful around the broken leg, so careful it made tears spill down your temples and into your hair. Even that tiny shift dragged a whine out of you.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped.

You could feel him shaking now. It was a tremor through his chest, his hands, the arm under your back. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lifting you anyway, because he had to.

Because the floor was soaked with your blood and stormtroopers were dead around you and your little hut, your little life, had been cracked wide open.

You clutched at him with one weak hand, fingers catching in the front of his shirt.

Bucky pulled you into his lap right there among the bodies, not caring about the blood.

His metal hand cradled the back of your head, impossibly gently. His flesh hand pressed over your side where your ribs hurt, not pushing, just holding, like he could keep you together by touch alone.

His throat worked. His eyes wouldn’t stay on yours. They kept flicking away, to the bodies, to the broken door, to his own metal hand in your hair.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

You blinked slowly.

Bucky’s face was close now. Too close for him to hide from you. His jaw was pulled tight, and his lips trembled. Dust clung to the dampness at his temples. Blood, not his, marked the line of his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

That was all he could manage.

Not I’m sorry I killed them.

No, Bucky might regret a great many things, but he could never be sorry for protecting you. 

He was just sorry that you saw.

Like the worst thing in the room was that you had seen what he could do.

It was that now, finally, he thought you might understand why they had put him in carbonite. Why they had called him an assert. Why stormtrooper squadrons with blasters had crossed the galaxy to a stupid desert planet to drag him back.

His eyes lifted to yours, terrified. He was waiting, you realised, for you to be disgusted by his actions.

Oh, Bucky.

Your heart hurt worse than your ribs.

You lifted your hand. It was pathetic, really. Your fingers barely obeyed you. Your arm shook with the effort. You missed his face the first time, knuckles brushing his collar instead.

Bucky caught your wrist gently. 

He held your hand in his like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to bring it closer.

You made a small sound of frustration.

His eyes narrowed immediately. “What? What hurts?”

You stared at him. He stared back, beautiful and ruined all the same.

So you used the last of your strength to tug your hand free, curl your fingers into his shirt, and pulled

You couldn’t pull far, but Bucky understood enough. 

His breath hitched

“No,” he whispered, like he was refusing himself something because he didn’t deserve it.  “You don’t—”

You kissed him, and it was not graceful. It was barely even a kiss.

Your split mouth pressed to his, and pain sparked across your cheek so sharply your eyes watered. You tasted blood. Your blood, maybe his. You didn’t care.

Bucky went utterly still.

For one terrible second, he didn’t breathe.

Then a sound left his chest, almost wounded, and his mouth moved against yours with a kind of careful desperation that made you want to sob. He kissed you like he was afraid you would vanish. Like he was afraid he would hurt you by being himself. Like he was trying to ask forgiveness without having enough words to build the question.

His hand stayed at the back of your head. His thumb moved once against your hair.

When you pulled back, he followed for half a breath before stopping himself.

His forehead touched yours, eyes closed. “You came back,” you whispered.

Bucky’s breath shuddered.

“Of course.” It was hoarse and almost angry with how true it was.

That was more than enough.

Your fingers loosened in his shirt.

For a moment, you just existed there in his arms while the world tilted around you. His heartbeat was too fast beneath your palm. His breathing kept catching. Every few seconds, his grip adjusted, checking you, making sure you were still there.

Then his gaze dropped to your throat, just between your collarbones, as if he remembered something. 

His face changed.

You frowned weakly. “What?”

Bucky didn’t answer right away. Instead, he shifted you against him with unbearable care, keeping your broken leg supported, and reached into the inside of his cloak.

His hand came out closed around a small piece of metal.

For one exhausted, feverish second, you thought it might be medicine.

It wasn’t.

A necklace slipped from his fingers.

It has a simple chain and a little pendant. The silver metal curled around a blue stone, cloudy at the centre, bright at the edge. It wasn't polished or perfect by any standards. It was handmade and slightly uneven. 

It was… lovely.

So lovely your breath hitched.

Bucky looked down at it like he didn’t know what to do with this gift now that he had brought it into a room full of death.

“I got it for you, from the market,” he said.

You blinked at him, throat closing.

He stared at the necklace, not at you.

“You said it was your birthday when you saved me.”

You forgot, for one stupid second, how much pain you were in.

“You remembered?”

Bucky’s thumb rubbed over the little blue stone once.

“You said.” His brow furrowed, like the memory was delicate and he was afraid of breaking it. “The night before you found me.”

You didn’t even realize he had heard you at that point. You were just rambling to him in his post-carbonite fugue state, you didn’t even realise he would remember the information for a later date. 

Your birthday.

Your stupid, lonely birthday.

You remembered that day, having a cold caf in your hands. You remembered watching the black sky over your hut. You remembered the tears running down on your face. You remembered making a pathetic wish made on what you thought was a star.

I don’t want to be alone anymore.

You had thought no one in the galaxy had heard you.

But whoever the maker was, they had sent him.

Frozen in carbonite, maybe. Falling out of the sky, maybe. Half-dead, half-gone, dragged through the atmosphere by an Imperial ship.

It didn’t matter.

He had remembered.

Bucky, who still lost whole pieces of himself. Bucky, who remembered snow and names and falling only in fragments. Bucky, who couldn’t always trust his own mind.

Bucky remembered that his ship fell out birthday.

A broken sound left your lips, and his head snapped up. “Does it hurt?”

You laughed and cried at the same time, which was a mistake because your ribs immediately punished you for it.

“Don’t,” he said, helpless. “Don’t do that. Just stay with me, okay?”

“You bought me a necklace,” you whispered.

His mouth tightened, like he was bracing for rejection.

“I wish I could get you it sooner,” he said. 

“Bucky….”

“I saved credits from repairs.”

“I know, Buck.”

His eyes flicked to yours.

“I wanted…” He stopped as the words failed him.

His teeth clenched worked once, then he tried again.

“I wanted you to have something from me.”

Your lips parted.

Bucky looked down again, ashamed of the softness, maybe. Ashamed that the hands that had just killed men could still want to give you a pretty thing.

His voice went smaller. “You have given me so much.”

Oh.

Oh Bucky, as if you needed repayment. As if your kindness was currency. As if you needed him to give you something to be loved. 

You only wanted him. 

Carefully, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for delicate wiring, Bucky shifted the chain around your neck. His fingers brushed your skin. The metal was cool at first, then warmed almost instantly against your throat.

The clasp took him longer than it should have. His hands were shaking too badly.

You watched his face as he worked. The furrow between his brows. The tight set of his mouth. The way he kept pausing whenever you breathed wrong, checking if he had hurt you.

Finally, the necklace settled against your chest.

The little blue stone rested above your heartbeat.

Bucky’s fingers stayed there for half a second longer than necessary.

Then he pulled away like he had no right.

You caught his wrist. “Bucky.”

He looked at you.

You wanted to say it properly: You weren’t afraid.

He had saved you.

Whatever the Empire had made him, it didn’t  get to own every part of him.

That you had now seen the weapon, yes, but you had also seen the man who fixed your water filter, remembered your birthday, listened to your useless stories, and came back.

But pain was dragging you under. Your thoughts were slipping loose, and words were hard.

So you said the only thing you could, “Stay.”

He bent over you, forehead pressing to your temple, his breath shaking against your skin.

“Always,” he said.

Outside, the suns burned over the desert. Somewhere beyond the ridge, more Imperials would come, more ships, more hunters. 

But in your ruined hut, with your blood drying on his shirt and his gift resting over your heart, Bucky held you like the galaxy could take anything else from him and he would still refuse to let go of this.

And for the first time in your life, you knew that neither of you would ever have to be alone again.

—end.

[aquaticmercy]

HEAR ME OUT!

Greek myth AU | Hunter!Dex x Demigod!Reader where Artemis sends Dex, a virgin hunter, to protect you, a daughter of Zeus.

TW violence, temporary transformation, daughter of Zeus!reader, blood/injury, temple sex.

Artemis usually does not bless male hunters.

With the exception of Orion and Hippolytus, she just doesn’t. And even those exceptions kinda backfired. 

See, Artemis knows men are messy. Men boast. Men ruin things. Men wander into sacred groves, see one divine deer minding its business, and immediately go, hmm, what if I made this about myself? So Artemis, as a rule, keeps her hunters female, and she makes sure these men belong to the forest more than they belong to any man or kingdom or stupid mortal expectation.

And then there’s Dex.

Dex, whose aim is so perfect even Artemis has to stop and go, okay, fine, that is art. 

He’s just that naturally talented. He’s capable of putting an arrow through a crow’s eye in total darkness and looking vaguely bored about the whole thing, like accuracy isn’t a miracle when he does it. It’s just muscle memory.

So in exchange for being her personal assassin, Artemis offers him eternity.

Immortal life in exchange for service. Be her assassin, her hunter. Kill where she points. Answer when she calls.

When Artemis wants someone kept alive, she sends Dex. When she wants someone dead, she sends Dex.

And Dex was if anything, grateful for the direction. He belonged to no throne, no lover, no mortal future. He belongs to the hunt. 

And, obviously, as a virgin goddess, Artemis makes him swear celibacy.

Of course she looks at this disciplined and deeply repressed man with nothing in his eyes and thinks, perfect. Finally. One male follower who will not embarrass me over desire.

HAHA.

Anyway.

And then Zeus asks Artemis for a favour.

Because of course, Zeus has another child. This time, it’s a demigod daughter, storm-born and politically inconvenient as hell. Hera hates you on principle, which is frankly exhausting because you didn't ask Zeus to be your father. You didn’t ask to become the newest target in Olympus’ worst marital dispute.

Still, Hera wants you dead.

She has been sending minor deities and monsters after you for weeks. She even sent a murderous peacock once. Sometimes, she doesn’t even have to send anyone. 

Local queens started hunting you because they think handing Zeus’ daughter over to Hera might earn them divine favour. Ambitious princes, bored warriors, random glory-hungry idiots who hear “spawn of Zeus” and immediately decide killing you would make them legends.

Congratulations! You are a person, a scandal, a political threat, and a trophy kill all at once!

Worse, you don’t even know how your inherited gifts work.

You are powerful, obviously. Storms gather when you are upset. Sometimes you cry and it rains for miles. Sometimes someone grabs your and lightning strikes. Sometimes you wake up from nightmares with thunder shaking the windows and no idea what you almost destroyed in your sleep.

You aren’t trained, safe, or in control. 

So Zeus needs safe passage from Athens to his temple in Olympia, where you will be under his protection properly. The journey should be simple, except everyone between Athens and Olympia has apparently decided that murdering you is their personal side quest.

All Artemis has to do is send one of her hunters to escort you there alive, so she sends Dex.

After all, she has sent him to guard women before. Queens, priestesses, nymphs, maidens, any devout follower of Artemis in enough danger.

He has guarded beautiful women. Powerful women. Terrified women. Furious women. Women who wept. Women who tried to seduce him. 

Dex has never once gotten distracted.

So when Artemis sends him to you. She doesn’t see why this should be different.

Except you are difficult.

You don’t trust him. You don’t want him walking behind you. You don’t want him walking in front of you either. You flinch when he moves too suddenly, then get angry at yourself. You tell him you don't need a guard while bleeding through your bandage and shaking so badly the clouds above you turn purple.

Dex only looks at your arm and says, “You need stitches.”

You hate him a little.

You hate that heat calm when everything in you is loud. You hate that he doesn’t seem impressed by your father or afraid of Hera or startled by the lightning that crawls over your fingers when you are scared. You hate that he looks at you and sees danger, yes, but not in the way everyone else does.

Everyone else looks at you like you are dangerous to them. Dex looks at you like danger has been done to you.

At first, you think he is only good at killing.

Which, to be fair, he is very good at killing.

The first monster finds you before you even make it out of Attica. Some long-limbed thing with a woman’s hair, lion claws, and Hera’s hatred shining through. You only hear it scream once before Dex’s arrow goes through its throat.

The next  creature is pinned to an olive tree, clawing at the shaft in its neck, and Dex is already reaching for another arrow like this is casual.

You stare at him.

He says, “Keep walking.”

A demigod of Ares tries to drown you in a river and Dex drags him out by the hair, holds him under instead, and tells you to look away. A prince recognises you in a market and reaches for his sword, and Dex puts a knife through his arteries. A flock of bronze-beaked birds follows you for two days until Dex disappears before dawn and comes back with blood on his hands and feathers stuck to his cloak.

And okay.

Fine.

Maybe you start trusting him a little.

Maybe not completely. You’re not stupid. Trust is how girls in myths get turned into trees or cows. It’s how you happened. But you start sleeping when he takes watch. You start walking closer to him on narrow roads. You start noticing that he always positions himself between you and any temple marked with Hera’s name.

He notices everything.

He notices that you stop eating after attacks, so he starts handing you food before the shaking can settle into nausea. He notices that the sky turns cloudy when you’re upset. He notices that you don’t like washing blood from your hands in rivers because the water reminds you of the thing that tried to drown you. He notices that when people call you “Zeus’ daughter,” your face goes blank, but when someone simply calls you by your name, you smile a little.

And then he starts leaving dead monsters at the edge of your camp like cats bringing mice to their owners.

Seriously. It’s insane.

You wake up one morning to find a dead serpent-thing laid neatly by the tree line, head severed, body still twitching.

You stare at it. Then at Dex.

“Is that for me?”

Dex, cleaning his knife, says, “It was following us.” 

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It cannot follow us anymore.”

“Dex.”

He looks at you, radiating the energy of a feral cat hoping you will appreciate the bird it left on your pillow.

You laugh a little, and Dex looks away so fast you almost miss the warmth at the tips of his ears.

Oh.

Oh, no.

Are you starting to find him… endearing?

Dex isn’t sweet in any normal way. He doesn’t bring you flowers or tell you daisies look nice in your hair.

He brings you corpses.

He kills the thing that scared you and lays it down like proof. Like, see? I took care of it. Nothing that wants you dead gets to stay alive near me.

And it works. You do feel safer because of him.

Dex, who starts watching the sky when thunder rolls because he has learned that your moods and the weather are basically in a long-term toxic relationship. Dex, who looks up the second clouds gather too quickly because he is checking on you. 

Dex, who’s fine.

Dex, who’s definitely not distracted.

Dex, who’s catastrophically lying to himself.

One day, you wake up from a nightmare, lightning stealing the hearth of the camp, lighting the air blue-white for a second. Dex is next to you before you t fully conscious, one hand hovering near your shoulder, not touching because he has learned that touch can scare you worse when you wake up like this.

“It’s me,” he says. “You’re safe.”

You look at him through tears and say, “Hold me.”

Dex freezes.

Because what?

He knows how to shield you with his body. He knows how to cut a throat. He knows how to track monsters through rain, how to hear arrows before they fly, how to make death certain.

He doesn’t know how to hug you.

But you’re reaching for him, shaking, and Dex has never been good at denying you anything.

So he moves carefully and wraps his arms around you.

At first, he’s terrible at it.

He’s so stiff and awkward.  Then you bury your face against his neck and let out a deep breath like you finally believed you were allowed to rest.

And Dex…

Oh.

Dex likes it.

He likes that your fingers clutch at his tunic. He likes that, for once, his body is not being used to kill or obey or endure.

It is keeping you warm.

He holds you tighter, just enough that you can feel it in the body language: I have you. I have you. I have you.

You fall asleep like that, storm quieting down into rain.

Dex doesn’t sleep.

He sits awake with you in his arms until dawn turns the sky gold, staring at the dying fire, having a mental crisis.

Because what is this?

What is this?

What is this ache in his chest? This panic when you cry? This satisfaction when you sleep because of him? This unreasonable hatred for anything that frightens you? This need to stand between you and the entire world, and not because Artemis ordered it?

Oh no.

Oh, fuck.

Is this love?

Is he in love?

Dex looks down at you sleeping against him, lashes damp, one hand still curled in his tunic like you chose him even unconscious.

The sky above the camp is clear for the first time in days.

And Dex, Artemis’ coldest weapon, thinks with absolute horror and wonder:

Yes.

Yes, I am.

Uhhh.

Well.

This is awkward.

Because Dex is celibate. Divinely celibate. Artemis-contract celibate. But it’s fine.

He doesn’t have to do anything about it. He can love you quietly. Professionally, even. 

Except then he sees you bathing in the river one morning and immediately becomes very interested in the trees. The sky. His knife. Literally anything else. He looks away, enough to pretend this is still discipline and not the beginning of an identity crisis.

Then he saves you again from one of Hera’s ugly little errands. Dex kills it before it reaches you, and you are so relieved you grab his shoulder and kiss his cheek.

Dex forgets how to breathe.

So. Fine. Maybe this is becoming a problem.

But he has it under control.

Which is why he starts disobeying Artemis in tiny, completely reasonable ways. Artemis says move at dawn, but you are finally sleeping, so he lets you sleep in. Artemis says take the shortcut through the city, but cities make you nervous, so Dex takes the long road through the olive groves instead.

It was just strategy, obviously. 

Then you fall asleep against his shoulder and murmur his name like you trust him even in dreams.

Dex stares into the fire.

Yeah.

He is so fucked.

Maybe even literally.

The day it happens is the day drakaina manages to corner you both in one of Hera’s abandoned temples.

Dex moves between you and the monster, but she pins him.

She pings him down against the altar steps, coils around his body, holds him there with his bow out of reach and blood at his mouth, and oh. 

Oh, that is the wrong thing to do.

Because you are watching Dex on the floor, trapped, furious because he cannot get to you.

No.

The temple goes blinding white.

Lightning tears out of the sky so violently Hera’s own altar cracks down the middle. The drakaina screams, and you don’t stop. You drive a broken spear through its throat and let the storm pour through the hole in the ceiling until there is nothing left but blood, smoke, and the sound of Dex breathing hard behind you.

And when you turn, Dex is looking at you like he has finally seen you.

See, he knew you’d be powerful. He just never expected you to be able to control that power enough  to save him. 

You say, out of breath, “She tried to kill you.”

Dex gets up with blood on his mouth and anger still in his eyes.

Because how dare Hera? No, really, how dare she? How dare she look at you and make you pay for Zeus’ sins? How dare she send monsters after a girl who never asked to be born, never asked to be hunted? How dare she make you feel unwanted when Dex is standing right there?

It's too much for Dex’s heart to handle, so he kisses you.

Right there in Hera’s temple. Against. Hera’s altar.

His lips are hot and desperate and viciously devoted, his hands are on you like he has spent weeks holding himself back and now the leash has finally snapped.

“Dex,” you gasp, because you still have enough sense left to be horrified. “Your vow.”

“I know.”

“Artemis—”

“I know.”

But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even hesitate. His mouth is at your skin, your throat, your shoulder, kissing you like he is trying to erase your fear.

“I want Hera to know she failed,” he says against your skin, peeling away cloth. 

Oh.

Oh.

“I want her to look down and see you alive. I want her to hear you. I want every god in Olympus to know she sent death and all she did was give me another reason to worship you.”

Like??? Dex????

Sir????

Your vow????

But no, he still doesn’t fucking care. Not when you are shaking under his hands. Not when thunder is rolling over the broken roof. Not when your fingers are in his hair.

“You are not Zeus’ mistake,” he says, rough and wrecked. “You are not a curse. You are perfect.”

His hands are shaking, and his hands never shake.

Not with arrows. Not with knives. But with you? 

Yeah.

“You are mine to protect,” he murmurs, like blasphemy.

Your breath hitched.

“And I am so tired,” he says, “of pretending that is only duty.”

He’s feral and this whole ordeal is mythologically catastrophic.

It’s the kind of decision bards will one day sing about in metaphor because “Artemis’ supposedly celibate hunter railed Zeus’ daughter on Hera’s altar out of spite” is apparently too much for polite society.

But that is exactly what happened.

Dex wants the temple to remember. He wants the rain, the marble, the dead monster, the split peacock carvings, all of it, to bear witness to the fact that Hera tried to make you a tragedy and Dex turned you into worship instead.

By morning, a goddess is waiting outside, but it’s not Hera. 

It’s Artemis.

Dex steps out to meet her with your marks still on his skin and no apology in his eyes.

Artemis looks at him, disappointed. “You broke your vow.”

Dex says nothing.

“There is no exception,” she says. “Not for love. Not for pity. Not even if the person you broke it for is my sister.”

And Dex, because he’s ruined by the act of love and apparently determined to make every god in Greece furious before breakfast, says, with a smile, “She’s worth it.”

When you finally stumble outside, you find a beautiful white stag, antlers pale as bone, hide bright as moonmilk, and hazel eyes you would know anywhere.

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

Artemis turned Dex into a stag.

For the crime of—checks notes—fucking you.

Like. Okay. Sure. Very normal goddess behaviour. He broke a vow after you saved his life, and Artemis went, hmm. Deer.

You shout so loud the sky cracks open.

Somewhere, Hera is probably cackling. Somewhere else, Artemis is probably standing under a tree being self-righteous about discipline and men disappointing her.

Stag-Dex only lowers his crowned head into your shaking hands like he’s saying, I would do it again.

Obviously, you drag him to Apollo’s temple, since he’s probably more normal about getting laid. 

Because if Artemis is going to be dramatic, then fine. You can be dramatic too. You can drag your cursed deer-lover through the nearest village while crying, sparking lightning across the road, and absolutely terrifying every farmer, priest, and goat within a five-mile radius.

Apollo appears because of all the commotion. He takes one look at you. Then at the white stag.

“Did my twin sister do this?”

“Yes.” You wipe your face with the back of your hand. “He broke his celibacy vow on Hera’s altar.”

Apollo goes still and smiles.

Because Apollo is a god, yes. Radiant and prophetic, blah blah blah. But he's also Apollo, which means he is physically incapable of hearing the sentence my twin sister’s assassin broke got some on my stepmother’s altar for my demigod sister and not finding it at least a little bit funny.

Like, that’s peak family drama. 

Apollo looks at stag-Dex with the distant, considering eyes of a god reviewing paperwork. “So,” he says. “Artemis has dismissed him.”

The stag huffs.

“And he is an archer, yes?”

You blink through your tears. “What?”

“A very good archer, if the stories are accurate,” Apollo continues, like this is now a professional department transfer.

Stag-Dex lowers his head like he would rather be killed again than have his résumé read aloud by Apollo.

Apollo’s mouth twitches up. 

Because yes, he is amused. He hates Hera, likes annoying his twin sister, and loves sex. Like Artemis, he is also god of archery, so really, if she’s going to throw away a perfectly good impossible shot because he got emotionally attached and made one spectacularly horny decision, that sounds like her loss.

“Fine,” Apollo says, lifting one golden hand. “I’ll take him.”

“Take him?” You hiccuped. “Take him where?”

“Relax, sister. I’ll take him under my protection,” Apollo says. “Call it a transfer of patronage. At least until Artemis stops being dramatic, which may take several centuries, but oh well.”

Like.

Your eye twitches and you think, he cannot be serious. He's doing this because he thinks it's funny.

Except he is. Light spills from his palm, and suddenly Dex is human again.

He's shaking and reaching for you like being turned into a stag was less traumatic than being away from your hands.

You crash into him. Dex catches you. His arms lock around you, one hand in your hair, the other at your back, and you kiss him like you are trying to put him back together 

Apollo watches for maybe three seconds.

Then he glances toward his altar. Then back at you two.

“If you’re going to do it on mine too,” he says, amused and absolutely shameless, “at least let me watch.”

Dex slowly lifts his head, still half-mad from the curse, and the fact that this unserious god (who he now answers to) is speaking at all. 

He glares, and Apollo’s smile widens.

Oh, this was going to be an interesting patronage experience, indeed.

—

Note: I’m doing a Greek myth AU for Bucky tomorrow stay tuned guys 🫶🫶🫶

[aquaticmercy]

dex sex sexy dex sex with dex sexy dexy dex dex sex sex sex with sexy dexy dex sex sex dex sex sex dex dex dex sex sexy dex sex with dexy sexy dexy dex dex sex sex sex with sexy dexy dex sex sex dex sex sex dex dex dex sex sexy dex sex with dex sexy dexy dex dex sex sex sex with sexy dexy dex sex sex dex sex sex dex dex

Hello? Is this just a window into my mind?

[aquaticmercy]

I just want to let you know. Love your writings. You have the highest honor of I have notifications on for when you post stuff on my tumblr app. I only have 1 other person currently I get notifications for. So uh congrats I guess. Lol

thank you so much and you need to know this is a compliment of the highest degree! I sincerely wish you find more creators you love as much so we may have company 🫶

[aquaticmercy]

hello dear! I hope you’re doing good! I just needed to let you know that yesterday night I couldn’t sleep and found myself reading good eyes! thank you so much for writing that, it was so sweet!! leo is just the most adorable kid in the world 😭

l’ve been in a reading slump for quite some time but your story felt so refreshing to my anxious brain, and you know what’s the funniest thing? I don’t even know who dex is 😭 I know he’s in daredevil but just because I looked him up (I’m a little behind with marvel tv series 🥸) AND YOU MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM??? now I need to read the rest of your dex stories 🙂‍↕️

you’re one of my favorite writers—actually, one of the first ones I stumbled upon when I started reading bucky fanfics—so thank you again, your writing is awesome 🩵

oh my god I need to give you a hug right now. This is so kind and I will be thinking about this message for weeks 🫶🫶🫶 May you never step on a Lego barefoot ever again🫶

[aquaticmercy]

Principles

Summary : Dex is jealous of your sex toys. What else is he jealous of?

Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) 

Warnings/tags : switch!Dex, switch!reader, Dex is a little pathetic in this one, obsessive jealousy, stalking, possessive behavior, BDSM/kink dynamics, sex toys, collars/restraints, safeword use (Green/Red), emotional masochism(?), rough sex, dacryphilia, mentions of past sexual mistreatment from your exes, murder/violence references, blood/injury, emotional dependency, humiliation and praise kink, no anatomical detail as per usual, Dex being jealous of literally anything that has ever touched you. (let me know if I missed anything!)

Word Count : 13.7k

Notes : I hope y’all don't mind that I wrote a one shot instead of the series! This is my first story in a while that was unrequested and just something that I wanted! Enjoy!

Dex had watched you long before he ever touched you. Not that you ever found out.

To you, Benjamin Poindexter had only been the strange but polite man who started appearing in your life “by chance”. You knew he probably lived around the area, because he happened to be walking down your road and held the door when your hands were full, who remembered how you had your coffee after hearing you order it once in a local cafe, who showed up in the elevator just as the doors were closing and asked if you got home safe last night like that was a normal thing for a near-stranger to worry about. Then, he claimed he was visiting a colleague who lived in your building. 

You thought he was sweet in a weird way. A little stiff, a little serious, a little too focused when you spoke, like every word out of your mouth mattered to him religiously.

You had no idea how much of it had been arranged. You thought it was just a little series of coincidences. Dex knew better. Dex had learned your schedule first: work, grocery store, laundromat, home, repeat. Then he learned the smaller things from his shadowy window across from your apartment: you checked the lock twice before bed, you forgot to eat when you were busy, you kicked your shoes off the second you got inside.

He told himself he was protecting you. That was what he called it at first, because protection sounded more legal than obsession. He told himself the neighbourhood was unsafe, that you were too trusting, that someone had to watch you and your window and the dark corners of the street beneath your building because no one else would. He told himself a lot of things, and for a while, he almost believed them. 

Then there was the box under your bed.

That fucking box.

At first, Dex didn’t know what it was. It was small and tucked away like a dirty little secret. Maybe it was something you only pulled out when you were alone. Maybe it was something you kept hidden where no one else could see. Except Dex saw everything. He had a good view after all, a couple of stories up.

One night, he saw you come home exhausted, hair messy and shoulders slumped, still in your work clothes with your face drawn in a frown, making his hands flex in the dark because he hated anything that wore you down. He was by his window, watching you with the same dead-eyed patience he would with a target. You were safe. You were home. He should have left it there.

Then you reached under the bed, pulled out the box, and opened it.

Oh.

Dex went completely still.

It was… oh, no.

You pulled out a toy. The first one was a turquoise dildo, stupid and fake and smooth, curved like it had any fucking right to be shaped for you. Dex hated it immediately. He hated the colour, hated the size, hated the shine in your hand. He fucking hated the way you looked at it like it was familiar, like it belonged in your bed, like it had earned the right to be near you. It had known you before he did.

Because no. No, no, no. No, no, no! You didn’t need that!

You didn’t need that stupid silicone. You didn’t need some fake, lifeless object inside you like it could ever understand the divinity it was touching, like it could ever deserve the warmth of your body, like it could ever know what to do with the adorable little sounds that slipped out of your mouth when you started giving in. Dex had one too. It was real and throbbing so painfully against his zipper that his vision almost blurred, but that only made the humiliation worse, because he was standing there in the dark wanting you while some stupid thing got to be held by your hand and plunged into your body without earning any of it.

He couldn’t even bring himself to touch himself. His hand twitched once toward his belt, and then stopped, fingers curling into a fist so tight his knuckles ached. It felt too insulting to you, somehow. To stand there outside your life and get himself off like a stranger when what he wanted was to be chosen, to be invited in. Touching himself would have felt like admitting defeat to the fucking fake piece of silicone, and Dex would rather splinter his hand open against glass than give that thing the satisfaction.

Then, another night, you took out something smaller. It was sleeker, more curved. Dex watched it sit in your palm, watched your thumb brush over it, watched your body settle back against the sheets like you already knew exactly what it was going to do for you. A vibrator, he realized, and the hatred came back so fast it was almost clean. 

Of course. Of fucking course there was another one. Another stupid little object pretending it could take his place, not that he had a place at all.

Dex had hands. Dex had fingers that never missed. Dex had aim so perfect and patience like a sickness. He could hit a target without thinking; he could find the weak point in anything. If he had the right to touch you, if you let him get his hands on you properly, he would learn you so thoroughly there would be nowhere left for you to hide. He would make you understand that you had never needed anything from that box. You had only needed him to finally get close enough.

That toy was nothing. Plastic garbage. An object. And Dex was still jealous.

He hated, hated, hated it until the feeling sat under his skin like a fever. He hated that it touched you without wanting you. He hated that it got inside you without worshipping you. He hated that it could make your thighs part and your breathing change without even understanding what blessing had been given.

It had no mouth, no hands, no eyes, no mind. It couldn't watch the little twitch in your lips when you tried not to make noise. It couldn’t possibly hear the difference between a sigh and a groan. It couldn't know when to slow down, when to go harder, when to hold you still and make you take what you were pretending not to need. 

Dex could. Dex would. If he had you underneath him just once, he would make sure you forgot that stupid thing had ever worked at all.

His fist curled against the brick wall beside him until his knuckles ached. He was hard and furious and breathing too quickly.

You didn’t know it yet, but you didn’t need that to get off. You needed him. It was only rational.

You needed his focus, his precise attention. You needed to be laid out beneath him and taken apart piece by piece until you understood that pleasure didn’t have to come from a lifeless object. It could come from him. It should come from him.

Then your body arched. Your mouth fell open, your fingers tightened, and the thoughts inside Dex went black.

He punched the brick wall once, hard enough to split the skin over his knuckles and damage the paint. Pain flashed hot through his hand, bright enough to cut through the jealousy for half a second, but not enough to make him look away. Nothing was enough to make him look away. Not when the toy disappeared between your thighs again, not when your head tipped back, then when your chest rose and fell beneath the thin fabric of your shirt. Dex watched with his teeth clenched and blood sliding down his fingers, consumed by a jealousy so vile it should have disgusted him.

The next day, when he thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, he was proven wrong. 

The rose toy was worse.

The rose toy made him want to burn the whole world down, because what the fuck did you need that for when he had a mouth? Dex stared at it from his window with a hatred he usually reserved for threats, for guys who looked at you too long on the street, for anyone who stood too close to you in line. But this was not a person who he could threaten or scare away or hurt. It was stupid little thing that sat between your thighs and pretended to do what his tongue should have been doing.

His mouth watered. His eyes dragged over you through the window, over your parted legs and rumpled clothes and the rise and fall of your chest. He watched your chest shift with every uneven breath, watched the way your body trembled when the toy stayed right where you wanted it. 

But when did you ever stop to think about what he wanted?

He wanted to put his mouth there. He wanted to drag his tongue over every inch of you. He wanted to learn what made you gasp, what made you mewl, what made you grab his body and hold him exactly where you needed him.

He wanted to master you, and that was the only word for it. Not have. Not fuck. 

Dex wanted to know every weak spot, every angle, every sound, every ruined expression you made when pleasure got too big for your body and spilled out of you. He wanted to know how much you could take. He wanted to know how pretty you looked when you were overwhelmed. He wanted to know if you would say his name like a warning or a prayer. 

The toy didn’t deserve any of that. It had never protected you, never watched your door, never memorized your footsteps on the stairs, never wanted to crawl inside you. 

But it had touched you anyway.

By the time you were finished, the inside of Dex’s mouth was bleeding and his breathing had gone unnaturally calm. He watched you clean the toys and tuck them away, watched the box slide back beneath your bed like it hadn’t broken his heart into a million little pieces. 

After that, he hated the box like it was alive. 

By the time he actually got close to you, Dex had already hated that box for months. You never knew that when he carried your groceries upstairs, he already knew which cabinet you kept the mugs in. You never knew that when he asked if you slept well, he already knew which nights you had tossed and turned. You never knew that when he looked around your apartment for the first time,  polite and almost shy, he knew exactly what was hidden under your bed.

Then you kissed him one night outside your door, giggling because he had gone so still, because he looked like he might actually die if you didn’t kiss him right then and there. 

After that, he was yours. Or you were his. Dex didn’t really care which way you phrased it. It was the same thing.

By some miracle, he became your boyfriend. 

He hated that word, and loved it all the same, because it sounded too tame for what you had done to him. Boyfriend sounded casual, temporary. As if it was something that could end. 

Lover was a better title, he thought. It felt more whole and all-consuming. But then your friends had cringed the one time he said it, and Dex had gone so still afterward that you could almost hear him tearing himself apart over it. 

He hated the idea that he had embarrassed you, hated even more that someone else had been there to see it, until you had to cup his face and tell him no, baby, you didn’t embarrass me. I thought it was sweet. Maybe, though, we should just say boyfriend with my friends, okay? 

And because it was you asking, he said of course, baby. 

Still, nowadays, he slept in your bed more than he did his own. He stood in your kitchen in the mornings. He learned the smell of your shampoo, learned the shape of your body under his hands instead of through glass and his own sick imagination. And when you finally let him touch you properly, Dex nearly lost his mind, because he was good at it. 

Of course he was good at it. Dex had focus like a camera lens, and once that focus turned on you, there was no part of your body he didn’t want to understand.

His fingers pressed and curled and learned you with frightening speed, finding the places that made your mouth drop open, the places that made your hips lift, the places that made you grab his wrist like you wanted him to stop and keep going at the same time. His mouth was patient, devoted, mean when it needed to be. He held your thighs open like he had been waiting his whole life to prove a point, like every gasp he dragged out of you was a personal victory over the stupid little rose toy.

When your hands fisted in his hair, when your thighs shook around his head, when his name broke out of you, all breathless and helpless, Dex thought, yes. there. That was what you were supposed to sound like. 

The first time he filled you up because he’d convince you to go on the pill, your whole face changed. Dex saw your eyes go wide, saw your lips part, saw your breath catch in your throat like you hadn't expected him to feel like that. For one strange second, he looked almost startled by his own satisfaction. Then he bent over you, mouth brushing your ear, and fucked you because he could, and he was grateful for it, gasping thank you, thank you, thank you over and over again, while his face was buried in the crook of your neck.

After that, you stopped using the box.

Dex noticed the dust beginning to collect on the lid. He noticed the charger cords stayed tangled and unplugged. Now, when you were needy, you reached for him. 

And there was nothing he loved more than you pawing his shirt, his wrist, his belt, his mouth. You reached for him in the morning, half-asleep. You reached for him at night with that little impatient noise in your throat that made him coo before giving you exactly what you wanted.

Good.

That was how it should have always been.

Sometimes, when you were asleep, Dex would look at the bed frame and think about the box beneath it. He should have been satisfied, but he wasn’t, because it still existed. 

And maybe, much later, you started noticing things too. You’d see the way Dex could flick a bottle cap across the room and land it in the trash without looking. The way his hands looked natural around the knives in your kitchen. 

You knew something. You weren’t stupid.

By the time you realised he was Bullseye, it was too late. By then, you already loved him. By the time you realised there was something violently wrong with him, you didn’t care enough to leave.

And the box under your bed stayed untouched, even though Dex thought about it every day.

—

The day he finally did something about it, he came back home to your apartment after a good couple of hours of donning the Bullseye mask, being a good guy and killing at least half a dozen task force agents.

Usually, when Dex came home buzzing like that, you were there.

Usually, the second he stepped through your door with that electric stillness in his body, you would look up from the couch or the kitchen counter or the bed, take one look at his face, and your eyes would change from curious to knowing immediately. You wouldn’t ask what happened. You wouldn’t ask where he had been. You would just set down whatever was in your hands and say, “Come here, baby.”

And Dex would go to you like a starving little thing. You would let him bury his face in your neck, let him grip your hips too hard as you murmured sweet, filthy little things into his ear about how he could take it out on you, how you could handle him, how he didn’t have to hold it all in himself. 

Sometimes you made him wait. Other times, you made him ask. Most of the time you let him fuck you against the nearest wall before either of you even made it to the bedroom, because you liked him like that, wrecked and keyed up and desperate enough to turn all that focus on to you. 

But that day, you weren’t home. Earlier in the morning, you had kissed him on the cheek with your keys in your hand and said, far too sweetly, “Baby, I have overtime today.”

You’d said it like it was just a schedule change. As if you hadn’t just sentenced him to four or five extra hours all alone.

Dex had been fine then, and said okay, because a normal boyfriend would. He had watched you leave, watched the door shut behind you, watched the lock turn, and told himself he could wait. He had waited for worse things. He had discipline. He had control.

But now, control was suddenly a very stupid word.

He was still buzzing. His hands felt awake. Every little sound in the apartment was a little too overstimulating, and he needed something to distract him from it: the refrigerator humming, a pipe knocking behind the wall, traffic below, the faint settling creak of the floorboards under his boots.

He stood in the middle of your apartment and breathed.

For one insane second, Dex considered going to your workplace.

He could picture your startled little gasp when he appeared where he shouldn’t be. He’d drag you to a single-cubicle bathroom, crowd you against the sink and cover your mouth with his hand because you had laughed last time, whispering, “Dex, we shouldn’t,” while your fingers undid his belt. He remembered the first time he had done it, remembered your skirt shoved up, remembered you biting his shoulder to stay quiet, remembered how smug he had felt afterward when you had gone back to work with his handprint on your hips beneath your clothes.

He could do it again.

He almost did.

But then his eyes moved toward the bedroom. Toward the bed and the space underneath it.

That fucking box.

It was such a stupid thing to notice, such a small thing. A corner of it was barely visible in the shadow under the bed, tucked away like it had nothing to fear from him. Like it hadn’t sat there while you slept beside him, while you kissed him, while you reached for him, while you let him make you fall apart and then kept that little graveyard of old pleasures under the same bed.

Dex stared at it.

The focus in him that had been looking for you found the box instead.

Before he could think better about it, he went into your bedroom, dropped to one knee, shoved his hand under the bed, and dragged the box out hard enough that it scraped against the floor. The lid snapped open under his fingers, and the dildo was on top.

Smooth, curved, stupid, fake little thing, sitting there like a dare.

Dex picked it up, and the second it was in his hand, he felt disgusted. There. There was the problem. There was something he could actually put his hands on. This. This thing. This lifeless piece of silicone that had touched you and survived.

Not anymore.

Dex had gone to the kitchen without even realizing he’d moved, grabbed a knife he recently sharpened, and came back with his breathing shallow and even. He sat on the bedroom floor with the open box between his knees and cut into the dildo like he was gutting a fish. The silicone resisted for half a second before splitting, and that drag of the knife through something shaped to imitate what he had made heat crawl up the back of his neck.

It was satisfying, mutilating this stupidly lifeless object.

His hatred didn’t care about logic. His jealousy had never needed the thing to be alive. It had only needed the thing to have touched you. That was enough to make the destruction feel intimate, corrective, and necessary.

He cut it again. Then again. Then, the rampage took shape quickly after that.

The man who folded his shirts in your drawer and rinsed his mug after coffee and kissed your forehead when you slept in too late was gone. As far as these toys were concerned, he was Bullseye.

The blade dragged through silicone again. His hands twisted. The fake curve lost its shape. He ripped it open, ruined it, carved it into useless pieces while his breath came harder and harder through his nose and his thoughts went noisy and repetitive:

It touched you.

It touched you.

It touched you.

The smaller vibrator went next. He hated how sleek it was, how obviously designed to find something inside you that belonged to him now. He slammed it against the floor once, hard enough that the crack of plastic snapped through the room. The sound felt good, so he did it again. A piece broke off and skittered under the dresser. He grabbed the rest of it and brought it down until the casing split open and its mechanical guts spilled out like it had finally been exposed for what it was: A battery. A lie.

Dex’s hand was bleeding again by then. He didn’t know if it was from the agents, the knife, the plastic, or the way he kept hitting things too hard. He didn’t care, though.

He picked up the rose toy next.

He remembered seeing it between your thighs through the window. He remembered his mouth salivating like an animal. He remembered wanting to bite through his own hand because that stupid little thing had been sitting where his mouth should have been, making you shake, making you breathe like that, ruining you without considering worship.

Dex’s fingers closed around it.

“You didn’t need this,” he muttered.

His voice sounded strange in the empty apartment.

“You had me.”

Not then, some small sane part of him might have said. Not yet. You hadn’t had him then. You hadn’t even known he was watching.

Dex ignored that thought.

He drove the knife into the gummy outer piece and tore it open. The rose came apart under his hands, the casing cracked, the wired snapped, pieces dropping into the box with the others until the whole thing looked like a little crime scene made of plastic and his own deranged need to be the only thing you ever reached for again.

The rampage didn’t make him calm.

It made him worse.

Because once he started, he couldn’t stop at the toys. He snapped cords. He ripped the satin lining out of the old box because it had held them. He crushed a bottle of silicone cleaning liquid in his fist and watched it spill slick and useless across the floor, then cursed and cleaned that part immediately because it was your floor and he was desperately trying to convince himself that he was definitely not an animal. 

By the time the box was ruined, Dex was breathing hard. The buzzing under his skin hadn’t disappeared, but it had direction now. His knuckles stung and his eyes stayed fixed on the mess in front of him with a focus so total it almost looked peaceful.

Then he gathered every broken piece.

He took the box outside behind the building, to the old metal bin near the alley where no one ever looked. He arranged the pieces, added kindling, added flame, and stood there watching as the fire caught.

The silicone melted slowly.

The dildo warped first, losing its already tattered shape, collapsing as the heat ate through it. Dex watched with his hands at his sides and felt something in his chest loosen by degrees. The vibrator casing blackened. The rose toy pieces curled and shrank into un ugly, unrecognizable puddle.

The smell was awful, chemical and bitter, crawling into the back of his throat.

Dex watched anyway. He needed to suffer through it to know he did it.

He watched until the pieces were ruined beyond saving. He watched until nothing in the bin looked like something you could have held, could have wanted, could have used. 

Only then did he go back upstairs.

Dex laughed once under his breath, not because anything was funny, but because the sound had nowhere else to go. He washed his hands in your bathroom, scrubbing blood and soot from his knuckles, cleaning under his nails with the same discipline he used after a kill. Then he dried his hands on the towel you always insisted was decorative and stood in the bedroom again.

He stared at the empty space under the bed no. There was no taking all the damage back now, not that he wanted to. But… it just felt wrong. 

Well.

Now he needed to replace the box, didn’t he?

That was what a boyfriend did after destroying his girlfriend’s private sex toy collection in a jealous, post-murder fugue state. He should replace it with something better.

There was a shop around the corner. Dex had passed it before with you and you had squeezed his hand and laughed under your breath when he looked away too quickly from the window display. It wasn’t because he was shy. Dex wasn’t shy with you anymore. He could put his mouth between your thighs and stay there until you were crying lightning and his name into the pillow, but there was something different about seeing all of it displayed in public: rows and rows of things made for people who didn’t have him.

He went anyway.

The little bell over the door chimed when he stepped inside. A woman behind the counter looked up. “Hi, let me know if you need help finding anything.”

Dex stared at her for half a second too long. “I’m fine.”

Spoiler: he wasn’t.

He walked past the first display and immediately regretted having eyes. Dildos, vibrators, and suction toys. Things in pastel colours and matte black. Things with little labels that promised intimacy from something battery-powered and dead. No. Absolutely not. He wasn’t buying you anything phallic. He wasn’t buying you anything designed to replace a tongue. He wasn’t paying money for a thing that would sit in your drawer and pretend it could do what he did.

He ignored every masturbation item with the offended dignity of a man who had, less than an hour ago, cut your dildo into pieces because it had hurt his feelings.

He wouldn’t buy you any pretty little objects that promised to “hit the right spot,” because Dex’s fingers hit the right spot. Dex’s mouth hit the right spot. Dex knew your body now, and anything that claimed it could do the same made him want to start another fire.

He moved deeper into the store, and that was when he found the restraints.

He picked up a metal pair of padded cuffs with real locks and tested the weight in his palm, expression blank. Good and sturdy. Soft enough not to hurt you unless you wanted it to. He placed them in the basket.

Then silk ties. Black, then red, then a dark blue because he imagined that one against your wrists and had to stand very still for a moment. Rope came next, the kind that would look filthy wrapped around you but would not actually hurt you. 

He found a blindfold and the thought of you wearing it made his mouth go dry. You, trusting him enough to give up sight. You, lying back and letting the world narrow down to what he was doing to you. That was good. That was right. That didn’t replace him. That made him necessary.

Into the basket.

A gag made him pause when he imagined your mouth around it and then imagined not being able to hear every little sound he worked so hard to drag out of you. He frowned at the display for a while, then chose one anyway because some nights, maybe, you would like being made quiet. Some nights, maybe, he would like the sight more than he hated losing the sounds.

Then he saw the collar.

It was not flashy, just black leather, with a small metal ring at the front. His hand closed around it as the leather bent slightly under his thumb. He pictured it at your throat. Pictured his fingers hooking under the ring to pull you close. Pictured you looking up at him with that half-angry, half-wanting expression you got when he was being too much and you liked it anyway.

Mine, he thought.

Not because he wanted to own you like an object, not exactly. Dex was too broken to make the distinction cleanly, but he knew this much: he wanted you choosing it. He wanted you holding your chin up while he fastened it around your neck. He wanted to see it on you and know you had let him put it there.

He put it in the basket.

By then, the sales assistant had started watching him with polite concern.

“Shopping for a gift?” she asked.

Dex looked down at the basket. “For my girlfriend.”

“That’s sweet,” she said, which was such a wild misunderstanding of the situation that Dex only stared at her.

“Yes,” he said finally.

Sweet. Sure.

He added a proper storage box too, black and lockable, because if he was replacing your box, he was replacing it correctly. He added massage oil after checking three labels and rejecting anything that smelled too artificial. He added a small bottle of specialised cleaner because you would complain if he didn’t, and because even in the middle of this deranged little shopping trip, Dex was still painfully, pathetically attentive to the boring practical details of loving you.

At checkout, the woman rang everything up without comment.

Dex kept his eyes forward.

He didn’t look at the wall of vibrators behind her. He didn’t look at the glossy pink boxes promising pleasure in ten different speeds, because if he looked too long, he might start thinking about the one currently melting behind your building, and if he thought about that too much, he might smile.

So he paid, took the bag, and left.

When he returned to your apartment, he arranged the new box carefully. Handcuffs tucked to the side. Rope coiled neatly. Silk ties folded. Blindfold, gag, cleaner. The collar went on top. Maybe he should’ve gotten a leash. Oh well. If you really liked it, he’ll bring you to the store and get you to choose.

Dex stared at it for a moment before he closed the lid and slid the box under the bed where the old one had been.

There.

Fixed.

Not really, of course. Not in any healthy or normal sense of the word.

But when had Dex ever been healthy or normal about you?

—

You came home tired that day

When you unlocked the door, Dex had been waiting in the kitchen, wearing one of the shirts he had slowly migrated into your drawer.

“Hi, baby,” you murmured, already smiling when you saw him.

Dex walked towards you immediately, too fast, probably. He kissed you before you could take off your coat, hands going to your waist, mouth lingering like he had been counting the hours since you left because he had. You laughed into the kiss and pushed at his chest.

“Missed me?”

“Yes,” he said, too honestly.

For a while, everything was fine. You changed out of your work clothes. Dex followed you around like a shadow, trying not to look too often at the bed. He made tea. You drank half of it. You complained about overtime, about your feet hurting, and Dex listened with a deadly seriousness most men reserved for hostage negotiations.

Then you went into the bedroom to put something away. You crouched by the bed to shove your bag out of the way, and that was when you saw the box.

A new box.

It was black, neat, expensive-looking, tucked exactly where the old one used to be.

You pulled it out slowly, already suspicious, because Dex didn’t misplace things. Dex arranged. Dex corrected. Dex replaced. When you opened the lid, you immediately saw the collar laid right on top like a dark little apology ribbon.

For a second, you said, “Oh, wow," because you genuinelyliked it.

It was gorgeous. The cuffs were padded and clearly not cheap. The silk restraints were soft. The rope was smooth, the kind that would not burn if handled properly. The collar was simple black leather, pretty in a way that made your stomach give one stupid little twist before. It was thoughtful. Dex had gone shopping with your body in mind. He had pictured your wrists. your throat, your mouth. The little sounds you made when you were overwhelmed and pretending you weren’t.

And then you remembered the empty space where your actual things should have been.

“Ummm…” You looked up. “Where’s my stuff?”

Dex stood in the doorway, too still. That was answer enough, really.

“What stuff?” he asked, badly.

You stared at him. “What?”

Because really, what the hell did he think he was gonna get away with like that?

“My old box, Dex. The one that was here. The one this is replacing.”

“You don’t use it anymore.”

You blinked. "That's not what I asked.”

Dex shifted his weight, and there was something almost innocent in the confusion on his face. Though not innocent like harmless. Dex was never harmless. He looked innocent like he genuinely couldn’t find the part of the situation where his logic had failed. You had stopped using the old toys. You had him now. He had bought you better things. Things for both of you. In his mind, he had done everything right. Why did it matter? 

“You have me,” he said, like that settled it.

You stared at him for another beat. Then your tiredness warped into irritation. “Dex. Where. Is. My. Stuff.”

His eyes flicked away.

Your stomach sank. “Did you throw it out?”

“No.”

“Did you put it in the dumpster?”

“No.”

“Please tell me you didn’t donate it.”

Dex looked appalled, like that wasn’t his modus operandi. “Of course not.”

“Then where is it?”

He hesitated and Benjamin Poindexter did not hesitate unless the answer was somehow worse than every option you had given him.

“I destroyed and burned it.”

What. The. Fuck?

For a second, you genuinely couldn’t speak.

“I…” you looked empty. “You burned it.”

His mouth tightened. “You don’t use it anymore.”

“Oh my god.” You stood up with the collar still in your hand. “I know I don't use it anymore.”

“Then why—”

“Principle, Dex!”

He frowned, and that made you want to throw the collar at his head.

“Principle,” you repeated, louder. “It was mine. I bought it. You don’t get to decide something is useless and destroy it because you personally don’t like it.”

“You don’t need them,” he said again, and he was starting to feel like a broken fucking record.

“Principle!”

“You have me.”

“Principle, Dex!”

He looked genuinely distressed now, but not because he understood. Not because he had suddenly realized that taking your things from under your bed and burning them was unhinged. He looked distressed because you were upset, because the warmth had drained out of the room and he didn’t know how to get it back without lying about the one thing he couldn’t make himself regret.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. A pathetic last ditch effort, really.

You laughed once. “No, you’re not.”

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

“I said,” he managed through gritted teeth, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry I’m mad.”

Dex went quiet. There it was.

You watched him realize you had him cornered. His face went tense, his eyes a little too dark, his mouth pressed into a hard line. Dex was sorry you looked hurt. He was sorry your voice sounded like that. He was sorry there was a chance you might pull away from him and mean it. But he wasn’t sorry the toys were gone. If he was honest, he was relieved they were gone. He was relieved they were ash. He was relieved they could never sit under your folds again.

“Say it,” you said.

His eyes lifted to yours. “Say what?”

“That you’re not sorry you burned them.”

His throat moved.

“Dex,” you scolded.

He looked away again.

You stepped closer. “Say it.”

“I’m not sorry they’re gone,” he said at last, honest and rough.

Your anger went hot and bright. “Of course you’re not.”

“You don’t need them,” he said, almost pleading now, like if he could just explain it properly, you would understand. “You don’t. You reach for me now. You wake me up when you want something. You pull my hand between your legs. You say my name. You don’t need something fake. You don’t need something that works like—” He stopped, breath hard through his nose. “You don’t need it.”

You stared at him, stunned all over again by the sheer deranged sincerity of it. “You hated it.”

His silence answered for him.

“You hated my toys.”

“They touched you,” he said, as if that explained anything.

“They were objects.”

“They touched you,” he said again, as if he repeating it enough would make you believe.

He said it like he was naming a crime. They touched you. That was the entire case. The entire verdict. In Dex’s head, the old box was not just a box. It was proof of a life before him. Proof that your body had known pleasure without him. 

“You’re jealous of fucking objects,” you said, “Do you hear yourself?”

His mouth tightened.

“You are. Oh my god, you are so fucking jealous.”

“It was made to—” He cut himself off, eyes flashing, dark and humiliated. “You used it instead of me.”

You dragged one hand down your face. “I used it before I knew you.”

Dex swallowed then started, “Then what…”

“That still doesn’t mean you get to burn it!” you exclaimed, cutting him off.

Dex looked genuinely lost for a second, and that made the whole thing worse. He had walked himself straight into a psychosexual spiral and couldn't understand why the conclusion was not obvious to you. You belonged to yourself, yes, fine, he knew that was what he was supposed to think, and he did think that, but your pleasure had become his job, his purpose, his proof that you chose him. The old toys were obsolete. They made him imagine you alone, reaching under the bed instead of reaching for him, and even the thought made his brain go static with jealousy.

“I bought you better things,” he said, smaller now.

You looked down at the box again, then back at him.

“No,” you said. “You bought things that need you.”

He went still, because you were right.

“You bought cuffs because they need your hands. Rope because it needs you to tie it. A blindfold because it makes you important. A gag because you think would look pretty on me. A collar because—” You stopped, glancing at the leather in your hand. Dex’s eyes followed the movement immediately, hungry and ashamed. “Because you wanted to put this on me.”

His breathing changed. 

“You replaced my box with yourself,” you said in deft realisation.

Dex looked at you like you had cracked open his skull and read the ugliest scroll inside it.

“I bought things for us,” he said, but his voice had gone rough.

“You bought things that couldn’t touch me unless you were there.”

His lips parted, closed. Opened again. “I wanted to be there.”

“I know.”

“I should be there.”

“Dex.”

“It should be me.”

Dex looked almost sick, eyes fixed on you, shoulders tight. He was jealous, yes, but the jealousy had gone molten now, mixing with want and shame and the awful fear that you might still want something that wasn’t him.

Your frustration gentles for half a second. Then you remembered how fucking expensive those toys were.

“Principle,” you snapped again, because you needed the word to land in his skull. “Dex, I’m not mad because I desperately needed a vibrator. I clearly don’t. I’m mad you destroyed it.”

“I replaced it.” He had the audacity, even now.

“You replaced it with what you wanted.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“I do like it!” you shouted, then immediately hated yourself for giving him that.

Dex’s eyes flicked to the box.

His face went blank, trying not to startle you further. “I’m sorry.”

“But you don’t regret it.”

He swallowed.

You stepped closer again, and he let you.

He could be terrifying. He could be impossible. He could turn an argument about property into an existential crisis about a lifeless object touching you before him. But when you came close, when your anger had nowhere else to go but into his space, he stayed. He let you corner him. Let you press the collar flat against his chest and watch his whole body react.

“What did you think was going to happen?” you asked, voice low now. “Honestly?”

Dex’s eyes dropped to the collar.

“You thought I was going to come home, find out you burned my things, and what? Say thank you? Let you put this around my neck?”

He looked at the leather in your hand. Then at your face.

The want in him was so obvious it was almost embarrassing.

“You did,” you said because you knew. “You thought you were going to put this on me tonight.”

His breathing went uneven.

“You were going to be all sweet and insane about it, weren’t you? You were going to touch my throat and call me yours and pretend burning my stuff was just a little misunderstanding because the new box is prettier.”

Dex said nothing.

“No,” you said.

He looked up.

“You don’t get to do that,” you told him.

Disappointment flashed behind his eyes, then confusion. Then that needy, miserable focus again, like he didn;’t know where the scene was going anymore but he still wanted to follow you there.

You stepped forward until he backed into the doorframe.

“You don’t get to burn my things and reward yourself,” you said, pressing the collar higher against his chest, up toward his neck. “You don’t get to make this about what you want.”

Dex’s throat bobbed. “What are you doing?”

You smiled but it was slightly sadistic. “What do you think?”

His eyes dropped to the collar again. For one second, he genuinely didn't understand.

Then you lifted it to his throat, and he froze.

His brain went haywire so visibly you could almost see the wires sparking behind his eyes. He had thought about that collar on you. He had probably thought about it all afternoon. He had imagined his fingers hooking beneath the ring to pull you close. He had built the whole fantasy around possession moving outward from him to you, about you wearing the thing he chose, about you looking up at him and letting him see proof that he had replaced everything in your life before him.

But now your hands were at his neck. Now the leather was against his skin. Now your fingers were brushing the vulnerable place under his jaw, and the fantasy inverted so violently he looked like he was falling into an unpredictable void of your lust.

“Oh,” he breathed.

You paused with the buckle still loose.

Dex’s eyes had gone wide and dark, his mouth parted, all his vicious certainty suddenly gone. He looked overwhelmed by the speed of his own neediness. The collar was supposed to mean you were his, in that fucked-up symbolic language he had written in his head. But with you fastening it around him, with your furious hands at his throat, with your body pinning him in place without force, it meant he was yours.

Oh. He knew the difference now.

“Oh my god,” you murmured, studying his now half-lidded eyes. “You like this.”

His lashes fluttered once.

“Dex,” you said, squeezing his cheeks together with one hand. He swallowed against the leather as you buckled it with your other hand.

The tiny click sounded obscene in the otherwise quiet room.

His eyes closed for half a second, and his whole body seemed to shudder inward. When he opened his eyes again, he looked wrecked.

“Color?” you asked. 

Oh.

“Green,” he managed. Because of course it was. 

You pretended not to be pleased as you hooked two fingers through the ring. Dex stared at your hand. You tugged once.

It was barely anything, but he followed immediately.

The sight of it made your anger burn hotter and lower at the same time. Benjamin Poindexter, following one small pull at his throat like his body had decided before his pride could argue. All that violence, all that jealousy, all that insane possessive logic. And here he was, looking at you like punishment was the only language he fully understood.

You pulled him out of the bedroom by the collar, and into the living room, where the good chairs were. 

He looked confused and turned on and miserable, which was exactly what you wanted him to be. He still didn’t fully understand the principle. Fine. You would make him understand by the end of the night.

“Strip.”

He obeyed fast.

You watched the fabric hit the floor and felt your mouth go dry despite yourself. He was all lean muscle and restrained violence, chest rising and falling. It should have been absurd. But it was also fucking unfair how good he looked, how the leather made him seem both more dangerous and more helpless, how his eyes stayed locked on you like he would do anything if you kept looking at him like that.

“Don’t look so eager,” you said.

His jaw flexed. “You put it on me.”

“You bought it.”

“For you.”

“Funny how that worked out.”

Dex’s eyes darkened.

You pushed him back into the chair by the window, the one you usually curled up in with a book. He sat because he wanted you to push him, because being handled by you was the closest thing to absolution he understood. You had the cuffs on your other hand, the ones he had imagined around your wrists, and his gaze followed them with naked hunger.

“Hands behind the chair.”

He hesitated, but because he did not want to. He hesitated because some stubborn, spiraling part of him was still stuck on the same loop, still fighting from inside his own head. He had done everything right. He had removed what you didn’t need. He had bought better things, and you were clearly using them now. Why were you still angry? Why did you still want the old ones? Why wasn’t this enough?

You leaned down, holding the collar ring between two fingers. “Dex.”

His eyes snapped to yours.

“I said hands behind the chair,” he snapped.

This time, he obeyed.

The cuffs clicked shut around his wrists one after the other. Dex tested them once, shoulders pulling tight, then went still, his chest rising hard beneath the collar. You stood in front of him with the key in your palm and watched his eyes move over you, your work clothes, your tired face, your angry mouth. He looked like being denied forgiveness was hurting him. He looked like it was making him harder to breathe.

You stepped closer, close enough that his knees bracketed your legs, close enough that he had to tilt his head back to keep looking at you. The collar put his throat on display.  You could see every swallow, every uneven breath, every tiny betrayal of his body when you touched the ring again.

“I’m not letting you go,” you said.

His lips parted.

“Not until you promise me you’ll buy me new ones.”

Dex’s face changed immediately.

“No.”

You almost laughed. “Excuse me?”

“No.”

You smiled as if he had just fallen into your trap. “Then I guess you’re not going anywhere.”

“No. No, no, no.” The words started coming faster, tumbling out of him with a desperation that made his voice crack. “No, you don’t need them. You don’t need those. You have me. I’m here. I’m right here.”

You narrowed your eyes, but your anger snagged on the way he said it. He was not being smug now. He wasn’t calm, or even really arguing anymore. His wrists pulled once against the cuffs, metal clicking behind the chair, and he looked almost startled by his own helplessness before his eyes found yours again.

“Use me,” he said.

Your stomach tightened. “Dex.”

“Use me,” he repeated, rougher now, pleading. “You don’t need them. You don’t need it. Use me. I’ll do it. I’ll be good. I’ll be so good. Just don’t make me buy you something that replaces me.”

“No one said you were replaceable,” you frowned

“You want them back.”

“Because they were mine.”

“You want them back,” he said again, like he couldn’t hear the difference. “You want them back, but I’m right here.”

You grabbed his face, fingers firm on his jaw, and kissed him before he could say it again. It was supposed to shut him up. It did, for maybe half a second. Then Dex made a sound into your mouth, needy and broken, and started kissing you back like he was trying to climb out of his own skin. His hands flexed uselessly behind the chair. The collar pressed into your fingers when you tugged him closer, and his whole body followed the pull so immediately that heat between you legs through your anger.

You kissed him again. And again. And again, until his breathing was wrecked and his mouth was swollen and his begs had turned into a whine against your lips.

“No,” he whispered when you pulled away. “No, baby, please. Don’t make me. Don’t make me buy those. Use me. Please use me.”

“You don’t get to beg your way out of consequences.”

“I’m not,” he said, even though he absolutely was. “I’m giving you something better.”

“You are giving me a headache.”

“I’m giving you me.”

It shouldn’t have made your heart jump. It shouldn;t have made you look down at him, collared and cuffed and half out of his mind, and think that maybe the worst part was not that Dex was insane. It was that he was insane in ways that made you want to love him more

You stepped back.

Dex’s eyes followed you immediately.

“You want me to use you?” you asked.

“Yes.”

“You want to be useful?”

“Yes.”

“Then watch.”

His face changed into a flicker of confusion first, then anticipation, then frustration when you turned away from him and started unbuttoning your shirt.

Dex went silent so abruptly it almost made you smile. His eyes were locked on your fingers, on each button sliding free, on the thin strip of skin appearing beneath the fabric.

You stripped in front of him because you were angry and petty and tired of him thinking his jealousy got to be the only thing in the room. Your shirt fell to the floor. Then your trousers. Your bra. Your underwear. Dex watched every inch of you like it hurt him not to touch, his wrists straining once behind the chair before he forced himself still.

Dex’s mouth opened, as if he was getting exactly what he wanted, but then you walked to the couch and picked up one of the decorative pillows, the cotton one you usually shoved behind your back when you watched TV. 

Dex’s eyes shifted again as realization crept in.

“No,” he said.

You arched a brow.

His breathing changed. “No.”

“Oh?” You held the pillow in between your legs, watching his eyes go dark and frantic. “You don’t like this?”

“Don’t.”

“You were jealous of plastic, baby. Surely you’re not jealous of a pillow too.”

Dex made a sound that was almost a growl and almost a whine. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t make it sound stupid.”

“It is stupid.” You sank down to the floor in front of him, grinding down on the cushion keeping your eyes on him. “You burned my toys because you were jealous of objects. You’re sitting there in a collar you bought for me because you couldn’t handle a vibrator existing under my bed. And now you’re looking at this pillow like you’re going to kill it.”

His face twisted.

You had meant it to be teasing. Cruel, yes, but controlled. A punishment, a lesson, proof of how ridiculous he was being. But when you settled over the pillow and shifted your hips once, Dex’s reaction was so immediate and visceral that the room seemed to tilt around it.

He didn’t look angry anymore.

He looked distressed.

His wrists jerked against the cuffs, the chair creaking under the force, and his breath punched out of him like he had been hit. You saw his brain do the horrible thing it always did, watched him turn a pillow into another rival, another thing touching you, another thing getting what he wanted while he sat there forced to watch.

“Dex,” you said, but you moved again without thinking. 

His whole body flinched.

“No,” he choked. “No, no, no, no, please.”

You froze.

He was staring at you, eyes wet now, breath coming too fast. He wanted to obey. He wanted to be punished. He wanted to be good. But he also could not bear the sight of you taking pleasure from anything that wasn’t him, even in play, even as a punishment.

“Baby,” you said carefully, uncertain now.

Dex shook his head, almost violently. “Red.”

Oh.

Just like that, you stopped. 

Neither of you had ever used that safeword before, but you were glad he did.

You were off the pillow almost immediately, scrambling to him. 

“Oh,” you whispered. “Oh, fuck, baby, I’m sorry.”

Dex’s gaze snapped to you.

You dropped in front of him, hands going to his face first because you needed him looking at you. His skin was hot under your palms. His eyes were wet, not fully crying yet but close enough. He looked wrecked, and not playfully desperate like usual, not turned on in that cocky way he got when he thought he had pushed you into giving him what he wanted. The sight of you using anything else, even a pillow, even as a punishment, had wrecked him.

“You hate it,” you said softly, almost to yourself. “You actually hate seeing that.”

He nodded pathetically. “Mmmhmm.”

“You said you hated the toys,” you murmured, thumb brushing over his cheek. “I thought you were being insane. I mean, you are being insane, but I didn’t realize it was hurting you like this.”

Dex looked away, ashamed, furious, overwhelmed by being understood too clearly. You leaned in and wrapped your arms around him carefully, pressing your face into his neck. For a second, he didn't move. Then his whole body sagged into you as much as the cuffs allowed, breath trembling against your shoulder, face turning blindly toward your warmth.

“We’re done,” you said. “I’m taking these off.”

You reached behind his neck for the collar first, but the moment your fingers found the buckle, Dex jerked his head to the side.

“Dex.”

“Green,” he said quickly.

You froze.

His voice was rough and wet, the word scraping out of him like he had dragged it up from somewhere raw. “Green.”

“You just said…”

“I know, I know, but—” He swallowed hard, throat shifting against the collar. “Green as long as you use me.”

Your breath caught.

Dex looked at you then, fully, and the tears finally slipped over. His face twisted with it, like he hated himself for crying but couldn’t stop. “Not the pillow. Me. Use me. Please. I don’t want to stop if it’s me.”

“Dex.”

“I need this,” he said, and it came out so naked that it hurt. “I need to know I’m better than a piece of plastic.”

Fuck.

“Oh, baby.” You cupped his face again, thumbs catching the tears before they could reach his mouth. “I know you are. Of course you are.”

“Then why are you still mad?”

The question came out small, almost confused. Because there it was again: the part of him that truly did not understand. The part of him that had made a perfect little equation in his head and couldn't see where it failed. If he was better, why did you care? If you had him, why did the burned things matter?

You sighed, pressing your forehead to his. “Because they were mine.”

Dex shut his eyes.

You felt him breathe, shaky and uneven.

“I’m yours, too.” he whispered.

Your whole body went still.

Fuck fuck fuck. You were going to fold again, were you?

Dex opened his eyes. Damp lashes, ruined mouth, collar snug against his throat. He looked up at you like that was the only answer he had, the only thing he knew how to offer in return. I’m yours, that could balance the scales. Like giving himself over completely should make up for taking the box from you.

You should have argued. Instead, you kissed him.

“Yes,” you whispered against his mouth. “You are.”

Dex made a broken sound, and then he was kissing you back as much as the cuffs allowed, desperate and clumsy, trying to lean into you with his wrists still locked behind the chair. His mouth tasted like salt and need. You kissed him slowly at first, grounding him, giving him something real to focus on that was not the pillow, not the old toys, not the psychosexual spiral eating itself alive inside his head.

“Color,” you murmured.

“Green,” he said instantly.

“Not because you think I’ll be mad if you say red.”

“Green,” he repeated, steadier this time. Your hand slid down to the collar ring, and his breath hitched.

You kissed him until his begging started to lose shape.

It wasn’t really words anymore, just broken little sounds against your mouth, the scrape of his breath, the helpless pull of his wrists against the cuffs every time you shifted in his lap. Dex kept trying to follow you, kept trying to give you more than his body was allowed to give. 

Your hand slipped between you, hiking in his thighs, meaning to wrap around him, to give him pleasure with your fingers. 

Dex jerked so hard the cuffs clicked behind the chair.

“No,” he gasped into your mouth.

You froze immediately. “Color?”

“Green,” he said, frantic. “So fucking green, green, I just— not like that. Please, baby, not like that.”

You pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were wet, pupils blown black, his lips swollen from kissing. The collar sat snug around his throat, rising and falling with every shaky breath.

“Then what do you want?”

Dex swallowed, and the motion pressed against the leather. “Use me.”

Your breath caught.

He looked ashamed of how badly he needed it and too desperate to hide. “Please. I don’t want your hand. I don’t want anything else. I want you on me. I want you to take it from me. I want you to ride me. I want to be what you use.”

“Oh,” you whispered.

His whole face changed at that, like the understanding alone almost broke him.

You climbed into his lap slowly, one knee on either side of his thighs, watching him fight himself not to move. He was already hard beneath you, hot and straining, his body tense with the effort of staying still while you settled over him. His hands flexed uselessly behind the chair. He wanted to touch you so badly it looked like pain.

You took the ring of the collar between two fingers and pulled his face up to yours.

“You sure want me to take what I need from you?”

“Yes,” he breathed, almost frantic now. “Yes, baby. Please. I can do it. I can be good. I can be so good for you.”

Oh.

Then you sank down onto him, so slowly that both of you stopped breathing.

Dex’s head fell back against the chair, mouth open, the sound that left him too raw to be pretty. You felt him stretch you open inch by inch, felt the heat and weight of him filling you so completely that your own voice broke before you could stop it. You had to stop halfway down, fingers tightening around the collar ring, forehead dropping toward his as your body adjusted to his stretch.

“Fuck,” you whispered.

Dex’s eyes opened at once, glassy and wild. “Say it.”

You blinked, barely able to think. “What?”

His voice cracked. “Say I’m better.”

Your heat clenched around him. “Dex.”

“Please,” he begged. “Please, b-baby. Tell me. Tell me I’m better than it.”

You should have scolded him. You should have told him again that this wasn't the point, that you were still angry, that he did not get to turn this into another deranged little competition. But then you sank the rest of the way down, taking him fully, and Dex made a sound so broken and grateful that your whole body went hot.

“You’re better,” you breathed.

He shuddered beneath you, hard enough to make the chair creak. “Again.”

You moved your hips once, slow and deep, and his entire body strained against the cuffs. “You’re way fucking better.”

Dex’s eyes fluttered, his breathing turning ragged. “Again. Please. Again, baby, tell me again.”

So you did.

You started riding him properly, lifting yourself up and sinking back down, bouncing on his length until neither of you could pretend this wasn’t affecting your train of thought. The cuffs rattled behind the chair every time he fought the urge to grab your hips. His thighs flexed under yours, his chest rising too fast, his throat exposed beneath the collar every time you tugged the ring and made him look at you.

“You’re better,” you said, breathless, riding him harder. “You’re better than it.”

Dex groaned, loud and wrecked. “Yes. Yes, fuck, yes.”

“You’re better than the stupid, the vibrator, the rose toy.”

His face fell with pleasure and humiliation, eyes wet, mouth open like every word was going straight through him.

“Better than the box,” you panted. “Better than anything under my bed.”

“Anything,” he echoed, desperate. “Anything. Say anything.”

“You’re so needy,” you whispered, but you were not much better. You were moving faster now, chasing the way he filled you, the way he looked under you, collared and cuffed and entirely yours. “You’re so fucking jealous, baby.”

“I know,” he gasped. “I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just— fuck, don’t stop.”

You grabbed his jaw and kissed him,  barely a kiss at all with the way both of you were breathing. Dex tried to follow your mouth when you pulled back. 

“Look at you,” you murmured. “You just want me to choose you, dont’cha?”

His eyes locked on yours.

You rode him harder, your voice breaking as the pleasure started making your thoughts blur. “You’re better than anything. Better than anything I could buy. Better than anything I could touch.”

Dex looked like he was going to fall apart beneath you.

“Again,” he begged. “Please, again.”

“You’re better than anything,” you gasped, fingers tight in the collar. “Or anyone.”

Dex stopped thrusting his hips up so abruptly you yelped into a halt.

You barely had time to catch your breath before his eyes opened and darkened.

“Anyone?”

Your stomach dropped.

It was one word. One stupid word you had said without thinking because you were dizzy and full of him, because Dex had begged you to tell him he was better and you had.

Oh. Fuck.

“Dex,” you said carefully. “No.”

His muscles flexed. “No?”

“No. We can’t do this.”

He stared at you, still in his lap, warm and shaking from the way you had been riding him. Still close enough to feel how badly he wanted to move, how hard he was holding himself back by force alone.

“Dex,” you tried again, softer this time.

His eyes did not move from your face. “Uncuff me.”

It should have scared you, how fast he switched.

One second, he was pliant beneath you, desperate to be used. The next, his voice had gone flat and enraged, eyes narrowing like a predator. 

But it was still Dex. Your Dex. He would never hurt you.

“Color?” you asked.

“Green,” he said immediately. Then, rougher and impatient, “Uncuff me.”

Your hands were not steady when you reached for the keys, then behind him, squirming because he was still inside you, and his size wasn’t making it easy for you to jostle around like that. 

The cuffs clicked open, and for a second, he only trailed his hands up your thighs he was so gentle, rubbing circles on your sweat-slicked skin.

“I know you had someone before me,” he said.

He knew, because Dex was jealous, not delusional.

He knew you had a life before him, knew there had been men before him, had even heard your friend’s tiny voice over the phone once saying, I met your crazy ex today? while you laughed awkwardly and changed the subject too quickly. He had stood in your kitchen with his hand frozen around a mug, filing that away in some dark corner of his mind.

But knowing was one thing. Hearing you say “anyone” while he was still inside you and your hand was tight in the collar he still wore for you, was another thing entirely. 

Your face went hot. “Obviously.”

“How many?”

“Dex.”

“How many?”

You swallowed. “I’m not talking about my exes while we’re having sex.”

His hand went up to the collar ring, not to pull it off. To press your fingers there. To make sure you were holding it right.

“How many?” he asked again, and this time his voice was demanding.

You tried to climb off him. “Baby, no. You don’t want this.”

Dex moved so fast you barely registered it.

One second you were above him, the next he had you up and over his shoulder, your breath punched out of you in a shocked little yelp. The room tilted. Your hands grabbed at his back, his waist, anything. Then he was putting you down on the couch, bending you over the arm with one hand between your shoulder blades, still wearing the collar. 

“Eyes forward,” he said.

Your thighs clenched at the sound of his voice. “Dex—”

“Eyes forward.”

You hated that you listened. You that your body shivered. 

He pressed in behind you, close enough that he made your knees weak all over again. One hand slid over your hip, shaking with restraint, almost tender before it turned possessive. The other covered kept your ass up for him to line up.  “Tell me how many.”

You exhaled hard. “Three.”

Dex went silent.

Then, softly, terribly, he echoed it, “Three.”

“Before you,” you snapped, trying to sound angry even though your voice was already ruined. “Before I even knew you like this. Before us. Dex, this is stupid.”

He laughed once. It sounded broken. “Names.”

“No.”

“Full names.”

“No, I’m not giving you their full names so you can go insane and hunt them down.”

His breath hitched behind you.

Oh.

That was not the wrong thing to say. That was the worst thing to say. Because now he had pictured it. Now some awful part of him had lit up at the thought, and you felt his body go harder against yours, felt the way his grip tightened like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

“Fine,” he said, trying so hard to compromise. “First names.”

“You don’t want those either.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t,” you whined, “You think you do because you’re jealous and insane and horny and trying to hurt your own feelings.”

His forehead dropped between your shoulder blades.

For one second, he just breathed there, shaking. When he spoke again, his voice was wet.

“First names,” he whispered. “And what was wrong with them.”

He knew it would hurt. Dex wasn’t confused about that. He was not so far gone that he thought hearing their names would make him feel better. He knew it would put pictures in his head he would never be able to scrape out. He knew he would imagine their hands, their mouths, their stupid little claims on you. He knew every detail you gave him would become a weapon turned inward first, he wanted you to press this emotional knife into his ribs just to see if the pain proved how much he loved you.

But that was exactly why he needed it.

Dex didn’t know how to be reassured gently. Soft comfort slid off him too easily. He needed the wound opened first. Needed to be shown the ugliest picture and survive it. It was emotional masochism dressed up as jealousy, and the sickest part was that he knew. He wanted you to hurt him with the truth so your praise would feel earned when it came after.

“Tell me,” he said again, voice breaking at the edges.

“Dex…”

“I need to know,” he said, and the desperation in it cut through you. “I need to know what they did wrong. I need to know I’m better. I need you to say it while I’m fuckin’ deep inside you, while you’re fuckin’ clenching me, baby please.”

You closed your eyes.

His mouth pressed to your back. It was almost a kiss. Almost an apology. Then he pushed into you again, and the sound that tore out of you was so loud it made your own face burn.

Dex groaned behind you, ugly and wrecked. “Tell me.”

You gripped the couch cushion, because fuck it. What the fuck did you owe them anyway?

“Finn.”

His hips snapped forward harder.

You cried out, body jolting against the couch.

Dex groaned like the name had hurt him exactly the way he wanted it to. “What was wrong with him?”

“His nails,” you gasped, already struggling to keep your voice steady. “College boyfriend. His nails were always too long and when he fingered, it hurt. I took it, but then he blamed me when I bled.”

Dex’s hand slid over your stomach, pulling you back into him, his breath breaking against your skin.

“Careless,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“I’m not careless.”

“No,” you said quickly. “No, baby, you’re not.”

“Say I’m better.”

“You’re better.”

He thrust harder, and your answer broke apart into a moan.

“Say it properly.”

“You’re better than Finn,” you choked out. “You’re so much better than him.”

Dex shuddered and you felt it in his chest, in his grip, in the way his mouth dragged wetly over your back.

He was crying, you realised, when you felt hotlittle drops against your spine while he kept fucking you like jealousy had turned him feral. Dominant and ruined at once, giving orders while crying because he had asked for the knife and now wanted you to twist it.

“Next,” he said.

“Dex,” you moaned, shaking your head. “Please.”

“Say red and I’ll —fuck! — stop. Until then…” His fingers tightened around your hip. “Next.”

You tried to breathe. You tried to remember why this was a bad idea. You remember that you didn’t want your stupid dickhead exes in the room with you while Dex was behind you, collared, crying, and pounding into you like every name was a target he needed to hit.

“Matteo,” you managed.

Dex’s rhythm stumbled for half a second, then came back harder.

You sobbed his name.

“What was wrong with him?”

“You don’t want this one,” you managed to hiccup.

“Yes, I do.”

“No, baby. You really don’t.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t amused. He moaned again as he managed, “Tell me.”

“He was a creep,” you finally said, the words scraping out of you. “From my old job. He shared p-private pictures. With his friends.”

Dex stopped breathing, his forehead hit your back again.

“Oh,” he whispered.

It was horrible. 

You felt the tears fall faster now, sliding down your skin while his hand trembled on your waist. For all his violence, this was the part that broke him. Someone had treated you like something to pass around. Someone had treated you like you were anything less than sacred.

“Dex,” you warned softly, because you could feel him thinking.

Dex made a small, broken sound, then moved again, harder, like he could fuck the memory out of your body. You gasped, eyes rolling back. 

“He didn’t deserve to look at you,” Dex said, voice shaking.

“No,” you breathed.

“He didn’t deserve anything from you.”

“No.”

His tears kept falling, pathetic and hot against your spine, even as his body stayed rough behind yours. He had asked for this. He had wanted the wound. Now he was bleeding into it.

“Tell me I’m better,” he begged.

“You’re better than him,” you said quickly, before he could ask, before he could spiral too far away from you. “You’re better, Dex. You don’t make me feel like I’m just here to be shown off. You make me feel wanted.”

He sobbed against your back.

“Again.”

“You’re better than Matteo.”

Harder.

“You’re better than him.”

Harder.

“You’re better because you actually care if I want it,” you gasped, barely able to speak now. “Because you ask. Because you listen. Because even when you’re like this, even when you’re out of your fucking mind, you still need me to want it, too.”

Dex’s whole body jerked.

“Next,” he choked.

You shook your head, cheek pressed to the couch cushion, eyes wet now too. “Dex, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I hate this.”

“Say red, then.”

You couldn’t bring yourself to. Because he was right. You might pretend to hate this, but fuck, you were sick. 

Sick enough for this to get you off. 

You managed a pathetic little, “g-green.”

His breath hitched, satisfied. “Thought so.”

He liked it, too. He liked it like self-punishment. Liked it because it hurt. 

“Last one,” he whispered.

You swallowed around a moan. “Colin.”

Dex’s hips snapped into you so hard you cried out.

The hand on your hip slid up to your chest, holding you back against him as he bent over you, making the most pathetic sound you had ever heard from him.

“What—hnghhh—  was wrong with Colin?”

“He was possessive,” you said, barely coherent. “But not like you.”

Dex went rigid. “Like w-what, then?”

“Shit,” you gasped. “He was controlling. Mean. He wanted to own me, but he didn’t love me. Not like you. He didn’t want to be good for me. He j-just wanted to win.”

Dex was sobbing now.

You could hear it. Feel it. His mouth was pressed to your shoulder, his breath hitching, tears smearing over your skin while his body kept driving into yours with desperate, punishing force. He had you pinned beneath him, yes. He was the one moving you, the one holding you, the one demanding answers. But the collar was still around his throat, and you now managed to trail your hand up and grab the ring. You held the fucking collar and tugged, and he was surprised he didn’t come then and there as he gasped, breaking a little more.

“I’m not him,” he said.

“No.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, t-too.”

“I’d never—” His voice cracked. “I’d never make you feel like that.”

“I know, baby.”

“Tell me.”

“You’re better than Colin.”

His rhythm faltered. “Tell me why.”

“Because you’re mine,” you moaned. “Because you— fuck!— want to be mine. Because you don’t just want to have me, you want me to choose you. You want t-to be useful. You want to be good— hmphh— to me.”

Dex sobbed so hard his hips stuttered.

“Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, fuck, yes.”

“You’re better than all of them.”

“Again.”

“You’re better than Finn.”

He groaned.

“Better than Matteo.”

His grip tightened.

“Better than Colin.”

He started breaking, cracks building through him in these beautiful little fractures. Your pleasure was already rising too fast, your thighs trembling, your voice gone thin and helpless beneath him.

“Dex!” you cried.

“I know,” he whispered, frantic and wet. “I know, baby. I know. I’ve got you. Tell me again.”

“You’re better,” you sobbed. “You’re better than anyone. Anything, Dex, anyone.”

He came with your hand fisted in his collar.

The pull of it dragged a sound out of him that was almost a sob and almost your name, his whole body folding over yours as he spilled into you, shaking so hard you felt it everywhere. You could hear the broken relief in his voice as he kept whispering yours, yours, yours like he could make himself believe it if he said it enough.

That was what tipped you over, when your orgasm hit so hard your whole body seized beneath him.

You cried out into the couch, fingers yanking the collar ring without meaning to, and Dex choked behind you, shuddering again like the pull had gone straight through him. Pleasure tore through you in waves, hot and blinding, your legs trembling, your voice breaking on his name until it didn’t even sound like a word anymore.

Dex held you through it, crying into your back like he was the one who had been ruined.

When it finally ebbed, he stayed folded over you, his mouth pressed between your shoulder blades, breath ragged. Your hand was still caught in the ring of the collar.

For a long moment, neither of you moved.

The couch was too small for both of you, but Dex made it work because Dex always made himself fit wherever you needed him. 

His body was still trembling in little aftershocks, but the violent edge had burned out of him. What remained was his mouth against your shoulder, his hand spread over your stomach, his thumb moving in slow, soothing circles like he was trying to apologize through touch before words.

You could feel the little ring of the collar cool against your skin when his head dipped and nuzzled into the space between your neck and shoulder. 

Fifteen minutes later, he wasn’t crying anymore. His lashes were damp, his breathing uneven, but he had settled down. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, though he still wasn’t sure for what.

You were too boneless to answer properly. Your whole body felt heavy and melted into the cushions, your skin still humming everywhere he had touched you. You only reached back, clumsy and tired, and found his hand.

Only then did you realise that it was red from how hard he was pulling at the handcuffs. Because despite the fuzzy liner, it was still metal underneath.

Dex threaded his fingers through yours immediately. That was answer enough for him.

He kissed your shoulder again. Then the back of your neck. Then your cheek when you turned your head just slightly. 

These were small, careful kisses. Sweet, almost shy.

His voice stayed low when he spoke again. “I’ll be good.”

You closed your eyes.

The jealousy had calmed, but he still needed to be chosen. 

Dex held you like service. Like worship. Like if he could keep you warm enough and safe enough, maybe it would balance out everything else he was.

His hand slid over your side, checking without asking. He smoothed your skin gently over your hip and your thigh. His mouth touched the back of your shoulder, and his breath relaxed when you relaxed into him instead of pulling away.

You should have been angry.

You were angry, maybe, somewhere far away. Obviously, there were things to say later. Things about boundaries and consequences and the fact that Benjamin Poindexter could not solve every insecurity by turning it into sex so absolute it felt like a salvation. 

But right now, Dex was curled around you like a guard dog who had been allowed into bed after making a big mistake, and you couldn’t bring yourself to bring it up.

His big arms were careful around your body, face pressed to your skin. The collar still snug at his throat because he had not asked you to take it off, because maybe he liked the reminder that even when he got like that, he was still yours.

Your fingers brushed the ring lazily.

Dex melted immediately.

“Oh, what the hell,” you mumbled with a hazy smile, mostly into the couch cushion. “I don’t need those toys anyway.”

Dex tried not to look smug, but you felt it. 

You knew what that little hitch of breath meant, the way his mouth pressed to your shoulder and stayed there, hiding whatever painfully pleased expression had crossed his face. 

You didn't have the strength to scold him for it.

He kissed your shoulder again, grateful this time.

Still, you knew you had just signed a death warrant for Finn, Matteo, and Collin.

You hadn’t given Dex their full names, but Dex had heard enough. He could find people with less. He had found you, hadn’t he? 

You knew they were as good as dead. And if Dex could destroy and burn your old toys with that much passion, you couldn’t imagine what he would do to living men who had actually hurt you. Whatever came for them would not be quick or merciful. You knew that.

You shouldn’t want that.

On principle, you shouldn’t want that.

On the principle that you were better than them, that you were obviously morally superior, that you should not want three men dead just because they had once made you feel small, even if they deserved it.

But then Dex nuzzled closer in his devotion. His lips brushed your shoulder, and even half-conscious, he murmured your name like a prayer. His hand slipped over your stomach, protective now, his thumb moving in small circles like he was still trying to soothe you from your last.

You looked down at him and thought, I hope you make them beg.

Oh, principles.

Who needed those anyway?

—end.

Dex taglist : @itsdynotdaddy @diabolicallydownbad @doesanyonereadthis @meicore @pixie2k5 @bibiishin @starlitflora @pearlstiare @glorybeat @stardustworlds @castawaybarnes @supervampireflame @not-the-teen-witch @billybonesxx @ultimatewolverine @treetrees-world-of-imagiation @bitch-spaghetti-o @lostinthes4uce @cotton-eee @weallhaveadestiny @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @moonbug333 @yujyujj @mattdexx @lostfallenangelsblog @bloomsberryfairy @flimsysquid @abbotfan @leonetta2014 @ficcharsimpsblog @odairtrqsh @ugh-whytho @noonenuts @akiyhara @genya1617 @itzrachel04 @avidreader73 @quicksilver21 @scarlet48

Please ask or message if you want to be added to the dex general taglist!

Let me know if I missed anyone!

[aquaticmercy]

ngl now I kinda need a fic where Leo asks for a sibling (girl dad Dex🙏🏻🙏🏻)

This ask is referring to this story!

I’ll probably do a longer explanation for this another time because I’m getting so many girl dad! Dex! But I can’t see reader wanting to get pregnant until things are more stable, so maybe after DDBA season 2, or even season 3, whatever that would look like.

But if Leo ever asked for a little sister, Dex would take that very seriously.

Leo says, very sweetly, on his fifth or sixth birthday, that all he wants is a baby sister. Dex looks at you like your son has just handed him a mission from a divine hand.

And obviously, Mommy and Daddy get to work while Leo is at school.

Then, what if, nine months later, you have another boy?

Dex loves him, of course. That’s his baby. His son. Leo’s little brother. He’s obsessed the second he sees him. But also, that was not what Leo asked for, so Dex is already leaning over your hospital bed, brushing your sweaty hair back from your face, kissing your forehead like he’s the most devoted husband on earth, and going, “We’ll try again.”

And you, exhausted and sore and still stupidly in love with him, just blink up at him like, okay. Sure. Whatever you say, handsome.

Because pregnancy with Dex actually there this time?

Both wonderful and dangerous for your self-control.

Dex was hovering and fussing. Dex was acting like your body being swollen and tired and needy was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Dex touching your stomach like it belonged to him, l smiling every time the baby kicked, and seeing Leo experience the wonder of you growing life? Priceless.

And every time you complained about being tired or sore, he’d look so smug, like, yeah, baby, I know. I did that. And then of course he’d be super attentive.

And you hated how much you loved it.

You loved him being so focused on you. You loved him being more possessive than normal (if that was even possible). You loved the way he treated every pregnancy like proof that you were his wife, his home, his entire world.

So when he says you need to try again?

Well.

Leo did ask nicely.

[aquaticmercy]

Sleepover

Summary : Dex loves being a father, but one child-free weekend is all it takes to remind you he’s always going to be your embarrassingly needy husband first.

Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | you and Dex have a son called Leo

Warnings/tags : dad/husband!Dex x mom/wife!reader, fluff-ish! explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail as per usual), service switch!Dex dirty talk, possessive behaviour, tracker mention, praise kink, light power dynamics, hair-pulling/scratching, overstimulation, implied all-day sex. A character called Jonathan is mentioned to be your best friend. (let me know if I missed anything!)

Word Count : 4k

Requested by : anon

Notes : Please bear with me, I’ll try to get through all the comments for this series ASAP, feel free to send more ideas in the meantime. Enjoy!

Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!

Dex loved Leo.

He loved his son so much it made him twice as dangerous and three times more paranoid. He checked the windows multiple times at night. He could identify three different kinds of “Daddy!” from across the apartment and tell you whether it meant hungry, sleepy, bored, or trying to climb something he should not be climbing.

He loved Leo.

He also missed you.

Not in the sweet, sentimental way, though there was plenty of that, too. But he was satisfied in that department. After all, he now spent most of his evenings cuddling up to you and Leo, being a father, being a family.

No, he missed you in the way that made his teeth grind when you walked past him in one of his old shirts that had gotten too tight for him. He missed you in the way his hand would find your hip in the kitchen, fingers digging in for half a second before Leo came barrelling in with a toy dinosaur and a very urgent question about whether sharks had friends.

You had a sex life. It was just… hidden, as it should be with a child in the house. It had become a series of quickies instead of what Dex called “proper” sex.  

Sometimes, it was a hand over your mouth in the ensuite bathroom when Leo had his one-hour naps. Sometimes, it was Dex on his knees between your thighs during Leo’s nursery hours, one eye still half on the clock because pick-up was at three. Sometimes, you were bent over on the mattress with the TV just to hide the sound, Dex pressed against your back, breathing hot against your ear as you whispered, “we have to be quiet, baby.” After all, it was two AM and Leo was fast asleep. 

He hated it.

Well, not the sex. Never the sex.

He hated having to hold back. He hated having you biting your own wrist because you couldn’t make noise. He hated stopping when you were both still coming down from a high because the nursery called to say Leo had eaten half a crayon. He hated pretending he didn’t want to drag you back to bed every single time you smiled at him over your coffee.

So when Jonathan finally moved in with his boyfriend and mentioned, casually, that the second bedroom was finally set up, Dex said, “Leo could sleep over there.”

“Oh, baby,” you said, nearly melted. “You’d let him do that?”

Dex blinked.

You looked at him like this was growth. Like this was him learning to trust the world, one sleepover at a time.

“You trust him,” you said, smiling, folding one of Leo’s tiny shirts, looking at him like he had just taken some huge emotional step forward. Like he was healing. Like this was about trust and healthy boundaries and letting your son spend time with people who loved him.

Dex stared at you for one long second. Then he said, “Yes.”

Which was not technically a lie.

He did trust Jonathan because you trusted Jonathan.

That was how Dex’s world worked. He didn’t really believe in people. He believed in you. If you said Johnathan was safe, then Johnathan was safe enough. With precautions.

After all, already had a tracker in Leo’s shoe.

Just in case.

But you didn’t need to know that right then, because you were smiling at him like he was becoming a better man, and Dex didn’t have the heart to tell you that his intents were significantly less noble.

You bit your lip. “That’s really good, Dex.”

Dex nodded once, solemnly, like his motives were not currently dragging themselves through every filthy thought he had been forcing down for months.

You asked Jonathan if he could take Leo for one night.

Then Dex, with absolutely no shame, asked for two.

Jonathan squinted at him and said yes, as if saying I know what you’re doing but I just can’t prove it yet. 

“Two?” you asked later, amused.

Dex adjusted Leo’s overnight bag like the placement of his pajamas was a matter of national security. “He likes Jonathan.”

That was how Leo ended up being picked up by Uncle Jonathan on a Friday night. You kissed Leo goodbye at the door and told him to be good. Dex crouched down, fixed the strap on his bag, and said, very seriously, “Call Mommy if you need anything.”

Leo nodded. “Okay, Daddy.”

“And don’t open the door when Uncle Jonathan’s not there.”

“I know.”

“And if there’s an emergency—”

“Dex,” you said gently.

Dex stopped.

Leo hugged him around the neck. “I’ll be okay, Daddy.”

For one second your heart ached because he really was trying. He really did love him. He really was letting him go.

Then the door shut, and the apartment was quiet.

You turned to Dex with a kind smile. “I’m proud of you.”

Dex lifted his eyes to you, sheepish and loaded all at once, though the former didn’t last very long.

And that was when you realized.

Oh.

Oh.

That was not the look of a man reflecting on his progress as a father. That was the look of a man who had just successfully cleared the house.

“Dex,” you said slowly.

He stepped toward you.

You tilted your head “You did not send our son to my best friend’s place just so you could—”

“Yes.”

Your mouth fell open. “Benjamin.”

“You trust Jonathan,” he said, calm and absolutely shameless, even though you only called him that when you were annoyed. “Leo is safe.”

You folded your arms. “And?”

Dex’s eyes dropped to your mouth. “And I miss my wife.”

That shut you up. Because fuck, when said it like that... 

It wasn’t charming or teasing. It wasn’t even fully dirty at first. Just honest and hungry in a way that made your stomach turn over.

“Dex…” you whined a little as his arms wrapped around you.

“I’m sorry,” Dex said, the apology coming out almost muffled against the side of your neck. His hands were gripping, careful at first, like he was trying to prove he could behave even while every part of him clearly had no intention of doing so.

Fuck. 

“Mmm. I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured again, mouth brushing the sensitive place beneath your ear. “I just wanted time alone with you.”

You were supposed to stay mad.

Really, you were.

Because he had let you stand there, proud of him, all wide-eyed with affection, while he stood in front of you pretending this was some great parental milestone and not a tactical operation.

“You are unbelievable,” you said, but your voice had already lost too much of its edge.

Dex noticed and used this time to slide under the hem of your shirt, palms warm against your waist, thumbs pressing into skin like he had been thinking about doing it all day. Maybe all week. Maybe for months.

“We have sex,” you managed, even as your head tipped back before you could stop it.

Dex kissed down your throat, devastatingly patient. “Not like this.”

Your breath caught.

He lifted his head just enough to look at you, and the expression on his face was too soft to be smug and too hungry to be innocent. His eyes moved over you like he was remembering every version of you he had ever had.

“Not like before,” he said. “Not like the old apartment.”

Your mouth went dry.

“The old apartment?” you repeated, weakly, because apparently your body had decided to betray every principle you thought had.

Dex’s fingers flexed against your ribs, trailing the line of your bra, pawing and unhooking it at the back.

“Yeah,” he said, and there was a little smile in his voice now, like he knew exactly what he was doing to you. “When I could have you wherever I wanted.”

“Dex.”

“The couch,” he said, kissing the corner of your mouth. “The kitchen counter, the hallway, that stupid little table you kept saying we were going to break.”

You swallowed. “We did break it.”

Dex’s smile finally fully formed on his mouth. “Yeah.”

You should have pushed him away. You should have told him that this was not the point, that he could not just send Leo away for two nights and then look at you like that and expect you to forget you were annoyed.

But his hands were under your shirt now, and his mouth was on your jawline, and his body was crowding yours back against the door like he had been waiting forever to stop pretending he was a reasonable man.

“You used to make so much noise for me,” he murmured.

Your stomach flipped. “Benjamin.”

“I know,” he said immediately, smaller this time. One hand came up to cup your face, thumb brushing your cheek with a tenderness that made the heat tummy pool low. “I know. I’m sorry.”

And he was.

He was sorry. He knew he had been selfish. He knew this had been more about him than he had let on. But he also looked at you like he had missed you so badly it had been eating him alive .

“I love being his dad,” Dex said, forehead pressing to yours. “I do. I love him. I love him so much I don’t know what to do with it half the time.”

“I know,” you whispered.

His eyes shut for a second. “But I miss you,” he said. “I miss this. I miss not having to stop. I miss not having to listen for footsteps. I miss having you without half my brain waiting for Leo to wake up.”

Your anger dipped so fast it was almost embarrassing.

Because you knew Dex loved Leo completely. He loved being a father in the only way Dex could love anything, which meant his entire nervous system had become a weapon. 

But he loved you first. He had loved you before the nursery bags and bedtime stories and little shoes by the door. He had loved you before this spine was inhuman, before Fisk took you. He loved you in that old apartment, on every surface, in every second for the rest of his life.

And he missed his wife. Not Leo’s mommy. No, he got her every day. And though he loved you now more than anything in the world, he missed bratty, whiny, car-sex-in-the-FBI-garage you.

“You could have just told me that,” you pouted.

Dex opened his eyes. “Would you have said yes to two nights?”

You stared at him and sighed, though your lips twitched before you could stop them. “Unbelievable.”

“I know.”

“You put a tracker on him, didn’t you?”

Dex went very still, and you sighed.

“It’s a very small tracker,” he managed.

“Oh my God.”

You wanted to be mad again. You really did. You wanted to lecture him about boundaries and normal parenting and how other fathers managed sleepovers without turning them into covert security operations.

But then he kissed you again, sweet and apologetic, and your hands slid up his chest anyway.

Why were you mad again?

Something about growth. Something about trust. Something about your husband being a paranoid, tactical, emotionally stunted man who loved your son so much it scared him and wanted you so much he had apparently planned an entire weekend around it.

“You’re still in trouble,” you whispered against his mouth.

Dex nodded. “Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to just fuck your way out of this.”

His hand slid around your waist, pulling you closer.

“No?” he asked, unconvinced.

“Hmm,” you said, already breathless.

Dex kissed the corner of your mouth, then your cheek. Then, he nipped at your lower lips. 

“Okay,” he murmured. “Then I’ll make it up to you.”

—

Five minutes later, you were on the kitchen counter, thighs trembling around Dex’s shoulders, one hand braced behind you and the other twisted helplessly in his hair.

He had gone to his knees like worship.

He was not even pretending like he was anything other than starved for you. His hands gripped your hips hard enough to keep you exactly where he wanted you, dragging you closer every time your body tried to squirm away from the intensity.

“Dex,” you mewled, and your voice cracked on his name.

Your hand flew to your mouth out of habit. Out of pure, pathetic muscle memory.

The second you did it, Dex stopped.

Not fully, but just enough to make you feel the loss, enough for his mouth to hover against your core while he made the most wrecked, desperate sound you had ever heard from him.

A whine, you realized, frustrated and almost hurt.

His fingers closed around your wrist, gentle but firm, pulling your hand away from your lips, pinning them to the marble. 

“No,” he breathed, voice ruined. “Baby, don’t do that.”

You stared down at him, already dizzy, already too far gone for this conversation.

“The neighbours,” you whispered.

Dex’s eyes lifted to yours, deeply devoted, “they won’t hear.”

You blinked. “What?”

He kissed the inside of your thigh, tender enough to make you shiver.

“They won’t.”

Your brain struggled through the haze of his tongue lapping you, like kitten licks for now. It would be adorable if it wasn’t somewhere so fucking obscene. “Dex. What does that mean?”

“I soundproofed the shared walls.”

For one second, everything stopped. From your breath to your thoughts to your ability to pretend you were still even remotely in control.

“You what?”

“Last week,” he said, as calmly as if he had changed a lightbulb. “When you were at work.”

You stared at him. And the bastard looked up and looked proud.

“Oh my god,” you whispered. “You had a whole fucking game plan.”

His hands tightened around your thighs. “Hmm.”

“So you could hear me?”

His eyes shifted, almost wicked. That was the wrong question. Or maybe it was exactly the right one.

Dex’s mouth parted slightly, his breath warm against you, and suddenly he looked less like your husband and more like a man who had been surviving on scraps for months and had finally been given permission to feast.

“So I wouldn’t have to stop,” he said.

Your whole body went weak.

Fuck, it worked. 

“You’re insane,” you said, but it came out like praise.

Dex smiled against you.“I know.”

“You’re actually insane.”

“I know.”

You opened your mouth to argue. But then he pressed his tongue flat against you and the argument died immediately.

Your fingers tightened in his hair, head tipping back. The first real sound that left you was small, shaky, almost embarrassed.

Dex groaned like it hurt him.

“Mm, there,” he murmured, dragging the word against your skin. “That’s it.”

You tried to look down at him, but the sight nearly undid you.

Dex on his knees in your kitchen, sleeves pushed up, hands spread possessively over your thighs, face flushed with hunger and triumph. He looked focused, like the entire world had narrowed to you, your body, your voice, and the way you fell apart when he refused to let you hide from him.

You made another sound, louder this time.

His eyes shut.

“Fuck,” he breathed, almost reverent. “I missed that.”

The heat in your face burned worse than anything else.

“Dex—”

“No,” he said, and his hand slid up to your waist, holding you steady when you nearly slipped against the counter from all the slick mess you were making. “Don’t get shy now, baby.”

You shuddered.

He kissed you down there again, slower, meaner, sweeter somehow, like he was proving a point.

Fuck, he was right.

You’d forgotten how loud you used to be.

You’d forgotten the old apartment, the nice one Dex used to have before you, the thin curtains, the table, the way Dex used to fuck you in every surface and like he needed to mark the whole place with proof that you loved him. You’d what it felt like to have nowhere to be quiet for. 

You broke on a gasp, and this time you didn’t cover your mouth.

Dex looked up at you like you had given him something holy. “That’s my girl.”

And then he kept going.

After that, Dex got worse.

Because once you stopped covering your mouth, once you let him hear you, he lost whatever restraint he had been pretending to have.

After you came on his mouth on the counter, he wasted no time bending you over.

When you yelped, he only smiled.

“That’s it,” he said, voice rough. “Don’t hide from me.”

“Dex—”

“Missed this,” he said, stretching in you as you let out a lewd whine. “Missed you being needy for me.”

There were rules, of course.

Leo’s room was out of bounds, obviously. It was a no brainer. The couch was out too, because Leo played there too much, built pillow forts there, watched cartoons there, fell asleep there with sticky fingers and his dinosaur blanket. 

Most everything else was fair game.

The whole weekend became heat and orders and laughter that kept turning into gasps. You were on top of him half the time, because he asked you to. You scratched your nails down his back hard enough that his breath caught and his eyes went unfocused for half a second.

Then he laughed, pleased with himself. Clearly, it didn’t take much for you to get back into form.

“Oh,” he murmured, almost smiling as he tried to edge himself in you yet again. “T-there she is.”

“Shut up.”

“No.” His hands found your hips. “Fuck, I missed you mean.”

He got worse when you pulled his hair. Worse when you told him what to do. Worse when you got impatient and shoved at his shoulder, because Dex, terrifyingly, liked being handled by you. He liked being told where to go. He liked being praised when he listened. Still, he would switch the roles in a heartbeat if that was what you wanted.

“Come on, baby,” he murmured later, voice ruined against your ear, fingers deep in you. “You can give me one more.”

“Dex, I…”

“You used to be so good at this, huh? Going again when I tell you to.” His mouth brushed nipped at your jaw. “I know you still are.”

Your whole body went hot. “You’re disgusting.”

“I know.”

“Filthy.”

“I know.”

And that was the thing. He kept saying it so shamelessly, knowing he had nothing else to hide behind. Fuck, he looked so conceited once he realise he’d pulled this off.

By Saturday night, you were wrecked and giddy and half-feral, wearing his shirt badly and telling him he was the most deranged husband alive.

Dex only kissed your shoulder and said, “But I’m yours.”

As if that explained the way he melted when you praised him, then got worse when you pulled him closer and told him not to be so gentle.

By Sunday morning, the apartment was ruined in invisible ways.

There was no evidence left, because everything had to be spotless before Leo came home. The sheets were changed. The counters were wiped and bleached. The hallway was clear and the bathroom was scrubbed. So really, nothing was out of place except the ache in your thighs, the scratches on his back, and the marks you both left on each other's bodies.

But hey. Mission accomplished, right?

Dex laid beside you, one hand on your waist, looking pleased with himself.

“You’re smug,” you mumbled.

“I’m happy.” He smiled into your shoulder.

You closed your eyes, exhausted, sore, and deeply annoyed by how peaceful you felt.

Then you thought to yourself, traitorously: Leo was gonna have sleepovers once a month. 

—

Leo came running in that afternoon, bag bouncing against his little back, dinosaur clutched under one arm.

“Mommy!”

You crouched just enough to catch him, kissing the top of his head as he barreled into you. “Hi, baby. Did you have fun?”

He nodded quickly, already halfway through his report before you had even finished hugging him. “I had pancakes and Mark has a biiiig plant and I slept in the blue room and I wasn’t scared.”

“That sounds amazing,” you said, smoothing his hair back.

Leo pulled away just enough to look at you properly. Not at your clothes or at anything obvious. He just looked at your face, with that strange little focus he got. 

His brows pinched together. Maybe it was his superhuman precognition, knowing your legs would hurt when you got up. Maybe you just looked a bit… drained.

“Mommy’s tired.”

You went very still. Behind you, Dex froze, too.

Jonathan, still standing by the door with Leo’s overnight bag in one hand, looked between all three of you and raised an eyebrow.

You smiled too quickly. “A little bit, sweetheart.”

Leo turned to Dex with the full seriousness of a child delivering medical advice. “Daddy, we should let Mommy rest today.”

“Good idea, Leo.” Dex’s mouth curved up, but he recovered quickly, pressing a kiss to Leo’s temple like he was not the entire reason Mommy needed rest in the first place.

Jonathan looked at Dex. Then at you. He raised his hands and stepped back with a sigh like, I knew it. 

“I don’t want any details.”

—end.

Dex taglist : @itsdynotdaddy @diabolicallydownbad @doesanyonereadthis @meicore @pixie2k5 @bibiishin @starlitflora @pearlstiare @glorybeat @stardustworlds @castawaybarnes @supervampireflame @not-the-teen-witch @billybonesxx @ultimatewolverine @treetrees-world-of-imagiation @bitch-spaghetti-o @lostinthes4uce @cotton-eee @weallhaveadestiny @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @moonbug333 @yujyujj @mattdexx @lostfallenangelsblog @bloomsberryfairy @flimsysquid @abbotfan @leonetta2014 @ficcharsimpsblog @odairtrqsh @ugh-whytho @noonenuts @akiyhara @genya1617

Series specific taglist: @genya1617 @riverjane-d @eaumyth

Please ask or message if you want to be added to the dex general / series specific taglist!

Let me know if I missed anyone!

[aquaticmercy]

I can imagine after Dex returns home, he’s getting progressively more relentless because there’s nothing more he wants to do than to press reader against the mattress, but she won’t let him since Leo’s in the house. So the moment Leo’s away at a sleepover or at his Johnathan’s place, Dex is ON HER.

Since you’re taking requests, could I request that? However, feel free to decline!!

I love this request!!! Will be posting it shortly 🫶🫶🫶🫶

[aquaticmercy]

what if the reason Dex saves Matt in DDBA S2 episode 1 is because Daredevil is his son’s favourite superhero😭

Dex’s Son Has a Favourite Superhero. It’s Daredevil.

TW/Tags jealousy, implied violence, you and Dex have a son called Leo, Husband! Dex x Wife! Reader (lmk if you I missed anything)

WC 711

Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!

The reason Dex saves Matt in Cherry’s apartment isn't because he cares about Matt.

It’s because Leo once told him Daredevil was his favourite superhero.

And Leo obviously doesn’t know the history. He doesn’t know what Daredevil means to Dex, and he uneasily doesn’t wanna tell him he once wore the suit either because that’s just way too long and complicated to explain. 

Leo is four. Leo just thinks Daredevil is cool. Leo says Daredevil has horns, just like a Carnotaurus. 

Unfortunately, that’s enough to completely rewrite Dex’s priorities.

Because now Daredevil can’t die. Not because Dex likes him. But because Leo would be sad.

And then you make it worse because when Dex brings it up, clearly already weird and jealous about it, you just shrug like, “Matt’s got valid points. The work he’s doing is good, even though he doesn’t finish the job.”

Which is true.

Annoying, but true.

Obviously he lacks the conviction to actually kill his enemies, and Dex does point that out. But still. Matt is trying to help people.

And Dex takes this in the worst possible way because he’s Dex.

Because in Dex’s head, it’s not just, Leo likes Daredevil.

It becomes, Leo likes Daredevil because Daredevil is good.

Then it becomes, You think Matt is good.

Then it becomes, You think Matt is better than me.

Because what if Matt’s the kind of good man you wanted, and Dex is just the thing you ended up loving by accident?

Then suddenly Dex is standing there, completely silent, spiralling himself into a void of emotional fucking ruin because his son’s favourite superhero and your (mildly) approving comment have turned into a delusional proof that you secretly wish you’d married someone else.

And the worst part is Dex can’t even be angry about Leo liking him. Leo doesn’t know. Leo’s innocent. Leo just has his tiny little moral compass and his tiny little superhero opinions, and Dex would rather pull his own teeth out than make Leo feel bad for loving something.

So all that jealousy has nowhere to go. It just sits in him. Maybe he kills a couple of task force agents while spiraling like, see? I can beat up bad guys, too. Even better, I can make sure they don’t stand up again, unlike stupid Matt and his stupid suit and his stupid no-kill rule.

When he comes home, he just sits on the bed staring at nothing because we won’t punish Leo for admiring Daredevil, and he won’t punish you for admitting Matt has a point, so he just turns it inward and starts quietly convincing himself that of course this was always going to happen. Of course you’d eventually realise Matt is the better man. Of course Leo would look at Daredevil and see a hero, then look at Dex and see whatever Dex is.

It’s a full jealous husband/dad spiral.

So you have to spend the entire night convincing him that no, baby, of course not, you do not prefer Matt Murdock over him.

It’s one AM and Dex just refuses to sleep because he can’t. You kiss the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t want Matt.”

Another kiss, this time to his cheek.

“I don’t love Matt.”

You press your lips to his temple.

“I didn’t marry Matt.”

Then, a small kiss to his brow.

“I didn’t have a son with Matt.”

That one finally gets to him, because his hands finally come up to your waist like he finally accepts your declaration of love.

“And Leo liking Daredevil doesn’t mean he loves you less,” you say. “It doesn’t mean I love you less, baby.”

Dex looks at you then, and eventually he does understand.

He’s not the biggest fan of it, but he understands.

Leo loves Daredevil. You don’t want Leo hurt. Dex doesn’t want Leo hurt. Therefore Daredevil stays alive.

That is literally the whole equation. His priorities are:

You.

Leo.

Things that make you or Leo happy.

Things that keep you or Leo from being sad.

Everyone else can die or fuck off into nothingness and he literally wouldn’t care.

And fortunately (or unfortunately) for Matt, he’s been promoted to category three by a four-year-old with a Carnotaurus lunchbox.

(I think it would be funny if Dex asks Leo to help by giving crayons and letting him very carefully colour parts of the knife for Matt. Obviously, he can’t see it but will feel the waxy crayon. So he’ll show the knife to Karen who’s just like what the fuck.)

[aquaticmercy]

Any Bucky fics soom

I’ve got a Bucky Blurb and Bucky fic in the works for (hopefully) this weekend! Also working on a new avengers! Bucky x mermaid!reader and a dex x reader with ex!Bucky, but a teeny bit stuck with those 😅

[aquaticmercy]

Aaah I've been waiting for this!!!

Does what happens in ddba S2 happen in this? Does the reader know that he's bullseye? Would he kill Vanessa if the story had continued?

Could reader and dex and leo escape somewhere nice and live their lives peacefully?

do you think dex and reader will have kids again?

I only ask because dex strikes me as such a girl dad!

This ask is referring to this story!

Omg!! Okay so yes, you definitely know Dex is Bullseye.

Between being given the moniker during his sentence, his sentencing in season one and all the work you’ve done trying to prove that yes, Dex has done horrific things (including killing Foggy) but he also didn’t act alone, there’s no way you don’t know. You know exactly who your husband is.

I do think the events of DDBA season 2 still happen in this universe, but Dex’s motivations are slightly modified.

Dex sees Matt as the closest thing to an ally. I definitely think he wants Matt to protect his family if he ever dies because he’s probably one of the only people who can. and Matt’s like ??? You moved back in with your wife? You have a son?

Most people knew that Dex was married, but not everyone knew of Leo. I’d like to think you took a witness protection-adjacent plea with the government to keep Leo off the books with, considering how many enemies your husband had made. Maybe even the visits you had with Dex while he was in prison/the mental institution were kept a secret. Part of this plea would probably also mean that you and Leo would have to use your maiden name in official documents, and Dex secretly hates this. He still calls him Leo Poindexter, and honestly, you prefer it that way).

In this version of the story, when Dex kills anti-vigilante task force, it isn’t just because they’re corrupt. It’s because they’ve started targeting superpowered people, and Leo is a mutant.

So for Dex, that immediately becomes personal.

And yes, I still think he would kill Vanessa if the story continued. Vanessa knows you and Leo exist. Vanessa leveraged your existence against him. That means she has to die.

To Dex, that’s not just revenge. That’s balance. That’s finishing what needs to be finished. That’s setting an example for his son that you don’t leave threats alive just because they think they’re powerful enough to get away with it. 

And honestly, I don’t think Dex would mind dying after that.

If Vanessa was dead, and no one else truly knew about Leo (the only people left who knew he existed were now people who would never hurt him), he’d consider that job done. He’d die happy thinking he protected his family.

But of course, Dex doesn’t die. Maybe Karen doesn’t kill him when Matt tells her of Leo (this would be an interesting perspective, to see Karen trying to wrap her head around the fact that Dex could love anyone at all, let alone a child / or @riverjane-d also mentioned in a comment an interesting possibility where you are the one to stop Karen from shooting Dex instead of Matt!)

I think post-season 2, Dex would take the government contract with Mr. Charles because he wants a paycheck enough to move you and Leo somewhere quiet. The suburbs, maybe. Somewhere with space, land, and enough room to set up a proper security system so he can keep watch while he’s gone.

I don’t know about living peacefully, though. Maybe he could go into domestic bliss for 3-6 months at a time, but eventually Dex will find a threat that needs to be solving, and he has no problem polishing his knives for this.

And yes, I do think Dex and you could have another kid.

Honestly, Dex would give you another baby the second you asked. That, or Leo says he feels lonely and wants a sibling, and Daddy immediately decides that something must be done about it.

So while Leo is at school, Dex gets to work with you. For the good of the family, obviously.

And if it’s a girl, he’s done for. She’d be a tiny version of you. A little girl with your eyes and your kindness and your attitude, and Dex would love her just as much as he loves Leo.

[aquaticmercy]

Do you think having a child makes Dex a better person? (Love What Makes a good man btw!)

Dex’s Very Own Three-Body Problem

TW/tags protective father! Dex, discussions of violence and murder, you and Dex have a son called Leo, Husband! Dex x Wife! Reader (lmk if you I missed anything)

WC 1k

Part of What Makes a Good Man? (I think it could still be read as a one shot, but a couple of references would be missed)

Okay so I’d like to compare the relationship between you, Dex, and your son Leo to a three-body problem.

The three-body problem is the challenge of calculating the movement of three celestial objects that are interacting with one another through gravity. While predicting the orbit of two bodies (like the Earth and the Moon) is relatively straightforward, adding a third mass makes the system entirely unpredictable or chaotic. As a result, this system has no exact, closed-form mathematical solution.

For a long time, you and Dex have always just been two celestial bodies: you, his North Star, and Dex, the planet in your orbit.

You were his moral centre, the light he kept dragging himself toward even when every other part of him wanted to disappear. When Dex didn’t know how to be gentle, he looked at you. When he didn’t know what normal looked like, he copied you. When he wanted to be good, he reminded himself of you.

For you, Dex really tried, though it manifested itself in all sorts of colorful ways.

But when Leo was born, he changed the trajectory. Enter the Three-Body Problem. 

Leo, who had been conceived during a conjugal visit. Leo, who had begun as Dex’s desperate attempt to leave a permanent piece of himself with you, to tether himself to your life from behind prison bars. Leo, who had been the only gift Dex could give you while he was locked away in a mental institution.

At first, Dex didn’t really know how to care about him.

Leo had been nothing more than an idea then. A connection, a thread tying Dex obsessively to you when everything else had been taken from him.

But then Dex met him. 

And Leo had the same eyes. Same frown. Same strange little need for order. Except Leo was good. 

That was what made Dex attached. That was what made him love him. Because Leo wasn’t just his son. Leo was a proof of concept. Leo was a toddler, who looked exactly like him, with a moral compass. He was a projection of what Dex hoped to be.

So yeah, Leo was Dex’s mirror planet, and he had joined the orbit, too.

Leo had his own gravity.

And Leo’s gravity didn’t pull Dex toward restraint. It pulled him toward protection.

With you, Dex had to try, because you could stop him.

You could say his name. You could hold his hand. You could look at him like, No, Dex. Not this.

You weren’t helpless. You could talk him down. You could make him want to restrain himself because he wanted to stay worthy of you.

But Leo is a child.

Leo couldn’t talk his father down. Leo couldn’t possibly understand what Dex was capable of. Leo couldn’t stand there and tell his father where the moral line is.

So Dex drew the line himself.

If someone threatens Leo, they're dead.

That’s it. No warning. No mercy. No debate.

Because loving Leo gave Dex a whole new reason to be dangerous.

Yes, Dex would kill for you. Of course he would. But with you, there was always the question of whether you would forgive him. Whether you would be scared. Whether he had gone too far.

With Leo, the question became much simpler.

Did it keep his son safe?

If the answer was yes, then Dex thinks it was a good thing that he had added another number to his body count. 

Leo made Dex gentler inside the house. He learned bedtime stories. He learned toast shapes. He knelt down when Leo cried. He learns how to be kinder simply by interacting with this tiny version of himself.

But outside the house, having a son made him more paranoid and ruthless.

Dex has plans for everything: If someone followed you home from nursery. If the AVTF comes knocking again. If anyone realized Leo is a mutant.

There was no scenario where Dex would wait calmly and hoped the world was kind to Leo.

Leo was different. And Dex knew what people would do to someone who was different.  And he would do abhorrent things to make sure nothing ever happened to him. 

For you, Dex tried to be gentle. For Leo, Dex became a protector. Those are two completely different trajectories. That’s the three-body problem.

For you, Dex had to be good. For Leo, Dex had to be dangerous. And somehow, both came from love. You are still his North Star. You still make him want to be better.

But Leo’s gravity pulled him in a different direction. Leo gives him an independent reason to kill, a reason that didn’t need your permission first. 

And you weren’t immune to their gravity either.

Over time, because of Dex’s gravity your idea of “good” had shifted more than you wanted to admit. You had been married to Dex for nine years, so of course that changed you. Of course loving a man like him moved the line. You had already learned to excuse things you shouldn’t have excused long before Leo was even born.

But now Leo was here. And your orbit was completely thrown off.

Because when Dex hurt people for himself, you could still tell yourself to save him. When Dex hurt people for you, you could still try to pull him back.

But when Dex killed for Leo, though? You understood why.

You told yourself it was different because it was for your son. You looked away from horrible things Dex was doing to agents because Leo was safe. You kissed blood off Dex’s skin when he came home from a day of hunting because your baby was asleep in the next room and no one took him.

And because Dex will always see you as good, no matter how malleable your morals have become, your forgiveness changed his idea of goodness. If you understand why he did it, maybe it was understandable. If you still him after, maybe he was right. If you loved him anyway, maybe he was doing the right thing by protecting his family.

You pulled Dex toward the light. Leo pulled Dex towards his most paranoid, fearful thoughts of losing his son. Dex pulled you into understanding that both could exist at the time.

So no, Leo doesn’t necessarily make Dex a better man.

Leo makes him a father.

And for a man like Bullseye, that just made him even more dangerous.

-

Note : guys. I love you all. Tysm for giving this series so much love!!! I usually get 1-2 new reqs overnight but I woke up with like 10+ and most of them are about this series! I usually get a fair amount of comments as well but this is a bit more than usual. It will take time to get through, so just know that every comment/message I get means the world and is very much appreciated. Feel free to send more ideas in! Thoughts about the series that aren’t necessarily requests are also welcome!!! Again, love you all!!!!!! ❤️