I’m getting married in three weeks (yay!!!!) which means I’ll be taking a little break very soon. Before that, though, I’ll be spending this week and next week finishing my planned posts and all my Ko-fi requests.
Here’s the posting schedule for the next two weeks:
13 Jul 26 (today) — Dex x Reader Ko-fi request where reader kills someone for the first time
15 Jul 26 — Bucky Barnes x Reader where you meet during an AA meeting
17 Jul 26 — Dex x Reader Ko-fi request where you say red during sex (angst that ends in comfort)
20 Jul 26 — Dex x Reader Ko-fi request where reader is Elektra’s sister, and you, Elektra, Dex, and Matt all have dinner together. (Kinda modern AU-ish but not really because Elektra and Dex and both still murderers?)
22 Jul 26 — Dex x Reader Ko-fi request, part two of Little Monster
— • — • — • — • — • — • — • — • —
I’ll be away for the wedding and honeymoon from 27th July to 31st August, but fear not!!! I’ve queued posts for the six weeks I’m gone:
Week One: Werewolf!Bucky Barnes x Reader (short story)
Week Two: Monster Hunter!Benjamin Poindexter x Selkie!Reader (hear me out)
Week Three: Deep Sea Merman!Bucky Barnes x Marine Biologist!Reader (hear me out)
Week Four: DDBA/CIA!Benjamin Poindexter x CIA Handler!Reader (short story)
Week Five: Thunderbolts!Bucky gets a cat because yours and his son, Jamie, wants a pet (short story)
Week Six: Occult Expert!Reader x DDBA/CIA!Benjamin Poindexter (hear me out)
I’ll probably still be around sporadically, so I might write little under 500-word drabbles here and there (especially on flights lol), but I won’t be writing any long stories during this time.
Any Ko-fi request I receive from now till late August will be written for September rather than under the usual 30-day rule.
I realised that I may be to busy too write small blurbs for these six weeks, but I was bored today so I’ve written 6 extra blurbs in addition to these fics for every Friday when I’m gone (they’re like 500-ish words lol).😅
Everything’s queued and ready, which is nice! My fiance has insisted on taking the bulk of the two week-before wedding preparation because I’ve done a lot while he was finishing up his postgrad, and he insists I write because it calms me down🫶🫶🫶
Also, thank you so much for all the well wishes! It means the world to me! I stayed up last night reading them with him and he says much love to everyone on here too!!!! 💕💕💕💕
Monster AU | Monster hunter!Benjamin Poindexter x Selkie! Reader where Dex is sent to a fishing village because something in the water has started killing men.
WC 1.2K
TW violence, blood and gore, murder of poachers, obsessive and territorial behavior, very suggestive, restraint, monster/human relationship, nudity, fem!reader
The villagers describe a naked woman appearing along the cliffs at night with blood streaking her chin. They say she sings ships onto the rocks and tear out the sailor’s throats with her teeth. They say the men who follow her into the surf never come back.
Dex goes hunting, expecting a siren or cecaelia. Instead, he sees you crouched over a poacher in the shallows, one hand twisted in his hair while the tide foams pink around your knees.
There are six men surrounding you with nets and iron blades in their hands. Your sealskin lies bundled inside a cage behind them.
Dex know what you are immediately.
A selkie.
He watches you bare your teeth at the men as one grabs your arm and immediately regrets it. He watches you drive your forehead into his nose, take another by the throat and drag him beneath the surface until the bubbles stop.
Dex has spent his entire life learning how to recognise dangerous creatures, but he has never wanted one this badly.
Instead of doing what he was told to do, he helps you and kills the remaining men.
Afterward, you stand in the surf staring at him, soaked beneath the moonlight. Dex keeps his eyes on your face for several disciplined seconds before his eyes drop anyway.
Your body is covered in marks from the nets, red lines circling your wrists and thighs. There is a bruise spreading beneath your ribs where one of these men struck you.
He retrieves your sealskin from the cage and carries it towards you. He knows what it means to hold it; every hunter does. A selkie without her skin cannot return to the sea, and whoever possesses it possesses her.
He could keep it, and you would have to follow him, you would have to remain wherever he kept you.
It’s an intrusive thought, sure, but he can’t help but picture you inside his house, your body curled beneath his blankets every night. He fantasizes about this beautifully vicious selkie waiting for him to return from a hunt, unable to vanish beneath the waves because you belonged to him now.
Dex’s fingers tighten around the fur.
He notices fear flickering across your face, because you know this one could actually kill you. You know he is actually equipped to deal with your kind.
That look alone is enough to make him hate himself.
So he places the sealskin around your shoulders and closes it carefully over your body, though every selfish part of him wants to keep it. You clutch it to your chest, watching him as though you cannot understand why he has returned the only thing that could make you helpless.
Dex cannot explain that he wants you to choose him.
Eventually, you do.
You spend three days and three nights thinking about the hunter sent to kill you who spilled blood of his own kind for you instead.
By the fourth night, curiosity has consumed you whole.
So you climb through his window smelling of seawater, your hair dripping onto the floorboards. Dex wakes immediately, one hand grabbing around the knife beneath his pillow. He pushes the blade against your throat before his eyes have fully focused, while your bare thigh is already sliding across his waist.
He should throw you out. He knows better than to fuck a monster, right?
Instead, he knots one hand in your wet hair and kisses you until the knife falls forgotten into the sheets.
You bite when he grips you too hard, clawing ferally at his shoulders when he tries to slow down. Every rough touch only seems to draw you closer, hungry and impatient, as though tenderness is a luxury you can have later and right now you need him to prove that he is strong enough, worthy enough, to keep you.
Dex does.
He holds you down until you stop pretending you might escape. He leaves bruises shaped like his hands across your hips and teeth marks along your shoulder. He makes you feel possessed without ever once touching the magic that could actually possess you.
You start appearing in his room whenever you come ashore. Sometimes Dex returns from a hunt and finds you stretched naked across his bed, sleeping on your stomach with salt drying against your skin. Sometimes you are wearing his shirt, his knives arranged around you because you like the smell of iron and leather on his clothes.
He becomes territorial when you pretend to be human at his side. When you go for a walk on the beach, there is always a knife within reach in case a fisherman looks too long. Dex doesn’t care that you could kill most men without him present, because knowing you are dangerous does nothing to lessen the urge to stand between you and everyone who might want you.
Still, at the end of the day, you belong to the sea.
Every time you disappear beneath the waves, he tells himself you are not his prisoner. He returns your skin every time because he refuses to become another man who locked a selkie away because he was selfish.
Then night falls, his bed remains empty, and he lies awake imagining every creature beneath the surface touching what belongs to him.
When you return, he often meets you on the rocks and drags you against him before the water stops running from your body, and kisses you with one hand locked around your throat and the other on the sealskin at your waist. He needs to hear you gasp against his mouth, he needs proof that the sea has given you back exactly as he left you.
You love him like this, especially when his composure collapses only for you. He presses his face into your wet hair afterward, breathing you in while his hands continue moving over your body as though recounting every part by memory.
Sometimes, when you decide you want to pretend to be human and explore land all by yourself, you leave your sealskin with him.
The first time, Dex finds it folded on his bed after you have gone.
He stares at it before the door, closes every shutter and builds enough wards around the room to turn anyone who enters without permission into ash.
He sleeps with the skin beneath him that night, simply placing it on the mattress and resting one hand over the place where it lies.
You have given him the power to keep you.
Dex has never been more satisfied or more terrified in his life.
He becomes more violent whenever the skin is in his possession. He checks the wards constantly, and anyone asking why he has stopped taking contracts near the coast receives a terrifying enough threat to end the conversation.
You return three nights later and find him sitting beside the window, your sealskin folded across his lap.
Dex doesn’t ask where you have been.
He grabs your wrist, pulls you between his knees and buries his face against your stomach. His arms close around you so tightly you can barely breathe. Then his mouth presses against the skin beneath your ribs kissing you because you came back.
Also: Dex initially carries silver, iron, salt, and knives meant for every kind of creature. Once you’re together, his monster-hunting coat fills with things specifically for you instead: shells you might like, smoked fish, cloth for drying your hair, and a little vial of seawater for times when you hate being too far inland.
Everyone thinks the selkie bewitched the hunter, but the truth is much more embarrassing: Dex saw you bare your teeth at six armed men, watched you drag one screaming into the surf, and fell in love immediately.
-
this is a queued post! I am currently either getting married or on my honeymoon! enjoy! 💕
do you think dex gets away with everything using sex or.....
Dex Learns Your Tricks
TW sex, no anatomical detail, fem!reader | WC 400
Dex lets you get away with anything using sex.
You don’t answer his texts for three hours because you’re at work? He’s waiting in your apartment like a fucking crow delivering an omen, eyes dead, phone in his hand like Exhibit A in the trial of you being a terrible girlfriend.
You should say, Dex, normal people don’t spiral because their partner is in a work meeting.
Instead, you kiss him, thigh sliding over his lap, and suddenly his hatred of your inability to make him feel safe in this relationship dies.
Poor thing! All that rage and abandonment panic? Gone.
So, obviously, you abuse this power.
He’s mad? You kiss him. He’s jealous? You get on your knees and pull your hair back. He’s spiraling because the barista knows you by name? You let him bend you over the nearest surface until he’s whining into your neck.
And Dex, because he’s sick and obsessed, learns to imitate your methods, because apparently he decides this is how accountability works now.
So when your favourite coworker suddenly resigns after making one too many jokes near your desk, you know immediately Dex must’ve gotten to him.
You come home furious, and Dex is just sitting there, looking at you like he didn’t just waterboard some poor employee into quitting for the crime of *squints* having eyes and looking at you too long?
You tell him you can’t do that! Not to people you actually like!
And he kisses you and you weakly try to push him off and say you don’t get to fuck your way out of this.
Which is hilarious, because ten minutes later you’re face down on the mattress, dress shoved up, panties around one ankle, Dex behind you with both hands clamped on your hips like he’s trying to hold onto his last chance at forgiveness.
And he’s not even sexy about it. He's pathetic.
He’s sweaty, shaking, and breathless, fucking you deep and messy. “Please,” he pants into your shoulder. “Please.”
His hips stutter hard enough to make you bite the sheets. “Please let me get away with it.”
Oh, fuck him.
He’s whining now, forehead pressed to your back, one arm hooked around your waist to drag you back onto him.
“He wanted you,” Dex says, voice breaking. “He did. I saw it. Please, baby. Please, please, please let me get away with it.”
You try to stay mad, but he makes this ruined sound and spills inside you still begging, still half-apologising without actually saying sorry, still trying to fuck his way out of trouble because you taught him this trick in the first place.
And, yeah.
Fine.
It works.
—
this is a queued post! I am currently either getting married or on my honeymoon! enjoy! 💕
Werewolf au | Werewolf! Bucky x Reader where sex could trigger a transformation.
WC 1.5K
TW Explicit sexual content with no anatomical detail, werewolf transformation during sex, monster sex, size difference, biting, claws, breeding kink and references to Hydra experimentation, fem!reader.
In this universe, Hydra had not made Bucky Barnes into a super soldier.
Super soldier serum required a clean formula. Hydra had tried, too, but the subjects had been too imperfect to even try perfecting it.
So the serum they put in his veins had been older than the super soldier program. This time, it was stranger. Its ingredients were dragged out of a black-site freezer in the middle of nowhere, labelled in German, written over three times, surrounded by warnings even Hydra scientists pretended not to fear.
They had wanted a weapon that could track by scent, a weapon that could heal through bullets, a weapon that would tear through doors and men with the same indifference.
So no, in this universe, the Winter Soldier program didn’t actually make soldiers. They had made wolves instead.
Bucky never liked talking about the early transformations. He would only tell you little pieces sometimes, after a transformation under a full moon, while your fingers moved slowly through his hair. He would tell you about the cages, the muzzles. He once told you that moonlight made it worse, but pain could force it, too. Fear and rage could force it. Want could, too, though that was the one that terrified him most, because he wanted you.
You had known that from the beginning, from the very first time he buried his face against your neck and froze, breathing you in like you could smell the sweet blood under your skin. You had known it when his hands trembled on your hips, his eyes flashing gold in the dark and he looked away because hunger burned through.
But you had never been afraid of it the way he wanted you to be.
You were afraid sometimes, obviously, you were not stupid. You had seen claw marks in steel doors. Sometimes, you had woken to him pacing the apartment like his bones didn’t bend right, hands shaking at his sides, mouth locked tight because speaking would show you the teeth.
But fear had never been a rejection, not when it came from you. Especially when the very few times the wolf had shown himself, he still looked at you with Bucky’s eyes and held himself back from tearing you apart because the wolf was still Bucky, and Bucky still loved you.
Tonight, he was already too close to the edge.
Bucky was holding you down without meaning to. Your chest was pressed flat into the bed, breasts curving the sheets below you, cheek buried in the pillow, knees spread beneath him. He was behind you, inside you, moving with that wild instinct he always thought he could control, one hand gripping the mattress beside your head. The other held your hip, fingers digging in just enough to remind you how strong he was when he was still trying.
Then, his breathing changed, wet against the back of your neck, dragging out of him like the monster had started breathing through his lungs. His rhythm faltered, his body locked behind you. For one sick, suspended second, he was frozen while buried deep inside you.
“Fuck,” he growled out, the word was barely human.
You felt his hand leave your hip and slam into the mattress beside your ribs. The whole bed jumped. The bones in his arm whined softly, clawing into the sheets like he was trying to anchor himself there instead of in you.
Bucky knew the shift was coming before you did.
His hand tightened beside your head.
“Don’t move,” he said, breathing coming out as a thin inhale, then dropped halfway deeper, wetter, too large for a human chest.
“No,” he whispered as a tremor travelled through him and the bed creaked. “Not now.”
His fingers flexed against the mattress, and you heard the soft pop of joints shifting before his half-transformed nails dragged across the fabric.
Scrrrrch.
The sheet split beside your face.
“Bucky,” you breathed.
“Don’t,” he said, voice wrecked. “Don’t say my name like that. I’m trying not to—”
His sentence snapped off into a growl, then he grew.
You could have looked back, but you didn’t.
All you could do was feel it happen.
Heat flooded through him first, pouring into you from every place his skin touched yours. His thighs thickened against the backs of yours. His hips became heavier, wider, forcing your body lower into the mattress. The hand beside your head spasmed, nails sharpening into claws that pressed careful half-moons into the sheet.
And inside you, he changed too.
You let out an impossible mewl.
It was slow enough, and you felt him like a pulse. It was a deep swelling as the transformation dragged through every inch of him, making him thicker where he was still buried in you, stretching you around the wolf. Your body clenched down instinctively, confused and overwhelmed, and Bucky made a gutted sound above you.
The wooden frame gave a crack under a weight it had never been built to hold. You could feel fur brushing over your lower back, then along your thighs. His chest lowered over you, broader now, pinning you beneath him until you could barely move. You felt his mouth against your shoulder, half-formed canine teeth grazing your skin without biting down as drool slipped hot onto the back of your neck.
You gasped into the pillow.
Bucky went still again, and you could feel him fighting it.
Then his nose dragged against your skin, smelling your arousal.
“Oh, fuck,” he rasped. “You’re dripping,” he said, almost horrified that him being half a monster turned you on this much. “Sweetheart, you’re—”
His hips jerked before he could stop them.
You sobbed into the pillow.
He felt how wet you were, he felt how badly you wanted the thing he had spent years trying to hide from you.
You made a sound you didn’t recognize, half fear, half pleasure, helpless and broken against the pillow. Bucky answered with a growl so deep it shook through your spine. The bedframe slammed once against the wall because the change itself had thrown his weight forward.
He tried to pull back.
You grabbed blindly at the ruined sheets.
“Fuck,” you begged. “Please don’t stop.”
He could only growl, more monster than human now.
“I don’t care if you change,” you gasped, pushing your hips back into him. “I don’t care, Bucky. Please.”
The sound that came out of him was almost a snarl.
He was still careful where it mattered, claws buried themselves into the mattress and never you.
Still, the rhythm that followed was not human anymore.
He moved, and the room seemed to tilt.
The first thrust dragged him almost out before forcing him back in deeper, changed and so much bigger than before that your hands clawed uselessly at the ruined sheets. Your breasts pressed harder into the mattress, thighs shaking beneath him. Fur scraped your skin with every roll of his hips, rough against the backs of your legs, more silken over your spine when his chest bowed over you.
You could feel the werewolf behind you now.
It was no longer a man half-changing. Bucky’s whole monstrous body bracketed yours, breath pouring over you in wet, animal bursts. He drove into you like he was trying to bury the last of his humanity there and trust you to give it back later.
The bed was dying under him, headboard slamming into the wall hard enough to knock dust loose. Metal brackets squealed, sheets tore in long strips beneath his claws as the mattress dipped and buckled under the punishing motion of his hips.
Bucky’s mouth dragged over your shoulder. His tongue swept over the place his teeth had scraped. “God,” he growled, some human mind in him resurfacing to enjoy you. “God, you feel—”
The words dissolved into nothing as you whimpered.
He only fucked you harder, burying his monstrous face against the side of your throat, pained by how much he wanted you.
“Mine,” he growled, then immediately shuddered like the word had escaped him. “Fuck. Sorry. I didn’t—”
“Yours,” you choked out.
The bed cracked again as Bucky snarled into your shoulder.
He was a werewolf, and he was fucking you like one.
And he was still yours.
Eventually, as you reached your high, your body clenched around him, shaking under his weight, and Bucky’s growl turned savage. His hips drove deep and stayed there as he finished in you, his entire changed body above you. The bed gave a final, miserable crack beneath both of you, one side dropping just enough to make you gasp as he caught your body, huge arm hauling you safely against him even before the frame finished collapsing.
For several seconds, there was only breathing.
Then the transformation began to pull back.
You felt the slow recession of him inside you, fur thinning beneath your fingers where your hand had found his forearm, claws withdrawing from the mattress. His chest shrank against your back until he became familiar again, still broad and strong, but human enough to recognize.
Bucky didn’t move at first.
He stayed behind you, breathing hard, forehead pressed between your shoulder blades like he was afraid to lift his head and see what he had done.
You were still catching your breath when he finally spoke. “Fuck.”
You smiled weakly into the pillow.
Bucky exhaled, his voice still half a growl. “I’m gonna get us a stronger bed frame.”
-
this is a queued post! I am currently either getting married or on my honeymoon! enjoy! 💕
Like a cat, Dex liked having the underside of his jaw scratched. Not that he would ever admit that out loud.
It happened by accident in a safehouse somewhere outside Amsterdam, the two of you trapped inside while Charles arranged new passports. The place was barely furnished, just one narrow bed (not that either you or Dex minded. He was quite clingy, after all), a television that only played three local channels, and a sofa so small that Dex’s knees nearly touched the coffee table when he sat down.
At this point, he had been restless for hours.
You could always tell when his senses started becoming sensory problems. Pipes knocking inside the walls bothered him, footsteps in the apartment above you agitated him. The refrigerator clicking on made his shoulders tighten beneath his shirt.
Dex sat on the bed with his elbows braced against his knees, staring at the curtained window with a blank stare.
“The building’s secure,” you reminded him, because the last time someone broke into your apartment to try to kill you, Dex stayed up all night for the next three days with a gun in his hand while you slept (or at least tried to).
He frowned, tapping his foot restlessly on the wooden floor. “The bathroom window doesn’t latch properly.”
“You wedged a chair beneath it,” you climbed onto his lap, peppering gentle kisses on his collarbone.
“Someone could still—”
You curled two fingers beneath his chin. You had only meant to tilt his face towards you, to properly make him look at you instead of the window, but your nails dragged lightly against the skin beneath his jaw, and his shoulders dropped by half an inch.
You stared at him with a sly smile.
Because you were curious and because he looked unfairly adorable when confused, you did it again. Your fingertips travelled from the point of his chin towards his throat, scratching gently through the faint evening stubble there.
His eyes fluttered.
You couldn’t help the tiny giggle that escaped your lips.
Dex’s eyes opened immediately. “What?”
“You like that.”
“I don’t.”
You scratched beneath his chin again, and his head tipped back before he could stop it.
The movement was almost imperceptible, but you caught it; you had spent enough time loving him to notice the tiny betrayals of his own body.
A smile spread across your face. “You’re like a cat.”
Dex narrowed his eyes at you (not helping his case), but he didn’t move away. In fact, when your fingers paused, his chin followed them slightly.
You shifted closer, and this time you used all four fingers, lightly scratching while your thumb rested against the scar on his cheek.
Dex exhaled through his nose and leaned into your hand.
It made sense once you thought about it. He spent every waking moment sorting through too much information, his mind cataloguing every sound, every movement, every possible threat. The kind, repetitive drag of your nails gave him a singular comfort to concentrate on.
His knees have since stopped tapping the floor, and Dex’s hands settled around your hips automatically, holding you there while you continued scratching as his eyes closed again, bearing witness the frankly adorable collapse of Benjamin Poindexter.
His grip remained firm, but it was no longer vigilant. He was simply anchoring himself.
“You’re melting,” you murmured.
“No,” he insisted. “I’m watching the window.”
“Your eyes are closed.”
“I can still hear it.”
You smiled and scratched a little closer to the hinge of his jaw.
Dex made a tiny sound, but not a purr, no matter how much you wanted to call it one. It was a vibration in his throat, an involuntary noise of approval that made his eyes snap open in surprise.
You bit the inside of your cheek.
You laughed, and Dex tried to glare at you, but you were still touching him, so the effect was ruined by the way his head remained tilted obediently into your hand.
Eventually, when the footsteps upstairs stopped bothering him, he pulled you into bed, throwing you on the mattress and clambering over you, putting his ears to your stomach. A car door slammed outside, but Dex only pulled you closer.
This time, you scratched gently through the short hair at the base of his skull before returning beneath his chin, maintaining the same rhythm.
His breathing followed it.
In. Out. In. Out.
By the time Charles texted to say your extraction would arrive in three hours, Dex’s arm was wrapped around your waist, his thumb tucked beneath the hem of your shirt in slow circles, while you traced your nails on his skin.
I wasn’t asleep, he would insist later.
But his eyes were closed, his breathing was calm, and every so often, when your hand slowed down, Dex nudged his chin insistently against your fingers until you started again.
—
Note: this is a queued post! I might not have time to immediately reply to messages or comments, but I am still active from time to time during this little break and will respond in due time lovelies!
TW explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail), BDSM dynamics, collar/leash kink, dom/sub dynamic, power play, mentions of violence, Fem!reader, sub!dex, established relationship.
Totally works as a one shot but in my head this reader is the same reader from No Absolution and Snap Out of It!
Mr. Charles slid the file across the table and looked between you and Dex with the patience of a man who had accepted that sending the two of you anywhere together was a liability. But then again, you two were the most effective killers the black ops program had, so…
“It’s a surveillance job,” he said. “Surveillance. In and out. Means no bodies unless necessary.”
Dex, leaning forward on the table beside you, gave him a flat look. “When are they ever unnecessary?”
Charles sighed through his nose. “This is exactly what I mean.”
You bit down on your smile.
Charles pinched the bridge of his nose and turned to you. “Please keep that boyfriend of yours on a leash.”
Dex went completely still.
Leash.
His heartbeat picked up so fast it almost resented him.
Because all he could think about was the night before, when there had been no mission, no handler, no fluorescent lights in some CIA black site. You were both in the same hotel room, a leather collar buckled tight around his throat, and you were holding the leash like you had every right in the world to own him.
Dex had been on his knees first, then you had pushed him lower.
You weren’t even that rough, and that was almost more humiliating. All you had to do was look at him and tug once, and he followed. Before he knew it, he was down to his hands, on the floor. His dark eyes fixed on you, chest rising quickly, the leash pulled taut from your fist to the ring at his throat.
He looked filthy between your heels, still trying to pretend he was composed while his mouth was wet with drool and his face was flushed and his hands were curled into fists because you hadn’t told him he could touch you.
You stepped closer until the pointed toe of your heel brushed beneath his chin.
His eyes lifted first, then his chin, obedient to the pressure, tilting up exactly where you wanted him. His throat shifted against the leather collar.
Oh fuck, the sight of Dex, staring up at you from the floor like he had been made for nothing but this.
You dragged the tip of your stiletto slowly beneath his jawline.
“Look at you,” you murmured.
Dex swallowed, mouth parting. He had no smart answer, then, and you could see the visible effort of keeping himself still.
You tugged the leash and he crawled closer.
He wanted to be guided. He wanted to be pulled around by your hand, wanted to be placed exactly where you needed him and praised when he got it right.
You sat on the edge of the bed and spread your legs and gave another tug.
He came forward so quickly he looked ashamed of it, mouth pressing hot and open against the inside of your thigh. You let him kiss his way up slowly, pretending to be patient. You let him breathe against you, while your fingers tightened around the leash and your heel stayed planted beside his hand.
When his mouth finally found your heat over the underwear, his hands stayed flat on the floor, mouth shameless, tongue dragging a wet patch on the fabric like he was starving for it. He groaned against you when you pulled the leash tighter, the sound vibrating through your whole body, and the way his eyes flicked up to check your face.
He needed to know he was good.
You kept him there until his chin was slick and his breathing was ragged, until his hips were shifting uselessly against nothing and his fingers were digging into the carpet. Every time he got too eager, you tightened the leash and felt him force himself to calm down.
“That’s it,” you breathed, when he bit the cloth to the side. “Good boy.”
Dex’s eyes nearly rolled back.
He looked caught between humiliation and worship.
Then you pulled him up just enough to kiss him.
He came eagerly, rising on his knees, mouth messy against yours. You tasted yourself on him and he made another broken sound when you bit his lower lip and dragged him backwards by the leash, guiding him onto his back on the floor.
Dex went down without a fight.
His hands finally found your hips when you climbed over him, and you let him have that much. You let him grip you, hard and shaking, while you sank down on him slowly enough to make him suffer. His head tipped back against the carpet as the leash pulled taut in your fist.
You rode him like that, still in your heels, one hand braced on his chest, the other wrapped in his leash.
Now, in the briefing room, Charles was still talking.
You shifted beside Dex, one heel clicking against the floor.
Dex’s eyes dropped to your shoes, then to your hand, then away, his throat moving under his collarless skin like he could still feel the leather there.
You smiled down at the mission file.
Charles frowned. “Poindexter. Are you listening?”
Dex said nothing.
“He is,” you said sweetly. “And don’t worry, Charles. He follows my instructions very well.”
—
Any post from now on to the end of August will be queued. Look at the schedule here! I will be on from to time to check comments and messages but everything I post for the next month and a bit has already been written in advance 🫶
As someone whos a huge fan of your bucky fics im really curios about your dex fics as well but i dont know shit about him so can you give recs for what to watch to at least understand his arc? 🥲
omg I have been getting increasingly more messages about how people found out about Dex through me, and it’s absolutely wild😭😭😭
I would recommend watching all the Netflix marvel shows, especially daredevil and defenders for context, but the absolute MUST to understand Dex as a character would be Netflix’s Daredevil season 3 and Daredevil Born Again Season 1 & 2. Happy watching and come back to tell me what you think!! 🫡
Summary : You tell Dex he needs to earn the right to kiss you. His efforts are… interesting.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x Vigilante! reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : Romcom/dark comedy, Dex and reader being equally insane, canon-typical violence, stolen clothing, suggestive (sex implied), obsessive behaviour, you have a roommate called Mia. (let me know if I missed anything!) Set in DDBA S2!
Word Count : 5.6k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : This is so insane! A ko-fi request for a sequel that was originally a ko-fi request. Enjoy!
This could be read as a one shot, but was intended to be direct sequel to Little Monster
The second you told Dex he would have to earn the right to kiss you, his attention tunnel visioned onto the task.
You said it on your first date, if you counted sharing one terrible beer, killing Task Force agents together, and being walked home across rooftops as a first date.
Dex definitely did.
He walked you back to your fire escape afterwards, his shirt still hanging off your body beneath your jacket. You still had blood beneath your nails, and he still had your silver paint smudged beneath one eye.
At your window, he stopped.
Dex looked at your mouth, and for one brief second, he thought maybe this was it. Maybe walking you home like a gentleman would have been enough to earn you. Maybe you were finally going to lose that cruel smile and give him the only thing he had been thinking about since you kissed him through his own mask.
Instead, after handing the mask back, you placed one hand against his chest and kissed his cheek. “Goodnight, Dex.”
Then you climbed through your window and shut it behind you.
Dex stayed on the roof of your building for almost five full minutes, staring at nothing.
What was enough, then?
When he got home, he didn’t sleep.
Dex sat at his kitchen table until five in the morning with a notebook open in front of him, trying to work out how to earn you like it was a mission and a mathematical problem all at once.
He had never had this before, at least not romantically or properly.
He had wanted people before, sure. He had fixated and watched and needed. But he had never met someone he wanted to impress. This was different because it was you.
So Dex pulled up a notebook and started to brainstorm.
At the top of the page, in painfully neat handwriting, he wrote:
What can I do to earn it?
He stared at the sentence for a long time.
Then, because he had no idea what normal people did, he wrote the first thing that came to mind.
Jewellery?
He paused, but it seemed right. Women liked jewellery. He had seen his colleagues back at the FBI buy silver and gold for anniversaries, engagements, and apologies. He had seen men do it in restaurants, in movies, and in department-store advertisements with stupidly saccharine music every February.
Still, Dex knew you wouldn’t want something bought. That felt too ordinary, too impersonal. Anyone with money could buy a necklace, anyone could stand at a glass counter and let a bored sales assistant choose whatever they thought looked pretty.
That was not earning. To Dex, that was outsourcing.
Dex tapped the pen against the paper, before modifying it.
Stolen jewellery?
Better.
He underlined it once.
You liked flair, and a heist had flair. A heist required planning, timing, and risk assessment. It had alarms to silence, guards to drop, and glass to break.
Then he wrote:Necklace with red stones.
He paused, then kept brainstorming.
Clean first. Get a box.
He underlined clean first twice.
You would probably appreciate that he had been forced to kill his way through a collection of financiers, traffickers, and Task Force donors to get it. But you would appreciate the necklace even more if he cleaned every trace of their blood from it before he gave it to you.
See? He was learning.
—
A week later, you woke up to the report of a jewellery heist.
The story was already playing on the television in the kitchen by the time you wandered in, rubbing sleep from your eyes while the kettle hissed behind you. Blue police lights flashed across the screen, staining the marble frontage of some private gallery in a gray-ish intermittent colour. The windows had been shattered inward, glass glittered across the pavement like ice, and several black body bags were being wheeled past a row of reporters pressing microphones toward anyone wearing a badge.
Mia sat at the table with a bowl of cereal and the front page spread open beside her. She had placed an unloaded handgun across the article to keep it flat, which felt disrespectful to both journalism and breakfast but was hardly the strangest thing she had ever done in your kitchen.
You poured hot water over your coffee and leaned against the counter, only half listening as the reporter explained that the gallery had been used as a private showroom for a collection owned by three wealthy financiers. Between them, they had laundered money for traffickers, moved illegal weapons through shell companies, and funnelled anonymous donations into several Task Force operations.
Now they were dead.
The security team was dead too, although the report was careful to describe them as “private contractors,” which sounded much better than armed men paid to protect criminals and their stolen wealth.
Apparently, only one item had been taken.
The reporter’s image changed to an old catalogue photograph of a necklace laid against black silk. It was beautifully dramatic, set in dark metal with deep red stones that looked almost black before the studio light flashed.
You paused with the mug halfway to your mouth. “Huh.”
Mia glanced up from her cereal, spoon hovering near her lips. “What?”
“It’s pretty.” You looked at the necklace again.”
And that was the full extent of your interest.
That morning, it didn’t occur to you that Dex had done it.
Dex was many things, but he was not a thief. He took weapons when he needed them, and sometimes files, keys, evidence, ammunition. Those were practical things with a means to an end. You couldn’t imagine him breaking into private galleries for jewels. He had never shown any interest in luxury, money, or expensive objects for their own sake.
You finished your coffee, watched another body bag disappear into an ambulance, and thought no more about it.
—
Dex tapped on your apartment window shortly after midnight.
The sound was small enough that Mia didn’t hear it from her bedroom, but it pulled you out of the book balanced across your knees. You stayed still for a moment, listening.
Your hand went instinctively toward the knife tucked between the sofa cushions as you walked across the apartment. There was no shadow from the other side of the curtain, but when you saw Dex through the gap between the blinds you sighed.
Of course.
Dex stood on the other side, jacket zipped, his hair pushed back, and there was no visible blood on him anywhere. He held a small black velvet box between both hands with such care that, for a second, you wondered whether it might contain an explosive.
“Shhh,” you pulled a finger to your lips, and Dex only tilted his head.
You pulled back the window, his eyes found your face immediately, then flicked down toward your mouth before returning upward.
“What are you doing here?” You tried not to smile as you stepped into the fire escape and pulled the window back down behind you before Mia could wake up and discover Bullseye standing outside with what looked alarmingly like a romantic gift.
The metal steps were cold beneath your bare feet, and the night air smelled of rain, rust, and old brick. Traffic moved several storeys below, tyres whispering across wet roads while the glow from nearby windows softened the edges of Dex’s face.
For all you knew about him, he looked almost nervous.
The box remained cupped in his palms. When he finally offered it to you, his fingers lingered against the velvet for half a second before releasing it.
You looked at him, then down at the box, Dex watching your face like he was waiting for a verdict.
You opened it.
For several seconds, you didn’t understand what you were looking at. The stones were darker in person, a deep garnet red that seemed to hold light inside them. The metal had been polished until every curve gleamed. It was old, heavy, and far too beautiful to have belonged to any of the men who had kept it locked inside that gallery.
Then the television footage came back to you.
You lifted your eyes slowly.Dex didn’t look away.
“You did the heist,” you whispered, eyes wide now.
It was not really a question, but he nodded anyway, enough so that the cold air touched the back of your teeth while your thoughts rearranged themselves around the fact that Benjamin Poindexter had robbed a jewellery vault.
He had never been a thief before. Apparently, you had turned him into one.
The realisation hit you, so unexpectedly absurd that a tiny bit of laughter escaped before you could stop it. You lowered your head, one hand tightening around the box as the sound spilled into the alley below.
Dex’s face changed immediately. His shoulders drew in slightly, and for one second, he looked as if he thought you were laughing at him rather than the situation he had created. He had killed his way through a private gallery, stolen one necklace from an entire collection, cleaned it until it reflected fucking lasers, found a box, and knocked politely on your window.
All because you had told him to earn a kiss.
You pressed your lips together, trying to stop giggling long enough to speak.
“Dex,” you whispered, grabbing his arm, “I genuinely didn’t know this was you.”
His brow furrowed. “You didn’t?”
“You don’t steal jewellery.”
“I do now.”
That nearly started you laughing again.
You looked back down at the necklace instead. Up close, you could see the tiny details in the metalwork, dark vines curling around the stones like thorns. There was not a smear, fingerprint, or trace of blood anywhere on it. Dex must have cleaned it meticulously, working over every setting until nothing remained of the people who had guarded it.
You lifted the necklace carefully from the box. The chain slid over your fingers with a cool, satisfying weight. “It’s beautiful."
He was relieved all at once, you could tell when his jaw loosened and his shoulders dropped.
You turned the necklace over in your hands.
Of course he chose this one out of everything in the gallery.
His gaze drifted toward your throat, lingering there just long enough to answer the question you hadn’t asked: he had chosen it because he had imagined it on you in more ways than one, you were willing to bet.
You gathered your hair away from your neck and fastened the clasp yourself. The stones settled against your skin with a cold shock before gradually warming to your body. They rested directly over your collarbone, against your throat.
Dex’s eyes followed the necklace downward, tracing the chain and the red stones before returning to your face. His hands stayed still at his sides, but there was tension in every finger, as though not touching you required the same concentration as hitting an impossible target.
You had thought the gift was simply a gift, but then you saw the way he kept looking at your mouth.
Oh.
Oh.
How sweet.
You bit your lip. “This… was about the kiss.”
Dex’s face went still, and you could almost see him deciding whether denying it would help. He didn't bother.
“Did I earn it?”
There was something so painfully sincere in the question that your chest tightened. Dex hadn’t treated your teasing like flirtation. He had treated it like a task, or a standard he could meet.
You stepped closer.
The fire escape shifted faintly beneath your weight, metal creaking as you tried your hardest to still not make noise. You simply couldn’t bear to hear Mia fucking talk your ear off about manners anymore.
You touched the front of his jacket. His body went rigid beneath your palm.
For a second, you let him believe it.
You tilted your face toward his, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath. His eyes dropped to your mouth, his lips parted slightly, and every single part of his consciousness seemed to narrow onto the tiny distance remaining between you.
Then you turned your head and kissed his cheek.
Again.
This time, you let it linger as your mouth rested against the scar on his cheekbone while the red stones he had stolen for you pressed coldly against your throat. Dex closed his eyes, his breath leaving him in a wounded exhale.
When you drew back, he looked dazed.
You smiled and touched the necklace lightly. “It’s incredibly sweet.”
His gaze moved from the stones to your mouth. “But?”
“But not quite.”
The disappointment flashed across his face before he could hide it. It lasted only a second, and he quickly replaced it with a familiar, frightening focus. Then, very quietly, he said, “I’ll do better next time.”
You probably should have been worried. Instead, you smiled.
“I can’t wait.”
—
The second attempt involved your cutting off your ex-boyfriend’s pinky finger.
Dex hadn't gone looking for him. At least, that was what he told himself. He had simply seen the man leaving a bar one evening while he was on his way back home. Unfortunately for your ex, he'd made the mistake of bragging about his ex being a dangerous and wanted vigilante, loudly enough for Dex to hear.
"I used to have her wrapped around my little finger,” He laughed loudly, as if that would impress the girl he was currently talking to.
Ugh.
The package appeared on your fire escape the following morning, wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with butcher’s string, with anote that said : Though he shouldn’t have this anymore.
It was small enough to fit in your palm, though the dark stain beginning to spread through one corner gave away that it was definitely not jewellery this time.
You found Dex that evening on the opposite rooftop, watching your apartment with anticipation, waiting to hear whether a gift had been received. You should have been horrified. Instead, you kept thinking about the specificity of it. He had not killed the man, because apparently Dex had decided death would be too impersonal. He had taken the exact part of him that he had mentioned and removed it with surgical attention, leaving your ex alive to understand why.
When you met him on the roof, Dex straightened. Hope appeared on his face almost immediately, fragile beneath all that lethal stillness. You stepped into his space, rested your hand against his chest, and kissed his cheek in the same place as before.
Dex watched you leave with his fingers pressed against the place you had kissed, already reconsidering the scale of the gesture.
The third attempt happened during one of your outings together.
Calling it an outing was generous. You had spent most of the evening following a Task Force accountant through Hell’s Kitchen while Dex moved along the rooftops above you, appearing occasionally in dark windows and reflective surfaces like an omen. The job ended early, leaving the two of you walking without urgency through streets still wet from rain. You stopped for food from a cart, shared greasy hotdogs beneath the awning of a closed shop, and let yourself pretend for several minutes that this was what normal situationships did.
The man who ruined it came out of a bar angry. His shoulder struck yours hard enough to spill the drink in your hand, and instead of apologising, he grabbed your wrist when you turned toward him. His fingers tightened. He called you a bitch.
Dex knew you could more than take care of yourself, but instead of letting you deal with it, his head thought ding, ding, ding! This is your chance to earn it!
Without waiting to see what you would do, Dex killed him with his hands because the offence had been physical, and a primitive part of him apparently believed the answer should be too. By the time you reacted to them, the man’s face had already gone slack beneath the dirty wash of the streetlights. Dex remained crouched over him, breathing evenly, blood along his knuckles and the cuff of his sleeve.
He looked up at you without remorse, as if the man’s hand created a simple problem and Dex had solved it in the most direct way available.
You… looked disappointed, almost sad that you weren’t given the choice to end him yourself.
You should have scolded him. Instead, you crouched and wiped a thin streak of blood from beneath his eye.
His eyes dropped to your mouth before you had even begun leaning closer, and for a brief second, the hope on his face made you consider giving him what he wanted.
You kissed his cheek again.
This time, your mouth landed nearer the corner of his lips, close enough that Dex inhaled and turned his face by instinct, chasing an act you had already withdrawn. You smiled, tracing your thumb once over his bloodied cheekbone before leaving him kneeling beside the body with his restraint hanging by a thread.
His fourth attempt was less impulsive and considerably more elaborate.
Someone had begun watching your building. You noticed the same dark sedan twice in one week, though it always disappeared before you could approach it. Mia found a listening device beneath the kitchen windowsill, hidden so badly it was frankly insulting. T
Three nights later, an entire surveillance crew disappeared.
Their operation had been housed in a rented office two streets from your apartment. Dex dismantled it room by room. The people inside had worked for a private intelligence firm funded by Task Force donors, and Dex killed the ones who had apparently fucking photographed your bedroom, even if he had done the same himself. He left the technician who had installed the device alive with both hands broken and every hard drive stacked beside him.
Then Dex brought you the files.
He arranged them across your kitchen table while you slept, pages separated into neat categories: From the names of the donors, their addresses, their routines, and the amounts they had paid to look into your life.
You found him later that night when you stepped onto the fire escape, crouched between his knees, and held his face in both hands. This time, your kiss landed at the edge of his cheek, close enough to his mouth that the corner of your lips brushed his for less than a second.
He went rigid.
The contact on his lips had been so slight it might have been accidental, but both of you knew it wasn't. Dex followed when you pulled away, stopping himself only after his mouth had moved an inch toward yours. His eyes had gone unfocused, his breathing suddenly uneven as he stared at the tiny distance you had created.
You thanked him for the files, and told him not quite.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
—-
Dex ran out of ideas three days later.
The almost-kiss had destroyed what remained of his ability to think rationally. He could still feel the exact place you had pressed your lips to his skin, which he thought about often enough to become embarrassing.
You had been so close. Closer than ever before.
That would have meant he was improving, right?
Instead, he sat at his kitchen table until nearly dawn, staring at the same notebook he had used after your first date.
The original page looked almost childish now. Jewellery? was written in black ink, followed by notes about red stones, boxes, and cleaning off the blood. That had seemed like such a strong idea at the time. He had been proud of it. He had planned the heist meticulously, selected the necklace from an entire private collection, and polished every link of the chain himself.
You had loved it.
Still. It was not enough.
Everything he had tried afterwards filled the next several pages. Names, addresses, little reminders of things that bothered you and people who no longer had the opportunity to do so. Some of the ideas had been crossed out because they were too excessive, although Dex’s definition of excessive remained alarmingly generous. Others had been completed and marked with neat dates in the margin.
Beside each attempt, he had recorded the result.
Cheek.
Cheek again. Slightly longer.
Corner of mouth. Almost.
Pathetic. It really was fucking pathetic.
Dex stared at that final entry until the words began to blur.
He could do more, obviously. There were always more people to kill, more enemies to drag to your feet like a sad cat.
But Dex had begun to suspect that scale was not the problem.
He picked up his pen and wrote: bigger jewellery heist?
Then he crossed it out.
He wrote: kill Task Force Leader?
That one remained on the page for several minutes before he reluctantly crossed it out too. Powell definitely deserved it, but you had never mentioned him specifically. Killing someone you hadn’t complained about felt like guessing, and Dex was starting to understand that guessing wrong could push him farther away instead of bringing him closer.
He considered returning your ex’s other pinky finger.
No, he thought, too repetitive.
He considered finding every man who had ever frightened you and arranging them alphabetically in a warehouse.
Impractical, he thought. That idea had flair, but he could not work out what you would do with one.
By six in the morning, the notebook contained several increasingly desperate fragments and one entire page where Dex had written WHAT DOES SHE WANT? hard enough to leave the words embossed through the paper beneath it.
The answer didn’t appear.
For the first time since you had told him to earn the kiss, Benjamin Poindexter had no plan.
—
Mia discovered him outside your kitchen window at two in the morning.
She had come in for water wearing an oversized pyjama set, her hair twisted into a loose knot that had mostly collapsed. The apartment was dark except for the light above the stove, and she nearly walked past him before she noticed the shape crouched on the fire escape.
Dex tapped once against the glass.
Mia flinched hard enough to spill water over her hand. “What the…”
Within seconds, she had a pistol aimed directly between his eyes.
Dex had expected that.
Mia stared at him through the window, exhausted because she had repeatedly asked you to stop contributing to her life becoming stranger and had been consistently ignored. Her eyes moved from his face to his empty hands, checking for blood, weapons, packages, or severed pieces of anyone she recognised.
There was nothing, and that seemed to concern her more.
She unlocked the window but only raised it several inches, leaving enough space to talk without giving him room to climb through.
“She’s asleep,” Mia said quietly.
“I know.”
Her eyes narrowed. Of course he did.
Dex looked past her toward your bedroom door on the side, which was closed. He could picture you behind it, curled beneath the blankets, breathing into your pillow. He forced his attention back to Mia before the thought became distracting. “I need help.”
Mia’s grip shifted on the pistol.
For several seconds, she seemed unsure whether she had heard him correctly. Dex understood that he didn’t ask people for help. Help created debt and uncertainty, and it was usually more efficient to solve the problem himself.
Unfortunately, he had tried that.
Mia raised the window another few inches, though the gun remained.
Dex took the notebook from inside his jacket and passed it through the gap.
Mia didn;t lower the pistol as she took it. She placed the notebook on the counter, flipped it open with one hand, and began reading. Her expression changed as she moved through the pages: Confusion, followed by disbelief, then amusement.
Dex watched her read the record of his attempts, and when Mia reached the page headed POSSIBLE NEXT ATTEMPTS, she stopped.
The list beneath it included stealing a deed to a building, acquiring a tiger, and locating the person responsible for cancelling the brand of hot chocolate you liked three years ago.
Mia looked up. “A tiger?”
“She likes cats,” Dex shrugged.
Mia sighed. “That doesn't mean she wants a tiger.”
“I crossed it out.”
She looked at the notes again. “It says here you researched three private zoos.”
“I needed to know whether it was feasible.”
Mia shut the notebook and pressed her fingertips against her forehead. The gun was still in her other hand, but it had lowered toward the floor, apparently because exasperation had temporarily overtaken self-preservation.
Dex waited for her to provide an answer.
Instead, she looked at him through the narrow opening and began to laugh, and it was not the same laughter you gave him. Yours eventually made his chest warm. Mia’s laughter made him feel as though he had failed the test at every hurdle.
He thought about hurting Mia for making him feel humiliated, but then decided against it because you’d probably hate him for it.
“I’m serious.”
“That’s the problem,” Mia managed, keeping her voice down so she wouldn’t wake you. “You are thinking about this like you’re trying to overthrow a government.”
Dex didn’t see how that was relevant. Overthrowing a government required less guesswork.
Mia opened the notebook again and flicked through the pages, staring at each carefully planned act of violence. The laughter eventually faded, leaving behind a reluctant sympathy that Dex disliked even more.
“You’re thinking too much,” she told him.
The statement felt insulting. Thinking was how he avoided mistakes. “She told me to earn it.”
“I know. She told me everything.”
Dex’s attention sharpened. “Everything?”
Mia ignored the question. “You keep acting like there’s a secret combination of murder and theft that unlocks her mouth.”
He reached under the window for the notebook, but Mia pulled it back before he could take it. “She’s just a girl, Dex.”
He stared at her, because she wasn’t making sense.
You were not just anything. How fucking dare she insinuate that?
Mia seemed to read the objection on his face.
“I know she’s a fucking lunatic,” she continued. “I live with her. I’ve helped her sink bodies. Just… stop trying to earn the kiss by making her owe you.”
Eventually, she released the notebook back to his custody.
That had never been his intention. He didn’t want you indebted to him. He wanted you to be impressed, delighted. But perhaps those things were not as different as he had believed.
Perhaps the gesture had the undertone of the same question:
Was that enough? Do I get it now?
Mia had seen it. You probably had too.
Dex looked down at the notebook in his hands and the pages felt heavier than before.
Mia started lowering the window, apparently done with his bullshit for the night. She paused with only a narrow gap remaining. “Again,” She started, “She’s just a girl. Don’t overthink it.”
Easier said than done.
—
For once, Dex listened.
The next time he came to see you, nobody had died.
There was no breaking-news report waiting for you that morning, no stolen artefact displayed across the front page, no mysteriously vanished Task Force officials, and no parcel on the fire escape leaking through its paper wrapping. The day passed so uneventfully that by evening, you had started to suspect Dex was planning something truly catastrophic.
You checked the news twice. Nothing.
You glanced toward the window whenever a shadow shifted outside, but the fire escape remained empty. It was nearly eight when someone knocked on the apartment door.
You looked up from the sofa.
Mia looked up from the weapon catalogue spread across her lap. She was in her bedroom with the door ajar. “You expecting someone?”
“No.”
Mia turned another page. “Weird.”
There was no urgency in the knock, no coded pattern, and no scraping sound suggesting someone was trying to slide a body across the hallway carpet.
When you opened the door, Dex was standing beneath the weak yellow light with a bunch of flowers in his hands.
For a moment, you only stared.
They were not arranged professionally. The paper around them had been folded precisely in some places and crushed in others, as though Dex had spent far too long trying to hold them without damaging anything. There were no red stones, no bloodstains, and no expensive velvet box. Just a slightly unruly collection of pale flowers and greenery, fresh enough that tiny droplets of water still clung to the petals.
Dex looked almost painfully uncertain.
He had faced rooms full of armed men with less visible tension. His shoulders were held too squarely, his fingers carefully positioned around the stems, and his eyes kept moving between your face and the flowers as though he expected one of them to tell him what to do next.
Oh. this was new.
“You… brought me flowers.”
“I uh…” Dex nodded, “yeah.”
Your eyes narrowed with suspicion as you accepted them. The paper rustled beneath your fingers, damp where the stems had been wrapped. “Did you steal them?”
“No.”
“Threaten the florist?”
He had another pause, just long enough to become concerning. “No.”
“Dex.”
“I paid.”
You looked up properly at that.
His eyes looked… defensive, as if buying flowers had required more courage than stealing a priceless necklace from a fortified vault. Maybe it had. Violence gave him a shield to hide behind. This was only Dex standing outside your door with a simple gift and no proof of obsession beyond the fact that he had remembered you might like flowers in your favourite colours.
You looked down at the flowers again.
They smelled green somehow, faintly sweet but not overwhelming. A little piece of leaf had caught against the paper near your thumb. One stem was slightly bent, probably from Dex gripping the bouquet too tightly on the journey over and then attempting to straighten it before knocking.
The imperfection made it strangely charming.
There was no note demanding that you understand what he had done for you, though you had at least expected it. There was no list of names or severed pieces of someone who had wronged you. He hadn’t even brought them as evidence that he could protect you, avenge you, or remove inconvenience from your life.
He had brought you flowers because Mia had told him you were just a girl.
And sometimes girls liked flowers their will-they-won’t-they situationship brought for them.
Finally, after all his increasingly elaborate attempts, he had tried doing something… simple.
“They’re beautiful,” you smiled,watching relief pass over his face so openly you nearly melted.
Dex’s eyes flickered toward your mouth out of habit, but he stopped himself almost immediately. He didn’t ask whether he had earned it, he didn’t even step closer or look expectant. He only stood there in the hallway, hands empty now, waiting to see whether you wanted to invite him inside.
Oh, Dex.
You stepped into the hallway and placed the flowers carefully on the console table beside the door. Dex watched you do it, cautiously hopeful, but he still didn’t move.
Without any warning, you grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down, pressing your lips to his.
His mouth was warm beneath yours, parted slightly with surprise, and for one suspended moment he did absolutely nothing.
Apparently, he had failed to consider that flowers might work.
Eventually, though, he kissed you back carefully at first, as if the kiss might disappear if he wanted it too much. His hand lifted toward your waist but stopped just short of touching, every part of him still suspended between hope and disbelief.
You pulled away.
Dex followed without meaning to, his mouth chasing yours by an inch before he caught himself. His eyes opened completely dazed, and the devastation on his face made your stomach twist.
At that moment, he seemed to think that was all he was getting.
Then you smiled, tightened your fist in his jacket, and pulled him back.
The second kiss was deeper, and Dex made a soft, wrecked sound against your mouth as his hands finally settled around your waist. The restraint he had been pushed down for weeks cracked beneath your fingers. He kissed you like he had memorised every near miss: every cheek, every corner, every cruel fraction of an inch you had left between you.
Behind you, Mia peeked out her bedroom door.
Mia took one look at Dex leaning down on you in the doorway, your hands gripping his jacket and the flowers abandoned beside the door, then silently reached around the frame and pulled the door shut again.
You laughed into the kiss, breathless against his mouth.
Dex felt it in his bones, not quite believing the fact that you were finally kissing him back without a tally to settle or another task waiting. When you eventually pulled back, he followed helplessly until his forehead rested against yours. His breathing had gone uneven, and his eyes kept dropping to your lips as if he still expected you to change your mind and put unbearable distance between you again.
“D’you wanna come in?” you asked.
Dex nodded far too quickly. “Mhm.”
It came out so pathetic and eager that you smiled, caught his hand, and pulled him through the doorway. The flowers stayed forgotten on the little table while you dragged him toward your bedroom, kissing him again before you had even made it down the hall.
Mia’s door was still shut, and Dex briefly considered knocking to offer her headphones.
Then your hands found his belt loops in his waist, your mouth moving hungrily against his, and he decided she could survive one noisy night after advising him on how to win your physical affection.
After all, she had been right.
You were just a girl, and all Dex had ever needed to do was bring you flowers.
—end.
NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5.
That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation (keep this post in mind for July and August 2026). If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else.
Please remember I run this blog for free, so any support means a lot, only if you’re able to give it! Love y’all and thank you for reading!!! <3
Summary : You tell Dex he needs to earn the right to kiss you. His efforts are… interesting.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x Vigilante! reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : Romcom/dark comedy, Dex and reader being equally insane, canon-typical violence, stolen clothing, suggestive (sex implied), obsessive behaviour, you have a roommate called Mia. (let me know if I missed anything!) Set in DDBA S2!
Word Count : 5.6k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : This is so insane! A ko-fi request for a sequel that was originally a ko-fi request. Enjoy!
This could be read as a one shot, but was intended to be direct sequel to Little Monster
The second you told Dex he would have to earn the right to kiss you, his attention tunnel visioned onto the task.
You said it on your first date, if you counted sharing one terrible beer, killing Task Force agents together, and being walked home across rooftops as a first date.
Dex definitely did.
He walked you back to your fire escape afterwards, his shirt still hanging off your body beneath your jacket. You still had blood beneath your nails, and he still had your silver paint smudged beneath one eye.
At your window, he stopped.
Dex looked at your mouth, and for one brief second, he thought maybe this was it. Maybe walking you home like a gentleman would have been enough to earn you. Maybe you were finally going to lose that cruel smile and give him the only thing he had been thinking about since you kissed him through his own mask.
Instead, after handing the mask back, you placed one hand against his chest and kissed his cheek. “Goodnight, Dex.”
Then you climbed through your window and shut it behind you.
Dex stayed on the roof of your building for almost five full minutes, staring at nothing.
What was enough, then?
When he got home, he didn’t sleep.
Dex sat at his kitchen table until five in the morning with a notebook open in front of him, trying to work out how to earn you like it was a mission and a mathematical problem all at once.
He had never had this before, at least not romantically or properly.
He had wanted people before, sure. He had fixated and watched and needed. But he had never met someone he wanted to impress. This was different because it was you.
So Dex pulled up a notebook and started to brainstorm.
At the top of the page, in painfully neat handwriting, he wrote:
What can I do to earn it?
He stared at the sentence for a long time.
Then, because he had no idea what normal people did, he wrote the first thing that came to mind.
Jewellery?
He paused, but it seemed right. Women liked jewellery. He had seen his colleagues back at the FBI buy silver and gold for anniversaries, engagements, and apologies. He had seen men do it in restaurants, in movies, and in department-store advertisements with stupidly saccharine music every February.
Still, Dex knew you wouldn’t want something bought. That felt too ordinary, too impersonal. Anyone with money could buy a necklace, anyone could stand at a glass counter and let a bored sales assistant choose whatever they thought looked pretty.
That was not earning. To Dex, that was outsourcing.
Dex tapped the pen against the paper, before modifying it.
Stolen jewellery?
Better.
He underlined it once.
You liked flair, and a heist had flair. A heist required planning, timing, and risk assessment. It had alarms to silence, guards to drop, and glass to break.
Then he wrote:Necklace with red stones.
He paused, then kept brainstorming.
Clean first. Get a box.
He underlined clean first twice.
You would probably appreciate that he had been forced to kill his way through a collection of financiers, traffickers, and Task Force donors to get it. But you would appreciate the necklace even more if he cleaned every trace of their blood from it before he gave it to you.
See? He was learning.
—
A week later, you woke up to the report of a jewellery heist.
The story was already playing on the television in the kitchen by the time you wandered in, rubbing sleep from your eyes while the kettle hissed behind you. Blue police lights flashed across the screen, staining the marble frontage of some private gallery in a gray-ish intermittent colour. The windows had been shattered inward, glass glittered across the pavement like ice, and several black body bags were being wheeled past a row of reporters pressing microphones toward anyone wearing a badge.
Mia sat at the table with a bowl of cereal and the front page spread open beside her. She had placed an unloaded handgun across the article to keep it flat, which felt disrespectful to both journalism and breakfast but was hardly the strangest thing she had ever done in your kitchen.
You poured hot water over your coffee and leaned against the counter, only half listening as the reporter explained that the gallery had been used as a private showroom for a collection owned by three wealthy financiers. Between them, they had laundered money for traffickers, moved illegal weapons through shell companies, and funnelled anonymous donations into several Task Force operations.
Now they were dead.
The security team was dead too, although the report was careful to describe them as “private contractors,” which sounded much better than armed men paid to protect criminals and their stolen wealth.
Apparently, only one item had been taken.
The reporter’s image changed to an old catalogue photograph of a necklace laid against black silk. It was beautifully dramatic, set in dark metal with deep red stones that looked almost black before the studio light flashed.
You paused with the mug halfway to your mouth. “Huh.”
Mia glanced up from her cereal, spoon hovering near her lips. “What?”
“It’s pretty.” You looked at the necklace again.”
And that was the full extent of your interest.
That morning, it didn’t occur to you that Dex had done it.
Dex was many things, but he was not a thief. He took weapons when he needed them, and sometimes files, keys, evidence, ammunition. Those were practical things with a means to an end. You couldn’t imagine him breaking into private galleries for jewels. He had never shown any interest in luxury, money, or expensive objects for their own sake.
You finished your coffee, watched another body bag disappear into an ambulance, and thought no more about it.
—
Dex tapped on your apartment window shortly after midnight.
The sound was small enough that Mia didn’t hear it from her bedroom, but it pulled you out of the book balanced across your knees. You stayed still for a moment, listening.
Your hand went instinctively toward the knife tucked between the sofa cushions as you walked across the apartment. There was no shadow from the other side of the curtain, but when you saw Dex through the gap between the blinds you sighed.
Of course.
Dex stood on the other side, jacket zipped, his hair pushed back, and there was no visible blood on him anywhere. He held a small black velvet box between both hands with such care that, for a second, you wondered whether it might contain an explosive.
“Shhh,” you pulled a finger to your lips, and Dex only tilted his head.
You pulled back the window, his eyes found your face immediately, then flicked down toward your mouth before returning upward.
“What are you doing here?” You tried not to smile as you stepped into the fire escape and pulled the window back down behind you before Mia could wake up and discover Bullseye standing outside with what looked alarmingly like a romantic gift.
The metal steps were cold beneath your bare feet, and the night air smelled of rain, rust, and old brick. Traffic moved several storeys below, tyres whispering across wet roads while the glow from nearby windows softened the edges of Dex’s face.
For all you knew about him, he looked almost nervous.
The box remained cupped in his palms. When he finally offered it to you, his fingers lingered against the velvet for half a second before releasing it.
You looked at him, then down at the box, Dex watching your face like he was waiting for a verdict.
You opened it.
For several seconds, you didn’t understand what you were looking at. The stones were darker in person, a deep garnet red that seemed to hold light inside them. The metal had been polished until every curve gleamed. It was old, heavy, and far too beautiful to have belonged to any of the men who had kept it locked inside that gallery.
Then the television footage came back to you.
You lifted your eyes slowly.Dex didn’t look away.
“You did the heist,” you whispered, eyes wide now.
It was not really a question, but he nodded anyway, enough so that the cold air touched the back of your teeth while your thoughts rearranged themselves around the fact that Benjamin Poindexter had robbed a jewellery vault.
He had never been a thief before. Apparently, you had turned him into one.
The realisation hit you, so unexpectedly absurd that a tiny bit of laughter escaped before you could stop it. You lowered your head, one hand tightening around the box as the sound spilled into the alley below.
Dex’s face changed immediately. His shoulders drew in slightly, and for one second, he looked as if he thought you were laughing at him rather than the situation he had created. He had killed his way through a private gallery, stolen one necklace from an entire collection, cleaned it until it reflected fucking lasers, found a box, and knocked politely on your window.
All because you had told him to earn a kiss.
You pressed your lips together, trying to stop giggling long enough to speak.
“Dex,” you whispered, grabbing his arm, “I genuinely didn’t know this was you.”
His brow furrowed. “You didn’t?”
“You don’t steal jewellery.”
“I do now.”
That nearly started you laughing again.
You looked back down at the necklace instead. Up close, you could see the tiny details in the metalwork, dark vines curling around the stones like thorns. There was not a smear, fingerprint, or trace of blood anywhere on it. Dex must have cleaned it meticulously, working over every setting until nothing remained of the people who had guarded it.
You lifted the necklace carefully from the box. The chain slid over your fingers with a cool, satisfying weight. “It’s beautiful."
He was relieved all at once, you could tell when his jaw loosened and his shoulders dropped.
You turned the necklace over in your hands.
Of course he chose this one out of everything in the gallery.
His gaze drifted toward your throat, lingering there just long enough to answer the question you hadn’t asked: he had chosen it because he had imagined it on you in more ways than one, you were willing to bet.
You gathered your hair away from your neck and fastened the clasp yourself. The stones settled against your skin with a cold shock before gradually warming to your body. They rested directly over your collarbone, against your throat.
Dex’s eyes followed the necklace downward, tracing the chain and the red stones before returning to your face. His hands stayed still at his sides, but there was tension in every finger, as though not touching you required the same concentration as hitting an impossible target.
You had thought the gift was simply a gift, but then you saw the way he kept looking at your mouth.
Oh.
Oh.
How sweet.
You bit your lip. “This… was about the kiss.”
Dex’s face went still, and you could almost see him deciding whether denying it would help. He didn't bother.
“Did I earn it?”
There was something so painfully sincere in the question that your chest tightened. Dex hadn’t treated your teasing like flirtation. He had treated it like a task, or a standard he could meet.
You stepped closer.
The fire escape shifted faintly beneath your weight, metal creaking as you tried your hardest to still not make noise. You simply couldn’t bear to hear Mia fucking talk your ear off about manners anymore.
You touched the front of his jacket. His body went rigid beneath your palm.
For a second, you let him believe it.
You tilted your face toward his, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath. His eyes dropped to your mouth, his lips parted slightly, and every single part of his consciousness seemed to narrow onto the tiny distance remaining between you.
Then you turned your head and kissed his cheek.
Again.
This time, you let it linger as your mouth rested against the scar on his cheekbone while the red stones he had stolen for you pressed coldly against your throat. Dex closed his eyes, his breath leaving him in a wounded exhale.
When you drew back, he looked dazed.
You smiled and touched the necklace lightly. “It’s incredibly sweet.”
His gaze moved from the stones to your mouth. “But?”
“But not quite.”
The disappointment flashed across his face before he could hide it. It lasted only a second, and he quickly replaced it with a familiar, frightening focus. Then, very quietly, he said, “I’ll do better next time.”
You probably should have been worried. Instead, you smiled.
“I can’t wait.”
—
The second attempt involved your cutting off your ex-boyfriend’s pinky finger.
Dex hadn't gone looking for him. At least, that was what he told himself. He had simply seen the man leaving a bar one evening while he was on his way back home. Unfortunately for your ex, he'd made the mistake of bragging about his ex being a dangerous and wanted vigilante, loudly enough for Dex to hear.
"I used to have her wrapped around my little finger,” He laughed loudly, as if that would impress the girl he was currently talking to.
Ugh.
The package appeared on your fire escape the following morning, wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with butcher’s string, with anote that said : Though he shouldn’t have this anymore.
It was small enough to fit in your palm, though the dark stain beginning to spread through one corner gave away that it was definitely not jewellery this time.
You found Dex that evening on the opposite rooftop, watching your apartment with anticipation, waiting to hear whether a gift had been received. You should have been horrified. Instead, you kept thinking about the specificity of it. He had not killed the man, because apparently Dex had decided death would be too impersonal. He had taken the exact part of him that he had mentioned and removed it with surgical attention, leaving your ex alive to understand why.
When you met him on the roof, Dex straightened. Hope appeared on his face almost immediately, fragile beneath all that lethal stillness. You stepped into his space, rested your hand against his chest, and kissed his cheek in the same place as before.
Dex watched you leave with his fingers pressed against the place you had kissed, already reconsidering the scale of the gesture.
The third attempt happened during one of your outings together.
Calling it an outing was generous. You had spent most of the evening following a Task Force accountant through Hell’s Kitchen while Dex moved along the rooftops above you, appearing occasionally in dark windows and reflective surfaces like an omen. The job ended early, leaving the two of you walking without urgency through streets still wet from rain. You stopped for food from a cart, shared greasy hotdogs beneath the awning of a closed shop, and let yourself pretend for several minutes that this was what normal situationships did.
The man who ruined it came out of a bar angry. His shoulder struck yours hard enough to spill the drink in your hand, and instead of apologising, he grabbed your wrist when you turned toward him. His fingers tightened. He called you a bitch.
Dex knew you could more than take care of yourself, but instead of letting you deal with it, his head thought ding, ding, ding! This is your chance to earn it!
Without waiting to see what you would do, Dex killed him with his hands because the offence had been physical, and a primitive part of him apparently believed the answer should be too. By the time you reacted to them, the man’s face had already gone slack beneath the dirty wash of the streetlights. Dex remained crouched over him, breathing evenly, blood along his knuckles and the cuff of his sleeve.
He looked up at you without remorse, as if the man’s hand created a simple problem and Dex had solved it in the most direct way available.
You… looked disappointed, almost sad that you weren’t given the choice to end him yourself.
You should have scolded him. Instead, you crouched and wiped a thin streak of blood from beneath his eye.
His eyes dropped to your mouth before you had even begun leaning closer, and for a brief second, the hope on his face made you consider giving him what he wanted.
You kissed his cheek again.
This time, your mouth landed nearer the corner of his lips, close enough that Dex inhaled and turned his face by instinct, chasing an act you had already withdrawn. You smiled, tracing your thumb once over his bloodied cheekbone before leaving him kneeling beside the body with his restraint hanging by a thread.
His fourth attempt was less impulsive and considerably more elaborate.
Someone had begun watching your building. You noticed the same dark sedan twice in one week, though it always disappeared before you could approach it. Mia found a listening device beneath the kitchen windowsill, hidden so badly it was frankly insulting. T
Three nights later, an entire surveillance crew disappeared.
Their operation had been housed in a rented office two streets from your apartment. Dex dismantled it room by room. The people inside had worked for a private intelligence firm funded by Task Force donors, and Dex killed the ones who had apparently fucking photographed your bedroom, even if he had done the same himself. He left the technician who had installed the device alive with both hands broken and every hard drive stacked beside him.
Then Dex brought you the files.
He arranged them across your kitchen table while you slept, pages separated into neat categories: From the names of the donors, their addresses, their routines, and the amounts they had paid to look into your life.
You found him later that night when you stepped onto the fire escape, crouched between his knees, and held his face in both hands. This time, your kiss landed at the edge of his cheek, close enough to his mouth that the corner of your lips brushed his for less than a second.
He went rigid.
The contact on his lips had been so slight it might have been accidental, but both of you knew it wasn't. Dex followed when you pulled away, stopping himself only after his mouth had moved an inch toward yours. His eyes had gone unfocused, his breathing suddenly uneven as he stared at the tiny distance you had created.
You thanked him for the files, and told him not quite.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
—-
Dex ran out of ideas three days later.
The almost-kiss had destroyed what remained of his ability to think rationally. He could still feel the exact place you had pressed your lips to his skin, which he thought about often enough to become embarrassing.
You had been so close. Closer than ever before.
That would have meant he was improving, right?
Instead, he sat at his kitchen table until nearly dawn, staring at the same notebook he had used after your first date.
The original page looked almost childish now. Jewellery? was written in black ink, followed by notes about red stones, boxes, and cleaning off the blood. That had seemed like such a strong idea at the time. He had been proud of it. He had planned the heist meticulously, selected the necklace from an entire private collection, and polished every link of the chain himself.
You had loved it.
Still. It was not enough.
Everything he had tried afterwards filled the next several pages. Names, addresses, little reminders of things that bothered you and people who no longer had the opportunity to do so. Some of the ideas had been crossed out because they were too excessive, although Dex’s definition of excessive remained alarmingly generous. Others had been completed and marked with neat dates in the margin.
Beside each attempt, he had recorded the result.
Cheek.
Cheek again. Slightly longer.
Corner of mouth. Almost.
Pathetic. It really was fucking pathetic.
Dex stared at that final entry until the words began to blur.
He could do more, obviously. There were always more people to kill, more enemies to drag to your feet like a sad cat.
But Dex had begun to suspect that scale was not the problem.
He picked up his pen and wrote: bigger jewellery heist?
Then he crossed it out.
He wrote: kill Task Force Leader?
That one remained on the page for several minutes before he reluctantly crossed it out too. Powell definitely deserved it, but you had never mentioned him specifically. Killing someone you hadn’t complained about felt like guessing, and Dex was starting to understand that guessing wrong could push him farther away instead of bringing him closer.
He considered returning your ex’s other pinky finger.
No, he thought, too repetitive.
He considered finding every man who had ever frightened you and arranging them alphabetically in a warehouse.
Impractical, he thought. That idea had flair, but he could not work out what you would do with one.
By six in the morning, the notebook contained several increasingly desperate fragments and one entire page where Dex had written WHAT DOES SHE WANT? hard enough to leave the words embossed through the paper beneath it.
The answer didn’t appear.
For the first time since you had told him to earn the kiss, Benjamin Poindexter had no plan.
—
Mia discovered him outside your kitchen window at two in the morning.
She had come in for water wearing an oversized pyjama set, her hair twisted into a loose knot that had mostly collapsed. The apartment was dark except for the light above the stove, and she nearly walked past him before she noticed the shape crouched on the fire escape.
Dex tapped once against the glass.
Mia flinched hard enough to spill water over her hand. “What the…”
Within seconds, she had a pistol aimed directly between his eyes.
Dex had expected that.
Mia stared at him through the window, exhausted because she had repeatedly asked you to stop contributing to her life becoming stranger and had been consistently ignored. Her eyes moved from his face to his empty hands, checking for blood, weapons, packages, or severed pieces of anyone she recognised.
There was nothing, and that seemed to concern her more.
She unlocked the window but only raised it several inches, leaving enough space to talk without giving him room to climb through.
“She’s asleep,” Mia said quietly.
“I know.”
Her eyes narrowed. Of course he did.
Dex looked past her toward your bedroom door on the side, which was closed. He could picture you behind it, curled beneath the blankets, breathing into your pillow. He forced his attention back to Mia before the thought became distracting. “I need help.”
Mia’s grip shifted on the pistol.
For several seconds, she seemed unsure whether she had heard him correctly. Dex understood that he didn’t ask people for help. Help created debt and uncertainty, and it was usually more efficient to solve the problem himself.
Unfortunately, he had tried that.
Mia raised the window another few inches, though the gun remained.
Dex took the notebook from inside his jacket and passed it through the gap.
Mia didn;t lower the pistol as she took it. She placed the notebook on the counter, flipped it open with one hand, and began reading. Her expression changed as she moved through the pages: Confusion, followed by disbelief, then amusement.
Dex watched her read the record of his attempts, and when Mia reached the page headed POSSIBLE NEXT ATTEMPTS, she stopped.
The list beneath it included stealing a deed to a building, acquiring a tiger, and locating the person responsible for cancelling the brand of hot chocolate you liked three years ago.
Mia looked up. “A tiger?”
“She likes cats,” Dex shrugged.
Mia sighed. “That doesn't mean she wants a tiger.”
“I crossed it out.”
She looked at the notes again. “It says here you researched three private zoos.”
“I needed to know whether it was feasible.”
Mia shut the notebook and pressed her fingertips against her forehead. The gun was still in her other hand, but it had lowered toward the floor, apparently because exasperation had temporarily overtaken self-preservation.
Dex waited for her to provide an answer.
Instead, she looked at him through the narrow opening and began to laugh, and it was not the same laughter you gave him. Yours eventually made his chest warm. Mia’s laughter made him feel as though he had failed the test at every hurdle.
He thought about hurting Mia for making him feel humiliated, but then decided against it because you’d probably hate him for it.
“I’m serious.”
“That’s the problem,” Mia managed, keeping her voice down so she wouldn’t wake you. “You are thinking about this like you’re trying to overthrow a government.”
Dex didn’t see how that was relevant. Overthrowing a government required less guesswork.
Mia opened the notebook again and flicked through the pages, staring at each carefully planned act of violence. The laughter eventually faded, leaving behind a reluctant sympathy that Dex disliked even more.
“You’re thinking too much,” she told him.
The statement felt insulting. Thinking was how he avoided mistakes. “She told me to earn it.”
“I know. She told me everything.”
Dex’s attention sharpened. “Everything?”
Mia ignored the question. “You keep acting like there’s a secret combination of murder and theft that unlocks her mouth.”
He reached under the window for the notebook, but Mia pulled it back before he could take it. “She’s just a girl, Dex.”
He stared at her, because she wasn’t making sense.
You were not just anything. How fucking dare she insinuate that?
Mia seemed to read the objection on his face.
“I know she’s a fucking lunatic,” she continued. “I live with her. I’ve helped her sink bodies. Just… stop trying to earn the kiss by making her owe you.”
Eventually, she released the notebook back to his custody.
That had never been his intention. He didn’t want you indebted to him. He wanted you to be impressed, delighted. But perhaps those things were not as different as he had believed.
Perhaps the gesture had the undertone of the same question:
Was that enough? Do I get it now?
Mia had seen it. You probably had too.
Dex looked down at the notebook in his hands and the pages felt heavier than before.
Mia started lowering the window, apparently done with his bullshit for the night. She paused with only a narrow gap remaining. “Again,” She started, “She’s just a girl. Don’t overthink it.”
Easier said than done.
—
For once, Dex listened.
The next time he came to see you, nobody had died.
There was no breaking-news report waiting for you that morning, no stolen artefact displayed across the front page, no mysteriously vanished Task Force officials, and no parcel on the fire escape leaking through its paper wrapping. The day passed so uneventfully that by evening, you had started to suspect Dex was planning something truly catastrophic.
You checked the news twice. Nothing.
You glanced toward the window whenever a shadow shifted outside, but the fire escape remained empty. It was nearly eight when someone knocked on the apartment door.
You looked up from the sofa.
Mia looked up from the weapon catalogue spread across her lap. She was in her bedroom with the door ajar. “You expecting someone?”
“No.”
Mia turned another page. “Weird.”
There was no urgency in the knock, no coded pattern, and no scraping sound suggesting someone was trying to slide a body across the hallway carpet.
When you opened the door, Dex was standing beneath the weak yellow light with a bunch of flowers in his hands.
For a moment, you only stared.
They were not arranged professionally. The paper around them had been folded precisely in some places and crushed in others, as though Dex had spent far too long trying to hold them without damaging anything. There were no red stones, no bloodstains, and no expensive velvet box. Just a slightly unruly collection of pale flowers and greenery, fresh enough that tiny droplets of water still clung to the petals.
Dex looked almost painfully uncertain.
He had faced rooms full of armed men with less visible tension. His shoulders were held too squarely, his fingers carefully positioned around the stems, and his eyes kept moving between your face and the flowers as though he expected one of them to tell him what to do next.
Oh. this was new.
“You… brought me flowers.”
“I uh…” Dex nodded, “yeah.”
Your eyes narrowed with suspicion as you accepted them. The paper rustled beneath your fingers, damp where the stems had been wrapped. “Did you steal them?”
“No.”
“Threaten the florist?”
He had another pause, just long enough to become concerning. “No.”
“Dex.”
“I paid.”
You looked up properly at that.
His eyes looked… defensive, as if buying flowers had required more courage than stealing a priceless necklace from a fortified vault. Maybe it had. Violence gave him a shield to hide behind. This was only Dex standing outside your door with a simple gift and no proof of obsession beyond the fact that he had remembered you might like flowers in your favourite colours.
You looked down at the flowers again.
They smelled green somehow, faintly sweet but not overwhelming. A little piece of leaf had caught against the paper near your thumb. One stem was slightly bent, probably from Dex gripping the bouquet too tightly on the journey over and then attempting to straighten it before knocking.
The imperfection made it strangely charming.
There was no note demanding that you understand what he had done for you, though you had at least expected it. There was no list of names or severed pieces of someone who had wronged you. He hadn’t even brought them as evidence that he could protect you, avenge you, or remove inconvenience from your life.
He had brought you flowers because Mia had told him you were just a girl.
And sometimes girls liked flowers their will-they-won’t-they situationship brought for them.
Finally, after all his increasingly elaborate attempts, he had tried doing something… simple.
“They’re beautiful,” you smiled,watching relief pass over his face so openly you nearly melted.
Dex’s eyes flickered toward your mouth out of habit, but he stopped himself almost immediately. He didn’t ask whether he had earned it, he didn’t even step closer or look expectant. He only stood there in the hallway, hands empty now, waiting to see whether you wanted to invite him inside.
Oh, Dex.
You stepped into the hallway and placed the flowers carefully on the console table beside the door. Dex watched you do it, cautiously hopeful, but he still didn’t move.
Without any warning, you grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down, pressing your lips to his.
His mouth was warm beneath yours, parted slightly with surprise, and for one suspended moment he did absolutely nothing.
Apparently, he had failed to consider that flowers might work.
Eventually, though, he kissed you back carefully at first, as if the kiss might disappear if he wanted it too much. His hand lifted toward your waist but stopped just short of touching, every part of him still suspended between hope and disbelief.
You pulled away.
Dex followed without meaning to, his mouth chasing yours by an inch before he caught himself. His eyes opened completely dazed, and the devastation on his face made your stomach twist.
At that moment, he seemed to think that was all he was getting.
Then you smiled, tightened your fist in his jacket, and pulled him back.
The second kiss was deeper, and Dex made a soft, wrecked sound against your mouth as his hands finally settled around your waist. The restraint he had been pushed down for weeks cracked beneath your fingers. He kissed you like he had memorised every near miss: every cheek, every corner, every cruel fraction of an inch you had left between you.
Behind you, Mia peeked out her bedroom door.
Mia took one look at Dex leaning down on you in the doorway, your hands gripping his jacket and the flowers abandoned beside the door, then silently reached around the frame and pulled the door shut again.
You laughed into the kiss, breathless against his mouth.
Dex felt it in his bones, not quite believing the fact that you were finally kissing him back without a tally to settle or another task waiting. When you eventually pulled back, he followed helplessly until his forehead rested against yours. His breathing had gone uneven, and his eyes kept dropping to your lips as if he still expected you to change your mind and put unbearable distance between you again.
“D’you wanna come in?” you asked.
Dex nodded far too quickly. “Mhm.”
It came out so pathetic and eager that you smiled, caught his hand, and pulled him through the doorway. The flowers stayed forgotten on the little table while you dragged him toward your bedroom, kissing him again before you had even made it down the hall.
Mia’s door was still shut, and Dex briefly considered knocking to offer her headphones.
Then your hands found his belt loops in his waist, your mouth moving hungrily against his, and he decided she could survive one noisy night after advising him on how to win your physical affection.
After all, she had been right.
You were just a girl, and all Dex had ever needed to do was bring you flowers.
—end.
NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5.
That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation (keep this post in mind for July and August 2026). If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else.
Please remember I run this blog for free, so any support means a lot, only if you’re able to give it! Love y’all and thank you for reading!!! <3
have you watched the odyssey? And what did you think of Agamemnon I feel like you’re like the helmet🫦
OKAY.
so I have watched the odyssey and I liked it overall. It isn’t a perfect adaptation but then again this has been told and retold a million different times. It works in the context of the modern lens that Nolan is aiming for.
there are parts of it that I loved and parts I didn’t, but I won’t be discussing them here because I know tumblr is split on this film and I don’t want unnecessary arguments happening in my comments because I don’t think my blog is the place to do it. This is a Marvel-centered blog, after all 😭
HOWEVER. Most of my audience is Bucky and Dex fans, which means I know for a fact more than half of us probably have a mask kink so I will entertain that, at least.
Let me be clear: Agamemnon is a piece of shit, as evident in even this retelling. He can rot and I would not give a shit. The armour, though? 👀👀👀
I think Nolan does a great job in making him feel ominous. Unfortunately, I think the female gaze (me lol) romanticises this and it just tickles my brain, y know? the fact that we barely if at all ever get a direct look at his face is um… not helping the mask kink.
IN CONCLUSION. I DO NOT WANT TO FUCK AGAMEMNON. HE IS A PRICK. I WANT TO FUCK JUST THE ARMOR.
Summary : You invite Dex to your birthday dinner at your sister's apartment. Unfortunately for Dex, your sister is Elektra.
Pairing : Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | Modern au
Warnings/tags : modern au (I’m aiming for neo noir vibes) assassin!Dex, stunt choreographer!reader, Weapons/art collector! Elektra x Law Professor! Matt. Reader is Elektra’s little sister by a few years but whether she’s a biological sister or adopted is open to interpretation, murder and assassination, discussions of witness intimidation and coercion, blood and minor injury, morally grey characters, legal allegations, reader knowingly dating an assassin, implied sex and sexual content, alcohol, family conflict, happy ending if you ignore the moral implications lol.
Word Count : 8.9k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : Hey ya’ll! If you wanna be tagged, please send me a message! Comments get lost sometimes. Enjoy!
You met Dex in a hotel bar in Los Angeles on the night Daniel Shaw died, though you wouldn’t know until much later that he was the reason he was dead.
At the time, he was only a man at the end of the bar with a beautifully scarred face and a glass he barely touched. You noticed him because everyone else in the room was making a performance out of grieving. Several producers stood in tense little clusters with phones pressed to their ears, actresses dabbed at dry eyes beneath perfect mascara, personal assistants went back and forth like frightened birds between tables, and every agent in the building seemed to be calculating whether a dead studio head meant opportunity or unemployment.
You were not crying either, but at least you had the decency not to pretend.
Daniel Shaw had owned the movie studio currently paying your invoices, which made his sudden death inconvenient more than tragic. He had been found in his suite less than an hour ago. Someone said it was a heart attack. Another person said it was suicide after someone found a bullet in his head. It was so sudden! Your coworker kept repeating, as if the situation might become less alarming if she repeated it enough. You had worked under his studio for three months and met him properly only twice. He was charming, rich, and distant. Powerful men often were, which meant he remembered nobody’s name unless they could make him money.
You were a stunt choreographer. That put you somewhere below the director, below the producers, below the lead actress’ wellness coach, and slightly above the poor intern sent to buy twelve green juices at six in the morning. Shaw dying wasn’t personal to you, but it was close enough to your paycheck to keep you at the bar instead of going upstairs to sleep.
You took a sip of your whiskey and watched the room in the mirror behind the bottles.
That was where you found him watching you.
He didn’t look away when your eyes met, and it made you smile. Most men glanced down when caught, then looked back later with some lazy excuse written across their face. This man didn’t bother. He simply held your gaze in the mirror, almost amused, like he had known you were going to notice him and had been waiting for you to decide what to do about it.
You turned slightly on your stool. “You’re staring.”
His mouth curled up, barely. “You finally noticed.”
“I’m trained,” you shrugged, trying to keep things vague. “I notice when someone is watching me.”
He simply raised his cup to his lips. “Good to know.”
“Is it?”
“It explains the bruises.”
You looked down at your knee, where the hem of your dress had ridden up enough to show the dark bloom of a rehearsal bruise above your shin. It wasn’t your worst one this week, but it wasn’t the prettiest, either. Still, the way his eyes touched it and moved on made your skin warm, because he didn’t leer. He assessed.
You picked up your drink and carried it down the bar to him because the night was already strange, your contract might be cancelled by morning, and you had never been especially good at leaving interesting things alone.
“Since you’re apparently studying me,” you said as you sat beside him, “what else have you learned?”
He turned his glass once against the bar top, eyes moving over your face with infuriating patience. “You’re not drunk, but you’re trying to decide if you want to be. You’re not sad, but you know you should look sadder. You’ve checked the exits twice since I sat down, and you keep favouring your left side, which means either your hip hurts or your knee does.”
“My knee,” you confirmed, hating how impressed you sounded. “And I checked the exits because this room is full of dickheads. That’s just good sense.”
He managed a small, performative frown. “They’re just film executives.”
“Eh,” you shrugged, “same difference."
This time, he smiled properly. “Fair.”
You angled your body toward him, letting your shoulder rest against the bar. “Your turn.”
“My turn?”
“What have I learned about you?”
His eyes stayed on yours. “Go ahead.”
You let yourself look, because he had started it, though that pretence felt childish and paper-thin now. He had a dark jacket on and an expensive watch worn like he didn’t care whether anyone noticed it. His posture was relaxed, but not loose. His hands were still on the bar and had no wedding ring, no visible nerves, no grief, no curiosity for anyone in the room except you.
Your sister had taught you to read people pretty well.
“You’re too quiet to be an actor,” you said. “You’re not a producer either, because you haven’t checked your phone every six seconds and you don’t look like you’re about to ruin someone’s career over a schedule change. You could be security, but you’re not standing like you’re being paid to watch the door.”
“Maybe I’m off duty.”
“Maybe,” you allowed. “But if you were off duty, I think you’d still know exactly who in this room was carrying, who was lying, and who would scream first if the lights went out.”
The amusement in his face was evident. “And who would scream first?”
You glanced around the bar and nodded toward a red-faced producer loudly saying Shaw had been like a father to him. “Him. But only after checking whether TMZ is watching.”
The man beside you laughed under his breath. You liked the sound too much immediately, which was annoying because you didn’t even know his name yet.
You held out your hand. “I’m not calling you stranger all night.”
His hand closed around yours. “Dex.”
“Just Dex?”
“For now.”
“That’s weird.”
“Do you like weird?”
You should have denied it. Instead, your smile gave you away. “I like interesting. Weird is reviewed on a case by case basis”
Dex didn’t release your hand immediately. He brushed his thumb over your knuckles, where tape residue still clung from that afternoon’s rehearsal. When he let go, you had to remind yourself not to stare.
“So,” he said, “stunt performer of some kind.”
You narrowed your eyes as if you were surprised that the handshake had given it away. Still, it was fun to play along, right? “Were you at the dinner?”
“Briefly.”
“And did you know Shaw?”
He considered his answer this time “Briefly.”
You chuckled, and Dex watched as if he wanted to understand the mechanics of it. It was unsettling, but it didn’t make you want to leave. If anything, it made you lean closer, because he was giving you so little that every small reaction felt like a gold star. You worked with performers all day, people trained to externalise every emotion so the camera could catch it. Dex did the opposite. He made you want to get your hands on him just to see what he was like underneath.
“What do you do, Dex-for-now?” you asked.
“Private security advising.”
You tilted your head. “That is the most fake Hollywood job I’ve ever heard.”
“It pays well.”
“I bet it does.” You smiled, “Do you consult on security, or do you just stand around looking intimidating?”
His eyes dropped to your mouth again, and this time he wasn’t quick enough to hide it. “Depends on who’s paying.”
You shifted on the stool, crossing one leg over the other, and watched his eyes flick down for the briefest second before returning to your face.
Controlled, you thought again. He was controlled enough that making him look felt like winning.
“You know,” you said, “for a security advisor, you’re not very reassuring.”
Dex leaned slightly closer, his voice dipping beneath the noise of the bar. “And yet you came over.”
“I was bored.”
“You’re not bored now.”
You hated that he was right. You hated it more because of how certain he seemed, as if your interest was another fact he had collected. The room around you blurred into a swirl of candlelight, glass, perfume, and expensive panic. Upstairs, a billionaire was dead. Down here, this stranger watched you like you were the only interesting target.
You took another sip of your drink. “You’re very sure of yourself.”
“With some things.”
“And with others?”
Dex’s gaze held yours. “I like to be certain before I touch.”
It was absurd how quickly a fucking line got to you. Nothing in his tone was crude, and he barely even moved. But suddenly you were thinking about his hand around yours, his thumb over your knuckles, his mouth close to your ear.
You looked away first, which made him smile.
You didn’t answer right away. Instead, you set your glass down and let the silence stretch. Dex didn’t rush to fill it. He only watched you while the whole room kept mourning a man neither of you seemed able to miss.
Finally, you said, “My job might be gone tomorrow,” you sighed as if that didn’t affect you. It probably didn’t. Your family had enough money that you could just jet to the Bahamas tomorrow and not look back, but you actually liked the project you were working on. “That should bother me more.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“It does,” you said, then shrugged. “Just not enough to make me behave.”
Dex’s eyes moved over your face, and he shifted a little. “How badly do you want not to behave?”
Fuck.
It was so direct. It was certainly too much, maybe, from a man you had met fifteen minutes ago in a bar full of vultures dressed as mourners. But you had spent your whole life around danger. Dex was not pretending hard enough to be safe, and the reckless part of you respected that.
You leaned close enough that your knee brushed his. “That depends.”
His breath changed.
There. You had him.
Dex stood and offered his hand.
You looked at his hand, then at his face. “You always pick girls up in weird hotels?”
“No.” He managed a dry laugh, “you’re special.”
You laughed despite yourself and placed your hand in his.
The elevator ride up was a lesson in restraint. He stood beside you without touching you again, which made every inch of space between your bodies feel like you were pulling teeth. The mirrored walls showed you too many versions of him: his profile, his hands, the line of his throat where his shirt opened. You could feel him watching your reflection instead of your body directly, which shouldn’t have been hotter, but was.
The elevator doors opened before you could say anything.
His room was high up, expensive, and nearly untouched. There was no mess or scattered clothes. No sign that anyone had lived there longer than necessary. Los Angeles glittered beyond the windows, silver streets and distant headlights, while the door clicked shut behind you.
You turned to face him. “You’re not really a security advisor, are you?”
Dex looked at you for a long moment. “Not tonight.”
You should have asked what that meant. You should have cared. Instead, you stepped closer and reached for the open collar of his shirt, letting your fingers slide beneath the edge of the fabric.
“Good,” you said. “I’m off the clock too.”
When he kissed you, the control didn’t vanish all at once. That would have been too easy. It was slow, first with his hand at your waist, firm enough to make you gasp against his mouth. Then his other hand at the back of your neck, fingers threading into your hair as he angled you exactly how he wanted you. He kissed like a man who had thought about doing it before he allowed himself to move, like every second of restraint in the bar was hell on earth.
You pushed his jacket off his shoulders. He let it fall without looking away from you. When you started on the buttons of his shirt, Dex caught your wrists, not to stop you, but to slow you down, his thumbs pressing lightly to your pulse points like he wanted to feel exactly what he was doing to you.
“You’re impatient,” he murmured, and for a second, you realized, holy shit. He really didn’t do these one night flings often.
Still, the only thing you managed to say was: “You’re overdressed.”
His mouth found your neck, and your answer dissolved into a breathless laugh. He smiled against your skin. You felt it more than saw that private satisfaction, and then his hands moved again with a precision that made your knees feel unreliable. He never grabbed thoughtlessly. He touched with the same focus he had watched you with downstairs, learning what made you arch, what made your fingers dig into his shoulders.
By the time he walked you backward toward the bed, you were hot and irritated by how badly you wanted him. Dex seemed worse off for trying to hide it. His shirt was open, his hair no longer perfect because your hands had been in it, and his breathing had gone rough, making you smile against his mouth.
You pulled him down with you.
After that, the night turned feverish. It became his mouth on your skin, your dress pushed away, his hands gentle until you guided them, and suddenly they were not. He was careful in ways that made you ache and rough only when you dragged it out of him, and the first time you felt his composure slip, you laughed breathlessly because you could not help it.
Dex lifted his head, eyes narrowed.
“You’re not as controlled as you look.”
“No,” he said, his mouth brushing yours. “Not like this.”
You believed him, though you had no reason to. Maybe that was the point. All you knew was that this was just a bad day with bad timing and a dead man upstairs whose absence had left the door to the evening just open enough for a stranger to step through.
Later, when the room was dark and your body fell beside his, you lay with your cheek against his chest and traced one of the old scars near his ribs. He was quiet under your hand, but not asleep. You knew the difference.
His fingers moved slowly along your spine, almost absent. “Dex?”
“Mm.”
“Were you really there for Shaw?”
His hand paused for less than a second before it continued.
“Briefly,” he said again.
You smiled into the dark because you knew he was giving you nothing, and for tonight, only tonight, you decided to let him.
You should have gone back to your own room. You should have asked better questions. You should have treated this as a stupid one night stand and pretended this never happened.
Instead, you closed your eyes and stayed exactly where you were.
—
Six months after that night, you moved to New York.
Officially, it was for work. A Broadway production had brought you on to choreograph the stage combat for a lavish, over-funded revival with sword fights, balcony falls, and a dramatic death scene that had to happen eight times a week without sending the lead actor to hospital.
It was a good job. You even put it on exclamation points and sent it to your agent like you had made a responsible career decision.
It had absolutely nothing to do with Dex being based in New York.
Mostly.
Fine, maybe a little.
Your sister was there too, which made the decision feel less incriminating. Elektra had an apartment in Manhattan, three passports in names you were not supposed to know, and an art studio collecting ancient weapons, because technically, that was her job.
You knew better than to ask where the acquisitions came from, and Elektra knew better than to ask why you had suddenly accepted a Broadway job in the same city as a man who called himself a security advisor and looked at you like he would happily ruin his life if you asked sweetly enough.
You and Dex had been officially dating for three months.
It was a good three months of late-night dinners, hotel room mornings, flowers delivered to rehearsal with no card because he knew you would know. It was three months of you pretending not to notice when the news mentioned a man connected to Shaw’s circle dying strangely overseas. Three months of Dex pretending his work calls were about security logistics and not whatever thing he did for people rich enough to afford him.
You knew what he was. Dex carried violence too naturally for it to be a hobby, and sometimes, when he came to you after work, the calm around him was too emptied out. He would shower before touching you, scrub himself raw, come out with damp hair and bare feet.
Your moral compass had raised one weak little hand in protest, but then Dex had kissed you against your kitchen counter, murmured sweetheart like a prayer, and made your entire sense of right and wrong pack a bag and leave the state.
Maybe that made you terrible. Maybe it made you Elektra’s sister after all.
Or maybe Dex was just so unfairly, stupidly, devastatingly hot that you just kept getting distracted.
And Dex knew that you knew after the first month or so, when you jokingly called him Hot John Wick.
Dex had always expected you to figure it out sooner or later. He knew you were a smart girl. He just didn’t realise you’d figure out this soon.
Instead of being shocked though, he just raised his eyebrows and said, “John Wick is already hot.”
You chuckled and pulled him close. “Shut up and take it as a compliment that I find you even hotter.”
“Yes ma’am.”
And that was that.
—
Earlier today, you had texted Dex and asked if he could come over and cuddle.
Ha.
You were already on the couch when he got in, cozy in sleep shorts and an oversized hoodie, one fuzzy sock half-off your foot, your body tired from rehearsal and your brain still muddled with stage falls, sword cues, and actors who didn’t understand that “again from the top” didn’t mean “try to improvise a stabbing.”
Dex took off his coat and looked at you like he had been waiting all day to come home to you.
“You’re late,” you said.
“‘M sorry.”
He came closer, and you let him pull you up just so you could immediately drag him down with you again. Dex caught himself over you with one hand braced beside your head, his knee sinking into the couch, his body warm and heavy enough above yours to make your whole chest loosen.
He kissed you, mouth moving over yours like he wanted to settle there. Like he needed a minute to remember what it felt like to be wanted without being useful. You went pliant underneath him almost immediately, because apparently that was what you did now. You let murderers kiss you tenderly on your couch and call it romance.
His hand slid beneath your hoodie and you hummed against his mouth.
Dex’s palm dragged up your ribs, then paused over your breast, cupping you through the thin fabric beneath like he was not even trying to pretend the cuddling was innocent anymore. His thumb moved once, and your breath caught hard enough for him to smile into the kiss.
“Dex,” you murmured.
“Mm.”
“That is not cuddling.”
“It’s close.”
His mouth dipped to your throat, and the laugh you tried to give him turned embarrassingly quiet halfway out. He knew exactly what he was doing.
His hand slid down again over your waist, then your hip, then lower.
He pushed his body down yours, mouth tracing heat along your neck while his fingers found the waistband of your shorts. He tucked himself there, resting under the elastic, knuckles brushing warm skin.
Dex loved having his finger between your legs, knowing he can’t seem to miss the sweet spot, ever. Which meant you knew exactly how to make him suffer.
His fingers started to slip lower, and you caught his wrist.
Dex stopped.
Slowly, he lifted his head, looking offended, as if you had interrupted him mid-prayer.
“Sweetheart,” he said carefully.
You smiled. “My birthday is coming up.”
For a second, he just stared.
His wrist flexed under your fingers as you held it still. “I know.”
His thumb slipped under the edge by half an inch, expecting you to give in, but your hand only tightened, keeping him out of your shorts still.
Then his eyes lifted to yours, already suspicious. “Baby.”
You smiled. “Ah-ah.”
His gaze narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“Negotiating.”
“With my hand?”
“With your access,” you corrected
His desire didn’t disappear. It only got interrupted by confusion. “You’re blackmailing me.”
“I’m making a birthday request.”
His eyes flicked down to where you were holding his wrist. “With leverage.”
You held back a chuckle, trying your best to look innocent. “Smart girls use leverage.”
Dex opened his mouth, then closed it again.
You smiled sweetly. “That’s what I thought.”
For a second, he looked like he wanted to argue. Unfortunately for him, he also wanted control of his hand back very, very badly. “What do you want, pretty girl?” he asked.
You knew he meant presents, like actual presents. He was prepared to buy his way out of this. Hitman money in New York apparently paid well enough that Dex looked genuinely prepared for you to name something like a weekend in Paris.
You tightened your grip on his wrist. You looked up at him, very pleased with yourself. “I want you to meet my sister.”
Dex went still, much more still than when you had called him a hitman for the first time, actually, which told you a lot about his priorities.
“Your sister,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For your birthday.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
He looked at you like you were a puzzle he hadn’t been hired to solve. Dex looked down at his trapped hand, then back at your face. “You’re really withholding this until I say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
His teeth clenched as your thumb stroked idly over the inside of his wrist. You were not even trying to be seductive with it, but Dex watched the movement like it was actively shortening his lifespan.
“Baby,” he said.
“Mm?”
“Let go of my hand.”
“Say yes.”
“You don’t play fair.”
He made a sound that was half a laugh and half suffering. “You know I adore you, right?”
“Then say yes.”
Dex lowered his head until his forehead rested against yours. His eyes closed briefly, like he was gathering strength. It was ridiculous. He could probably walk into a guarded room and come out alive without messing up his hair, but you asking him to attend one birthday dinner had him acting like you had handed him a bomb with a pink bow on it.
“You haven’t told me anything about her,” he said.
“She’s my sister.”
“That’s not information.”
“She’s important to me.”
It managed to shut him up.
You sighed, just a little, though you still didn’t let go of his wrist. “I want her to meet you. Isn’t that enough information?”
Dex opened his eyes, and he looked almost undone by it.
You kissed him lightly. “Please.”
His breath caught.
You knew that would get him.
“Don’t,” he murmured.
“Please, Dex.”
“Sweetheart.”
“For my birthday.”
He stared at you with the exhaustion of a man who had never stood a chance. “Fine,” he sighed. “I’ll meet your sister.”
Your smile bloomed. “You’ll be nice?”
“I’ll be polite.” Dex looked pointedly at his wrist. “Can I have my hand back now?”
You hummed like you were thinking about it.
His eyes darkened. “Baby.” His mouth brushed yours.
Eventually, you released his wrist.
Dex didn’t move immediately, even though he had been desperate two seconds ago.
Dex kissed you first, like he was still thanking you for wanting him at dinner. His hand slipped lower and you gasped against his mouth, laughing breathlessly when you felt his smile.
“Now,” he hummed, “where were we?”
—
You and Dex stood outside Elektra’s apartment door with his hand at the small of your back and enough tension in his shoulders to make you bite back a smile.
For a man who had once admitted, very calmly, that he preferred entering buildings through service corridors because front doors made people too expectant, he had spent an absurd amount of time preparing for your birthday.
He had brought you flowers first, an arrangement of red ranunculus, white anemones, dark tulips, and little sprigs of jasmine tucked between them because he remembered you once saying jasmine smelled like nights in expensive hotels.
You had stared at it for so long that Dex had asked, “Too much?”
“No,” you said, already smiling like an idiot. “It’s beautiful.”
Only then had he relaxed.
The second gift was smaller, slim black leather notebook with your initials pressed into the bottom corner in gold, the pages thick enough for blocking notes, sketches, injury reports, and all the frantic choreography scribbles you usually left on call sheets and napkins. Inside the front cover was a thin metal bookmark shaped like a tiny sword.
You had smiled, and he looked painfully pleased with himself.
Then, because he was Dex, he had stopped in a supermarket on the way there and very pragmatically asked, “What kind of wine does your sister like?”
“Expensive.”
He only nodded.
Now he stood beside you holding a bottle that probably cost more than your weekly food shop, his jaw tight, his scarred face composed, his coat immaculate. He looked less like a boyfriend arriving for dinner and more like a man approaching a guarded border with falsified papers and a personal stake in crossing.
“You know she’s not going to fucking kill you.” You nudged him gently. “She made dinner. That’s basically a peace offering.”
“She made dinner for you,” Dex said flatly. “I’m the complication.”
Right.
Dex didn’t care about charming people for the sake of being liked. He didn’t need Elektra’s approval because he wanted a pleasant evening or a normal story to tell later. He needed it because Elektra mattered to you, and she was the one person whose opinion could matter. Because, in Dex’s mind, your sister was not an enemy. She was a hurdle to get to you more permanently. That’s all.
You turned toward him and straightened his collar, even though it was already perfect. “Be nice.”
Then the door opened.
Elektra stood there in silk trousers and bare feet, beautiful in the effortless way she had always been beautiful. Her eyes moved from you to Dex, then to the flowers in your arm and the wine in his hand.
“Well,” she said, “at least he brings tribute.”
You managed to chuckle. “Elektra.”
Dex offered the bottle and said, very flatly, “Thank you for having me.”
Elektra took it, glanced at the label, and lifted one eyebrow.
You could practically see Dex winning one microscopic point in a war he had invented entirely inside his own head.
“Come in,” Elektra said.
Dex’s hand found your back again as you stepped inside.
He was here. He was trying.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, a familiar voice called, “Are they here?”
Dex stopped, and not enough for Elektra to notice, maybe.
Then Matt Murdock appeared at the edge of the dining room, one hand against the wall, his red glasses reflecting apartment light.
Dex’s voice changed.
“Oh.” he said, “Murdock.”
Matt seemed to recognize the voice immediately because his head tilted in recognition.
Wait.
Wait.
What?
“You two know each other?” Your voice cut through the apartment before anyone else could decide what kind of lie to tell.
Elektra, of course, looked delighted. “Oh,” she raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”
You turned on her. “Don’t start.”
Matt’s mouth twitched, but the almost-smile disappeared quickly.
Dex’s hand hovered over your back, not quite touching you now, which irritated you more than it should have.
You looked at Matt again, your confusion finally catching up with the rest of the room. “I didn’t even know you were coming.”
Matt’s mouth softened when he turned toward you. “Happy birthday.”
You blinked at him. “I didn’t even know you and Ellie were back together.”
Beside you, Elektra took a thoughtful sip of her wine like this was all very normal and not at all insane.
“We are,” she said.
You stared at her.
Matt’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Apparently.”
Despite everything, despite Dex standing beside you like a wire pulled too tight, you felt a laugh threaten the back of your throat, because this was them. This had always been them.
You had known Matt since high school, back when Elektra was in college for art history. Your sister brought him home during holidays with the same indifference she used for all things she secretly cared about. You remembered him at your family table, too stubborn and too principled for his own good, arguing with Elektra about morality while she stole food off his plate. You remembered being younger and thinking their breakups sounded serious until Matt appeared again two months later with flowers.
So no, Matt being here was not strange. Matt being here with Elektra again wasn’t even that strange.
Matt recognizing your boyfriend was the problem.
You looked between them. “How do you know each other?”
Dex went quiet.
“Our paths crossed professionally,” Matt said.
You stared. “How vague.”
“That’s all you need to know,” Dex said.
Elektra’s smile widened behind her glass.
Matt looked worried, but it wasn’t really dramatic. Matt never looked dramatically anything unless Elektra was bleeding or lying to his face. But you knew him. You knew the slight tension in his mouth, the way he seemed to listen to more than what people were saying.
“You look worried,” you said.
Matt paused. “I’m not worried.”
“Matthew.”
Dex’s eyes twitched at the familiarity in your voice.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
You glanced back at him and found him standing there with perfect manners, trying very hard not to strangle a blind man from across the table for no apparent reason.
Elektra noticed too, and naturally, this pleased her.
“Well,” she said, stepping aside to let everyone further into the apartment. “This is already a much better birthday dinner than I expected.”
“It is my birthday dinner,” you said. “Not an interrogation.”
“That depends entirely on your boyfriend.”
Dex looked at Elektra then.
For the first time since the door opened, his attention moved to your sister, realising the human hurdle had a knife in its hand.
You sighed and clutched your flowers a little tighter.
Matt stepped closer. “It really is good to see you.”
Your irritation waned, because he sounded sincere, so you hugged him.
Matt hugged you back, one hand warm between your shoulders, gentle in the way he had always been somewhat of a big brother to you. “Happy birthday, kid.” he said again, quieter this time.
“Thank you,” you muttered. “Even though all of you are being weird.”
“We’ve barely started,” Elektra said.
“That is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
When you pulled away from Matt, Dex was still watching him.
You looked at the three of them and pointed toward the dining room. “Everyone sit down,” you said. “And someone is going to explain what professionally means before dessert.”
—
Dinner began with Elektra leading you to the table, Matt followed by memory, and Dex stayed close enough behind you you could feel him breathing on your neck. The food was already laid out, far more elaborate than she had admitted over the phone, with candles burning between the plates and your cake waiting beneath a glass cover on the counter.
You sat beside Dex. Matt took the chair opposite him, and Elektra sat beside Matt with the calm of someone who had accidentally arranged the most interesting seating plan possible.
For the first few minutes, the conversation stayed on you. Your birthday, your Broadway production, the lead actor who kept trying to make the sword fights faster, the balcony rig that had failed inspection twice. Matt asked intelligent questions and Elektra asked whether anyone deserved to be pushed from the balcony for real. Dex was deathly silent, and you assumed it was for fear of saying the wrong thing and losing Elektra’s favour, which in turn meant losing your favour, too.
Then, Matt mentioned teaching now, and your eyes went as wide as dinner plates.
“Holy shit,” you managed. “Professor Murdock?”
Matt had laughed under his breath. “That surprised you?”
“A little. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
Then you had turned to Dex, trying to make it casual, trying to move the night away from whatever ugly thing was coiling beneath the table. See? this is fine, you tried to say with your eyes
Well. It was until Matt decided to say, “And Poindexter, you’re still in security?”
Dex’s eyes had flicked to Matt for half a second.
“Yeah,” he said, with his hand warm on your knee, “She knows my work.”
Matt had gone still.
Dex hadn’t smiled, but you felt the satisfaction in him anyway.
You could feel him think, Matt cannot use that against me.
Except Matt kept going.
Matt didn’t sound like he wanted to humiliate him. He sounded worried, and maybe that was what made Dex more anxious. Accusation, he could meet. Concern made him look like an animal.
And because you had no idea what the fuck to do, you blurted out the one thing you probably shouldn’t have.
“Um,” you choked out. “Would you like to tell us how you met?”
Oh fuck.
Mistake, you could tell from the way Dex was looking at you now. Big mistake.
“It was years ago,” Matt said finally. “During my work on a civil suit. Nelson, Murdock, and Page represented several former employees of a private security firm.”
Dex’s thumb stopped moving on your knee.
Matt continued. “We found evidence of illegal surveillance, witness intimidation, and coercion.”
Elektra leaned back slightly, actively thinking of Dex’s bad influence on you now.
Dex’s face didn’t change.
“He worked for them?” Elektra asked.
Matt’s head angled toward Dex. “Ask him.”
Dex’s teeth shifted once.
You felt the violent urge in him before you saw it. His body didn’t lunge and his hand didn't move. But you could tell he was thinking of hurling a fork in Matt’s direction.
You put your hand over his and squeezed hard.
Dex’s eyes snapped to you.
You didn’t say anything. You only dug your fingers into the back of his hand, right where the skin was thin over bone. It was a warning, a plea not to escalate things. Your nails pressed in harder when his eyes moved back toward Matt.
Dex. You warned with your eyes.
His nostrils flared.
Please don’t.
Matt kept speaking, unaware or too aware. “His name came up in access logs and reports.”
Dex’s hand flexed under yours.
You pressed harder, until your nails broke skin. A tiny crescent of blood welled beneath your thumb, bright against him.
Dex looked down, and that’s what did it. All the focus in him fractured around the sight of your hand gripping his hard enough to hurt him, your fingers trembling. This was your silent refusal to let him become the thing Matt was describing right in front of you.
Though the haze in his mind didn’t disappear, he turned his face away from Matt. It came back to you and the fact that you were frightened enough of what he might do to stop him with pain.
Dex swallowed. Under the table, he turned his hand over and caught your fingers carefully, like he was afraid you might pull away.
Matt was still talking, though. “One witness was hospitalised the night before deposition. Another vanished for three days and came back with a different story.”
Elektra looked at Dex. You looked at Matt. Dex looked at nobody but you.
“And nothing stuck,” Dex said.
His voice was too controlled.
Matt paused. “No.”
Dex’s fingers tightened around yours once, not enough to hurt, enough to ask whether you were still there.
You were.
You hated that you were.
Dex’s eyes finally lifted to Matt again, and there it was: you knew he wanted to fucking hurt him, and not because Matt was lying. Because Matt was telling the truth in front of you. Because Matt had dragged a past version of him into your sister’s dining room and set it between the candles.
Your grip tightened again.
Dex breathed in slowly, then he looked at you.
You shook your head once. Please.
The fight went out of his shoulders by force, not surrender. He leaned back a fraction, still holding your hand under the table, your bloodied little nail marks hidden between his fingers like a secret.
Elektra set her wine down. “Dex,” she said. Her voice was smooth. “Can I speak with you?”
You looked at her immediately. “Ellie.”
“Privately.”
Dex didn’t answer right away.
His thumb moved over your fingers once. There was blood on his skin because of you, and somehow that made his touch gentler.
“It’s fine,” he said.
It was absolutely not fine. He stood anyway.
Before he followed Elektra, he bent close enough that his mouth brushed your temple. It was not quite a kiss and more like proof of control.
Then he left with your sister as the balcony doors shut behind them.
For a second, you only stared at the glass, watching Elektra turn on him with folded arms while Dex stood very still in front of her, hands visible, every inch of him pretending he had not almost lost himself at your birthday dinner.
Matt was still across from you when you turned back to him slowly.
He looked… worried.
You wiped your thumb against your napkin, and tried to breathe like your heart was not still stuck somewhere in your throat.
“Ummmm,” you said, because if you started with Dex, you might cry. If you started with the lawsuit, you might scream.
Matt turned his face toward you.
“So,” you said, voice smaller than you wanted it to be. “Are you sticking around this time?”
Matt didn’t answer right away.
That was very Matt of him.
He sat across from you at Elektra’s dining table with one hand curled near his wine glass, head angled faintly toward the balcony doors. Outside, your sister had Dex backed into a conversation you could not hear properly through the glass. Elektra’s arms were folded. Dex’s hands were visible at his sides.
That alone told you he was trying very, very hard.
You watched them for another second, then looked back at Matt.
“So,” you said, because there was no clean way to ask it. “Are you sticking around this time?”
Matt swirled a bit of his wine. Awkward.
“I… think so,” he said.
You stared at him. “You think so?”
The smile he gave you was small. “I’m trying.”
“Mmm. Very convincing.”
He huffed, almost a laugh, and it tugged at an old memory in your chest.
Because before he was Professor Murdock, he was Elektra’s on-again-off-again disaster boyfriend, and that made him your on-again-off-again big brother. He had been the person who helped you with homework at the kitchen table because Elektra said she was too busy and then corrected every other answer from across the room anyway. He had been the person who let you complain about school and teachers and boys without making you feel stupid for being young. He had been the one who said, very seriously, that no, you probably could not sue your PE teacher for being annoying, but he admired your commitment to the argument.
And then he would leave.
“She was awful last time you guys broke up,” you said.
Matt lowered his head.
You picked at the edge of your napkin. “Not in the fun way. She was actually awful.”
“What do you want me to say?” He sighed.
The candles on the table flickered between you. Elektra had made too much food, of course. Your flowers sat in a vase near the counter, lush and ridiculous and beautiful, and you could still feel the small dent of Dex’s hand where he had held yours under the table.
“She missed you,” you said. “She pretended she didn’t, obviously, but she did.”
His mouth fell.
“And I missed you,” you added, staring very hard at the napkin. “Who else do I get to complain about her to? Mom and Dad don’t give a shit anymore.”
Matt’s laugh was tiny and helpless. “I missed you too.”
That almost made you forgive him.
You looked back at him. “Then stay. Or don’t. But don’t drift in and out like we’re all supposed to just reset every time you and Ellie get bored again.”
He nodded once, accepting the hit. For a second, it felt like being sixteen again. Like he was still family, sitting at your family table.
Then his head shifted slightly.
Toward the balcony. Towards Dex.
And you felt the whole conversation distort.
Matt didn’t pounce. He was much worse than that. He eased into it, like he was only following the evidence where it naturally led.
“You know why I’m worried about your boyfriend,” he said.
You sat back and sighed. “There it is.”
“I’m not trying to start a fight.”
“No,” you shook your head. “You’re building a case.”
He didn’t deny it.
“I know you care about me,” you said. “I do. But please don’t do that... That lawyer thing with your wording. You're making me feel like I’m supposed to realise I’ve accidentally admitted something.”
“I’m not cross-examining you.”
“You are.”
“I’m asking questions.” Matt exhaled.
You hated how much you still wanted his approval, because he was one of those people who had seen you grow up and therefore they had earned the right to worry.
He leaned forward a little.
“How did he tell you about… what he does?”
You looked at him and took a sip of wine to buy yourself time. “I’m not thick.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No,” you said. “But he didn’t have to tell me shit for me to realise his job was more than sit around looking pretty with a gun.”
Matt’s jaw clenched slightly.
Outside, Elektra said something to Dex that made his shoulders go tense.
“He gave you a version,” Matt said.
You laughed once, without much humour. “Everyone gives a version.”
“Some versions are omissions.”
“God, you are so irritating.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” you cocked your head. “You think irritating is fine when you’re right.”
Matt tried again.
“There are patterns,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Patterns.”
“Yes.”
“With Dex.”
“With men like him.”
You looked sharply at him. “Men like him.”
Matt’s mouth tightened. “Men who know exactly how much truth to give you.”
Your throat tightened despite yourself.
He heard it, because damn that freakish hearing of his was apparently still going.
His voice flattened a bit. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Always very generous.”
“I mean it. I think you’re smart. I think you know more than most people would.”
You looked down at your hands.
There was still the faintest mark beneath one nail where you had dug into Dex’s skin hard enough to pull him back. You could still feel the moment he snapped back into himself. The way his fury turned, not gone, just redirected because you had asked without words.
Matt said your name, like he used to when you were younger and trying not to cry.
“I think you’re too close to the facts,” he said. You almost smiled because only Matt Murdock would say something like that at a birthday dinner.
You set the fork down. “You mean I’m biased.”
“I mean you’re involved.”
“I’m allowed to be involved in my own life.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Matt went silent.
You looked at him now, studying his posture “Because it sounds like you think if you arrange the argument properly, I’ll reach your conclusion.”
“I think you’re making a dangerous choice.”
“There we go.”
His face soured. “He is dangerous.”
“So is Ellie.”
“She’s different now.”
“And?” You leaned forward. “And?”
Matt didn’t answer fast enough.
You lowered your voice. “We both know what she’s done. We both know what half of that collection cost before she started using invoices and whatever else she claims is legitimate now.”
“She got out.”
“Good for her.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I,” you groaned. “But she still deserves love, doesn’t she?”
Matt looked pained, and you hated hurting him.
“You love her with a whole archive of exceptions,” you said. “But I’m supposed to treat Dex like one bad document is the entire record?”
“It’s not just one bad document—“
“It’s close enough.”
“No,” Matt said, and there was that courtroom firmness in him now. “I’m saying you probably know what the record looks like. You're just ignoring the parts you don’t want to read.”
You swallowed.
“I know what it costs,” he said. “To love someone and start making room for things you would have condemned.”
You looked toward the balcony.
Dex had turned his head slightly, like he could feel you looking.
Matt kept going, though kinder now. “You start with mitigation. Then you start giving out exceptions. I’m just asking you to consider—”
“No.” Your voice cracked a little. “No, you’re asking me to accept your ruling.”
Matt stopped.
Ruling.
Huh. You really have changed over the two years he was gone.
You breathed in shakily. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about him. Maybe you’re not. Maybe there are things I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll regret this so badly I’ll hear your voice in my fucking head for the rest of my life.”
Matt’s shoulders lowered.
“But my mistakes are mine to make,” you said.
Oh.
You saw the tiny break in his knuckles. The big-brother part of him, the one who never really had anyone but himself, the part that still remembered you as a teenager at the kitchen table with bruised knees and far too much attitude for your own good, wanting to protect you from yourself because he had loved a more bloody Elektra the way you loved Dex.
“I don’t want to watch you get hurt,” was all he managed to say,
You looked down. “You might have to.”
He looked down.
You reached across the table first and found his hand, because touch had always been a sensory experience he reacted to.
“I’m not blind,” you said, then immediately groaned. “Sorry.”
Matt’s mouth twitched. “It’s fine.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I know he’s not safe.”
Matt’s thumb brushed once over your knuckles.
“But he listens to me,” you said. “And maybe that’s not enough for you. But it matters to me.”
Matt didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue either.
For once, it felt like mercy.
Outside, you heard a scrape against the balcony table.
Matt’s head tilted. “What’s happening?”
You looked past him through the glass.
Elektra and Dex were no longer standing in their neat little interrogation positions. They looked like they were seated across from each other at the tiny balcony table, elbows planted, hands clasped, Dex’s shoulders covering half the scene.
You blinked.
Then, despite the ache in your chest, you laughed. “I think they’re arm wrestling.”
Matt closed his eyes.
The look on his face was so exhausting that it only made you laugh harder.
—
The rest of dinner went by quickly after Elektra and Dex came back in from the balcony with no visible injuries, which you counted as a birthday miracle.
Elektra looked smug and Dex looked composed, but there was a tightness around his lips that made you narrow your eyes. When you glanced between them and asked who won the arm wrestle, Elektra only smiled into her wine. Dex said nothing. Which, unfortunately for him, was an answer.
After that, everyone behaved, mostly. Matt stopped trying to lawyer you out of your own relationship. Dex stopped looking like he wanted to fling Matt through one of Elektra’s very expensive windows. Elektra told a horrible story about you at seventeen trying to jump from the garage roof into the pool and missing by an amount she called “humiliating but educational.” Matt laughed, Dex looked absolutely fascinated, like your teenage stupidity was precious. He asked one follow-up question, and you kicked him under the table.
By the time you left, she kissed both your cheeks, held your face for one second longer than usual, and said happy birthday one more time and told you to call her tomorrow.
Matt hugged you too, while Dex and Matt shook hands, proving to God and each other that they could survive physical contact without committing a felony.
Then Dex took you home.
You were sleepy in the car, full from dinner, cake, and emotional warfare.
At your apartment, you kicked off your shoes by the door and padded into the kitchen for water. Dex followed, taking off his coat, watching you with that careful quiet he got when he was not sure whether he was allowed to touch you yet.
You leaned against the counter and looked at him over the rim of your glass.
“So,” you said. “Who really won?”
Dex’s expression went flat. “No.”
You smiled. “No?”
Dex flexed his hand once, as if remembering. “She’s irritating.”
You laughed. “Mmm.”
“But you love her,” he said.
Your laugh faded.
Dex leaned back against the counter opposite you, arms crossed. “And she loves you. And she’s capable of protecting you.” He said, as if it was the only metric that mattered. “So I guess I’ll try.”
You stared at him. “That is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about anyone.”
Dex rolled his eyes, but there was no bite in it. He looked tired now. Not physically, more like tired from pretending to be a decent person.
You walked across the kitchen and took his hand.
The little marks from your nails looked worse up close. There were tiny, red, broken crescents on the back of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” you said, trailing small kisses on them
Dex looked down at your lips touching the wounds. He shrugged as if you did what you had to do to get the result you wanted, and Dex had always been pragmatic like that.
That night, Dex fell asleep with his arm locked around your waist.
He slept heavy, going slack against your back, his breath warm at the nape of your neck, his hand spread beneath your sleep shirt like he had reached for bare skin even in his sleep.
Your phone pinged just after two.
Then again. Then again.
You reached for it carefully, lifting Dex’s arm just enough to drag the screen close without waking him.
It was a text…. From Elektra.
I’m glad he’s on your side.
Then the next text.
That’s still not the same thing as him being safe.
Another message came through before you could answer her.
Make an informed decision. That’s all I’m asking.
Then, she sent a link.
You stared at it for a long time in the dark.
Dex shifted behind you, his arm tightening automatically around your middle, his face pressing closer to your shoulder, still asleep.
You opened it… and there it was. The lawsuit Dex was allegedly involved in.
The text was dense and written in bloodless language detailing private security and consultants. It detailed alleged intimidation and coercion, resulting in witnesses withdrawing statements and misplaced evidence.
Dex’s name was there.
You read until the words blurred, until the apartment turned orange in the early morning. Dex slept against you while a colder version of him lived through depositions and sealed complaints and things nobody had ever proved.
But you knew your boyfriend. You knew he was capable of this.
You waited for the feeling to change.
Maybe, you expected to be disgusted. Fear, more likely.
It didn’t come.
You felt the same about him as you did before.
And of course it wasn’t fine. Matt was not wrong and Elektra wasn’t worried for no reason.
But you had always looked at the world through rose-tinted glasses.
By dawn, you closed the file.
Dex stirred when you set your phone down, as if even the sound of it against the nightstand was enough to pull some half-asleep part of him back to you.
His arm tightened around your waist first. Then he dragged you closer, face pressing blindly between your shoulder and neck, making it impossible to move even if you had wanted to.
“Sweetheart?” he mumbled, barely awake.
You hummed and covered his hand with yours.
For a second, you lay there with the lawsuit still burning behind your eyes. All those careful words and sealed statements. All those allegations circling the man in your bed like vultures.
And maybe Matt was right.
Maybe Elektra was right.
Maybe Dex was dangerous.
But Matt had loved your sister through her murderous years, hadn’t he? So who were they to look at you like you were insane for dating an assassin?
You were now thoroughly informed, now, weren’t you?
You turned carefully in Dex’s arms until you were facing him. His eyes stayed closed, his brow furrowing faintly at the movement, but his hand slid up your back on instinct, keeping you close.
“Go back to sleep,” you whispered, kissing him softly.
Dex exhaled against your mouth, already sinking again. You tucked yourself beneath his chin, his arm heavy over your waist.
Informed decision made.
—end.
NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5.
That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation (keep this post in mind for July and August 2026). If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else.
Please remember I run this blog for free, so any support means a lot, only if you’re able to give it! Love y’all and thank you for reading!!! <3
Summary : You invite Dex to your birthday dinner at your sister's apartment. Unfortunately for Dex, your sister is Elektra.
Pairing : Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | Modern au
Warnings/tags : modern au (I’m aiming for neo noir vibes) assassin!Dex, stunt choreographer!reader, Weapons/art collector! Elektra x Law Professor! Matt. Reader is Elektra’s little sister by a few years but whether she’s a biological sister or adopted is open to interpretation, murder and assassination, discussions of witness intimidation and coercion, blood and minor injury, morally grey characters, legal allegations, reader knowingly dating an assassin, implied sex and sexual content, alcohol, family conflict, happy ending if you ignore the moral implications lol.
Word Count : 8.9k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : Hey ya’ll! If you wanna be tagged, please send me a message! Comments get buried sometimes. Enjoy!
You met Dex in a hotel bar in Los Angeles on the night Daniel Shaw died, though you wouldn’t know until much later that he was the reason he was dead.
At the time, he was only a man at the end of the bar with a beautifully scarred face and a glass he barely touched. You noticed him because everyone else in the room was making a performance out of grieving. Several producers stood in tense little clusters with phones pressed to their ears, actresses dabbed at dry eyes beneath perfect mascara, personal assistants went back and forth like frightened birds between tables, and every agent in the building seemed to be calculating whether a dead studio head meant opportunity or unemployment.
You were not crying either, but at least you had the decency not to pretend.
Daniel Shaw had owned the movie studio currently paying your invoices, which made his sudden death inconvenient more than tragic. He had been found in his suite less than an hour ago. Someone said it was a heart attack. Another person said it was suicide after someone found a bullet in his head. It was so sudden! Your coworker kept repeating, as if the situation might become less alarming if she repeated it enough. You had worked under his studio for three months and met him properly only twice. He was charming, rich, and distant. Powerful men often were, which meant he remembered nobody’s name unless they could make him money.
You were a stunt choreographer. That put you somewhere below the director, below the producers, below the lead actress’ wellness coach, and slightly above the poor intern sent to buy twelve green juices at six in the morning. Shaw dying wasn’t personal to you, but it was close enough to your paycheck to keep you at the bar instead of going upstairs to sleep.
You took a sip of your whiskey and watched the room in the mirror behind the bottles.
That was where you found him watching you.
He didn’t look away when your eyes met, and it made you smile. Most men glanced down when caught, then looked back later with some lazy excuse written across their face. This man didn’t bother. He simply held your gaze in the mirror, almost amused, like he had known you were going to notice him and had been waiting for you to decide what to do about it.
You turned slightly on your stool. “You’re staring.”
His mouth curled up, barely. “You finally noticed.”
“I’m trained,” you shrugged, trying to keep things vague. “I notice when someone is watching me.”
He simply raised his cup to his lips. “Good to know.”
“Is it?”
“It explains the bruises.”
You looked down at your knee, where the hem of your dress had ridden up enough to show the dark bloom of a rehearsal bruise above your shin. It wasn’t your worst one this week, but it wasn’t the prettiest, either. Still, the way his eyes touched it and moved on made your skin warm, because he didn’t leer. He assessed.
You picked up your drink and carried it down the bar to him because the night was already strange, your contract might be cancelled by morning, and you had never been especially good at leaving interesting things alone.
“Since you’re apparently studying me,” you said as you sat beside him, “what else have you learned?”
He turned his glass once against the bar top, eyes moving over your face with infuriating patience. “You’re not drunk, but you’re trying to decide if you want to be. You’re not sad, but you know you should look sadder. You’ve checked the exits twice since I sat down, and you keep favouring your left side, which means either your hip hurts or your knee does.”
“My knee,” you confirmed, hating how impressed you sounded. “And I checked the exits because this room is full of dickheads. That’s just good sense.”
He managed a small, performative frown. “They’re just film executives.”
“Eh,” you shrugged, “same difference."
This time, he smiled properly. “Fair.”
You angled your body toward him, letting your shoulder rest against the bar. “Your turn.”
“My turn?”
“What have I learned about you?”
His eyes stayed on yours. “Go ahead.”
You let yourself look, because he had started it, though that pretence felt childish and paper-thin now. He had a dark jacket on and an expensive watch worn like he didn’t care whether anyone noticed it. His posture was relaxed, but not loose. His hands were still on the bar and had no wedding ring, no visible nerves, no grief, no curiosity for anyone in the room except you.
Your sister had taught you to read people pretty well.
“You’re too quiet to be an actor,” you said. “You’re not a producer either, because you haven’t checked your phone every six seconds and you don’t look like you’re about to ruin someone’s career over a schedule change. You could be security, but you’re not standing like you’re being paid to watch the door.”
“Maybe I’m off duty.”
“Maybe,” you allowed. “But if you were off duty, I think you’d still know exactly who in this room was carrying, who was lying, and who would scream first if the lights went out.”
The amusement in his face was evident. “And who would scream first?”
You glanced around the bar and nodded toward a red-faced producer loudly saying Shaw had been like a father to him. “Him. But only after checking whether TMZ is watching.”
The man beside you laughed under his breath. You liked the sound too much immediately, which was annoying because you didn’t even know his name yet.
You held out your hand. “I’m not calling you stranger all night.”
His hand closed around yours. “Dex.”
“Just Dex?”
“For now.”
“That’s weird.”
“Do you like weird?”
You should have denied it. Instead, your smile gave you away. “I like interesting. Weird is reviewed on a case by case basis”
Dex didn’t release your hand immediately. He brushed his thumb over your knuckles, where tape residue still clung from that afternoon’s rehearsal. When he let go, you had to remind yourself not to stare.
“So,” he said, “stunt performer of some kind.”
You narrowed your eyes as if you were surprised that the handshake had given it away. Still, it was fun to play along, right? “Were you at the dinner?”
“Briefly.”
“And did you know Shaw?”
He considered his answer this time “Briefly.”
You chuckled, and Dex watched as if he wanted to understand the mechanics of it. It was unsettling, but it didn’t make you want to leave. If anything, it made you lean closer, because he was giving you so little that every small reaction felt like a gold star. You worked with performers all day, people trained to externalise every emotion so the camera could catch it. Dex did the opposite. He made you want to get your hands on him just to see what he was like underneath.
“What do you do, Dex-for-now?” you asked.
“Private security advising.”
You tilted your head. “That is the most fake Hollywood job I’ve ever heard.”
“It pays well.”
“I bet it does.” You smiled, “Do you consult on security, or do you just stand around looking intimidating?”
His eyes dropped to your mouth again, and this time he wasn’t quick enough to hide it. “Depends on who’s paying.”
You shifted on the stool, crossing one leg over the other, and watched his eyes flick down for the briefest second before returning to your face.
Controlled, you thought again. He was controlled enough that making him look felt like winning.
“You know,” you said, “for a security advisor, you’re not very reassuring.”
Dex leaned slightly closer, his voice dipping beneath the noise of the bar. “And yet you came over.”
“I was bored.”
“You’re not bored now.”
You hated that he was right. You hated it more because of how certain he seemed, as if your interest was another fact he had collected. The room around you blurred into a swirl of candlelight, glass, perfume, and expensive panic. Upstairs, a billionaire was dead. Down here, this stranger watched you like you were the only interesting target.
You took another sip of your drink. “You’re very sure of yourself.”
“With some things.”
“And with others?”
Dex’s gaze held yours. “I like to be certain before I touch.”
It was absurd how quickly a fucking line got to you. Nothing in his tone was crude, and he barely even moved. But suddenly you were thinking about his hand around yours, his thumb over your knuckles, his mouth close to your ear.
You looked away first, which made him smile.
You didn’t answer right away. Instead, you set your glass down and let the silence stretch. Dex didn’t rush to fill it. He only watched you while the whole room kept mourning a man neither of you seemed able to miss.
Finally, you said, “My job might be gone tomorrow,” you sighed as if that didn’t affect you. It probably didn’t. Your family had enough money that you could just jet to the Bahamas tomorrow and not look back, but you actually liked the project you were working on. “That should bother me more.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“It does,” you said, then shrugged. “Just not enough to make me behave.”
Dex’s eyes moved over your face, and he shifted a little. “How badly do you want not to behave?”
Fuck.
It was so direct. It was certainly too much, maybe, from a man you had met fifteen minutes ago in a bar full of vultures dressed as mourners. But you had spent your whole life around danger. Dex was not pretending hard enough to be safe, and the reckless part of you respected that.
You leaned close enough that your knee brushed his. “That depends.”
His breath changed.
There. You had him.
Dex stood and offered his hand.
You looked at his hand, then at his face. “You always pick girls up in weird hotels?”
“No.” He managed a dry laugh, “you’re special.”
You laughed despite yourself and placed your hand in his.
The elevator ride up was a lesson in restraint. He stood beside you without touching you again, which made every inch of space between your bodies feel like you were pulling teeth. The mirrored walls showed you too many versions of him: his profile, his hands, the line of his throat where his shirt opened. You could feel him watching your reflection instead of your body directly, which shouldn’t have been hotter, but was.
The elevator doors opened before you could say anything.
His room was high up, expensive, and nearly untouched. There was no mess or scattered clothes. No sign that anyone had lived there longer than necessary. Los Angeles glittered beyond the windows, silver streets and distant headlights, while the door clicked shut behind you.
You turned to face him. “You’re not really a security advisor, are you?”
Dex looked at you for a long moment. “Not tonight.”
You should have asked what that meant. You should have cared. Instead, you stepped closer and reached for the open collar of his shirt, letting your fingers slide beneath the edge of the fabric.
“Good,” you said. “I’m off the clock too.”
When he kissed you, the control didn’t vanish all at once. That would have been too easy. It was slow, first with his hand at your waist, firm enough to make you gasp against his mouth. Then his other hand at the back of your neck, fingers threading into your hair as he angled you exactly how he wanted you. He kissed like a man who had thought about doing it before he allowed himself to move, like every second of restraint in the bar was hell on earth.
You pushed his jacket off his shoulders. He let it fall without looking away from you. When you started on the buttons of his shirt, Dex caught your wrists, not to stop you, but to slow you down, his thumbs pressing lightly to your pulse points like he wanted to feel exactly what he was doing to you.
“You’re impatient,” he murmured, and for a second, you realized, holy shit. He really didn’t do these one night flings often.
Still, the only thing you managed to say was: “You’re overdressed.”
His mouth found your neck, and your answer dissolved into a breathless laugh. He smiled against your skin. You felt it more than saw that private satisfaction, and then his hands moved again with a precision that made your knees feel unreliable. He never grabbed thoughtlessly. He touched with the same focus he had watched you with downstairs, learning what made you arch, what made your fingers dig into his shoulders.
By the time he walked you backward toward the bed, you were hot and irritated by how badly you wanted him. Dex seemed worse off for trying to hide it. His shirt was open, his hair no longer perfect because your hands had been in it, and his breathing had gone rough, making you smile against his mouth.
You pulled him down with you.
After that, the night turned feverish. It became his mouth on your skin, your dress pushed away, his hands gentle until you guided them, and suddenly they were not. He was careful in ways that made you ache and rough only when you dragged it out of him, and the first time you felt his composure slip, you laughed breathlessly because you could not help it.
Dex lifted his head, eyes narrowed.
“You’re not as controlled as you look.”
“No,” he said, his mouth brushing yours. “Not like this.”
You believed him, though you had no reason to. Maybe that was the point. All you knew was that this was just a bad day with bad timing and a dead man upstairs whose absence had left the door to the evening just open enough for a stranger to step through.
Later, when the room was dark and your body fell beside his, you lay with your cheek against his chest and traced one of the old scars near his ribs. He was quiet under your hand, but not asleep. You knew the difference.
His fingers moved slowly along your spine, almost absent. “Dex?”
“Mm.”
“Were you really there for Shaw?”
His hand paused for less than a second before it continued.
“Briefly,” he said again.
You smiled into the dark because you knew he was giving you nothing, and for tonight, only tonight, you decided to let him.
You should have gone back to your own room. You should have asked better questions. You should have treated this as a stupid one night stand and pretended this never happened.
Instead, you closed your eyes and stayed exactly where you were.
—
Six months after that night, you moved to New York.
Officially, it was for work. A Broadway production had brought you on to choreograph the stage combat for a lavish, over-funded revival with sword fights, balcony falls, and a dramatic death scene that had to happen eight times a week without sending the lead actor to hospital.
It was a good job. You even put it on exclamation points and sent it to your agent like you had made a responsible career decision.
It had absolutely nothing to do with Dex being based in New York.
Mostly.
Fine, maybe a little.
Your sister was there too, which made the decision feel less incriminating. Elektra had an apartment in Manhattan, three passports in names you were not supposed to know, and an art studio collecting ancient weapons, because technically, that was her job.
You knew better than to ask where the acquisitions came from, and Elektra knew better than to ask why you had suddenly accepted a Broadway job in the same city as a man who called himself a security advisor and looked at you like he would happily ruin his life if you asked sweetly enough.
You and Dex had been officially dating for three months.
It was a good three months of late-night dinners, hotel room mornings, flowers delivered to rehearsal with no card because he knew you would know. It was three months of you pretending not to notice when the news mentioned a man connected to Shaw’s circle dying strangely overseas. Three months of Dex pretending his work calls were about security logistics and not whatever thing he did for people rich enough to afford him.
You knew what he was. Dex carried violence too naturally for it to be a hobby, and sometimes, when he came to you after work, the calm around him was too emptied out. He would shower before touching you, scrub himself raw, come out with damp hair and bare feet.
Your moral compass had raised one weak little hand in protest, but then Dex had kissed you against your kitchen counter, murmured sweetheart like a prayer, and made your entire sense of right and wrong pack a bag and leave the state.
Maybe that made you terrible. Maybe it made you Elektra’s sister after all.
Or maybe Dex was just so unfairly, stupidly, devastatingly hot that you just kept getting distracted.
And Dex knew that you knew after the first month or so, when you jokingly called him Hot John Wick.
Dex had always expected you to figure it out sooner or later. He knew you were a smart girl. He just didn’t realise you’d figure out this soon.
Instead of being shocked though, he just raised his eyebrows and said, “John Wick is already hot.”
You chuckled and pulled him close. “Shut up and take it as a compliment that I find you even hotter.”
“Yes ma’am.”
And that was that.
—
Earlier today, you had texted Dex and asked if he could come over and cuddle.
Ha.
You were already on the couch when he got in, cozy in sleep shorts and an oversized hoodie, one fuzzy sock half-off your foot, your body tired from rehearsal and your brain still muddled with stage falls, sword cues, and actors who didn’t understand that “again from the top” didn’t mean “try to improvise a stabbing.”
Dex took off his coat and looked at you like he had been waiting all day to come home to you.
“You’re late,” you said.
“‘M sorry.”
He came closer, and you let him pull you up just so you could immediately drag him down with you again. Dex caught himself over you with one hand braced beside your head, his knee sinking into the couch, his body warm and heavy enough above yours to make your whole chest loosen.
He kissed you, mouth moving over yours like he wanted to settle there. Like he needed a minute to remember what it felt like to be wanted without being useful. You went pliant underneath him almost immediately, because apparently that was what you did now. You let murderers kiss you tenderly on your couch and call it romance.
His hand slid beneath your hoodie and you hummed against his mouth.
Dex’s palm dragged up your ribs, then paused over your breast, cupping you through the thin fabric beneath like he was not even trying to pretend the cuddling was innocent anymore. His thumb moved once, and your breath caught hard enough for him to smile into the kiss.
“Dex,” you murmured.
“Mm.”
“That is not cuddling.”
“It’s close.”
His mouth dipped to your throat, and the laugh you tried to give him turned embarrassingly quiet halfway out. He knew exactly what he was doing.
His hand slid down again over your waist, then your hip, then lower.
He pushed his body down yours, mouth tracing heat along your neck while his fingers found the waistband of your shorts. He tucked himself there, resting under the elastic, knuckles brushing warm skin.
Dex loved having his finger between your legs, knowing he can’t seem to miss the sweet spot, ever. Which meant you knew exactly how to make him suffer.
His fingers started to slip lower, and you caught his wrist.
Dex stopped.
Slowly, he lifted his head, looking offended, as if you had interrupted him mid-prayer.
“Sweetheart,” he said carefully.
You smiled. “My birthday is coming up.”
For a second, he just stared.
His wrist flexed under your fingers as you held it still. “I know.”
His thumb slipped under the edge by half an inch, expecting you to give in, but your hand only tightened, keeping him out of your shorts still.
Then his eyes lifted to yours, already suspicious. “Baby.”
You smiled. “Ah-ah.”
His gaze narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“Negotiating.”
“With my hand?”
“With your access,” you corrected
His desire didn’t disappear. It only got interrupted by confusion. “You’re blackmailing me.”
“I’m making a birthday request.”
His eyes flicked down to where you were holding his wrist. “With leverage.”
You held back a chuckle, trying your best to look innocent. “Smart girls use leverage.”
Dex opened his mouth, then closed it again.
You smiled sweetly. “That’s what I thought.”
For a second, he looked like he wanted to argue. Unfortunately for him, he also wanted control of his hand back very, very badly. “What do you want, pretty girl?” he asked.
You knew he meant presents, like actual presents. He was prepared to buy his way out of this. Hitman money in New York apparently paid well enough that Dex looked genuinely prepared for you to name something like a weekend in Paris.
You tightened your grip on his wrist. You looked up at him, very pleased with yourself. “I want you to meet my sister.”
Dex went still, much more still than when you had called him a hitman for the first time, actually, which told you a lot about his priorities.
“Your sister,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For your birthday.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
He looked at you like you were a puzzle he hadn’t been hired to solve. Dex looked down at his trapped hand, then back at your face. “You’re really withholding this until I say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
His teeth clenched as your thumb stroked idly over the inside of his wrist. You were not even trying to be seductive with it, but Dex watched the movement like it was actively shortening his lifespan.
“Baby,” he said.
“Mm?”
“Let go of my hand.”
“Say yes.”
“You don’t play fair.”
He made a sound that was half a laugh and half suffering. “You know I adore you, right?”
“Then say yes.”
Dex lowered his head until his forehead rested against yours. His eyes closed briefly, like he was gathering strength. It was ridiculous. He could probably walk into a guarded room and come out alive without messing up his hair, but you asking him to attend one birthday dinner had him acting like you had handed him a bomb with a pink bow on it.
“You haven’t told me anything about her,” he said.
“She’s my sister.”
“That’s not information.”
“She’s important to me.”
It managed to shut him up.
You sighed, just a little, though you still didn’t let go of his wrist. “I want her to meet you. Isn’t that enough information?”
Dex opened his eyes, and he looked almost undone by it.
You kissed him lightly. “Please.”
His breath caught.
You knew that would get him.
“Don’t,” he murmured.
“Please, Dex.”
“Sweetheart.”
“For my birthday.”
He stared at you with the exhaustion of a man who had never stood a chance. “Fine,” he sighed. “I’ll meet your sister.”
Your smile bloomed. “You’ll be nice?”
“I’ll be polite.” Dex looked pointedly at his wrist. “Can I have my hand back now?”
You hummed like you were thinking about it.
His eyes darkened. “Baby.” His mouth brushed yours.
Eventually, you released his wrist.
Dex didn’t move immediately, even though he had been desperate two seconds ago.
Dex kissed you first, like he was still thanking you for wanting him at dinner. His hand slipped lower and you gasped against his mouth, laughing breathlessly when you felt his smile.
“Now,” he hummed, “where were we?”
—
You and Dex stood outside Elektra’s apartment door with his hand at the small of your back and enough tension in his shoulders to make you bite back a smile.
For a man who had once admitted, very calmly, that he preferred entering buildings through service corridors because front doors made people too expectant, he had spent an absurd amount of time preparing for your birthday.
He had brought you flowers first, an arrangement of red ranunculus, white anemones, dark tulips, and little sprigs of jasmine tucked between them because he remembered you once saying jasmine smelled like nights in expensive hotels.
You had stared at it for so long that Dex had asked, “Too much?”
“No,” you said, already smiling like an idiot. “It’s beautiful.”
Only then had he relaxed.
The second gift was smaller, slim black leather notebook with your initials pressed into the bottom corner in gold, the pages thick enough for blocking notes, sketches, injury reports, and all the frantic choreography scribbles you usually left on call sheets and napkins. Inside the front cover was a thin metal bookmark shaped like a tiny sword.
You had smiled, and he looked painfully pleased with himself.
Then, because he was Dex, he had stopped in a supermarket on the way there and very pragmatically asked, “What kind of wine does your sister like?”
“Expensive.”
He only nodded.
Now he stood beside you holding a bottle that probably cost more than your weekly food shop, his jaw tight, his scarred face composed, his coat immaculate. He looked less like a boyfriend arriving for dinner and more like a man approaching a guarded border with falsified papers and a personal stake in crossing.
“You know she’s not going to fucking kill you.” You nudged him gently. “She made dinner. That’s basically a peace offering.”
“She made dinner for you,” Dex said flatly. “I’m the complication.”
Right.
Dex didn’t care about charming people for the sake of being liked. He didn’t need Elektra’s approval because he wanted a pleasant evening or a normal story to tell later. He needed it because Elektra mattered to you, and she was the one person whose opinion could matter. Because, in Dex’s mind, your sister was not an enemy. She was a hurdle to get to you more permanently. That’s all.
You turned toward him and straightened his collar, even though it was already perfect. “Be nice.”
Then the door opened.
Elektra stood there in silk trousers and bare feet, beautiful in the effortless way she had always been beautiful. Her eyes moved from you to Dex, then to the flowers in your arm and the wine in his hand.
“Well,” she said, “at least he brings tribute.”
You managed to chuckle. “Elektra.”
Dex offered the bottle and said, very flatly, “Thank you for having me.”
Elektra took it, glanced at the label, and lifted one eyebrow.
You could practically see Dex winning one microscopic point in a war he had invented entirely inside his own head.
“Come in,” Elektra said.
Dex’s hand found your back again as you stepped inside.
He was here. He was trying.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, a familiar voice called, “Are they here?”
Dex stopped, and not enough for Elektra to notice, maybe.
Then Matt Murdock appeared at the edge of the dining room, one hand against the wall, his red glasses reflecting apartment light.
Dex’s voice changed.
“Oh.” he said, “Murdock.”
Matt seemed to recognize the voice immediately because his head tilted in recognition.
Wait.
Wait.
What?
“You two know each other?” Your voice cut through the apartment before anyone else could decide what kind of lie to tell.
Elektra, of course, looked delighted. “Oh,” she raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”
You turned on her. “Don’t start.”
Matt’s mouth twitched, but the almost-smile disappeared quickly.
Dex’s hand hovered over your back, not quite touching you now, which irritated you more than it should have.
You looked at Matt again, your confusion finally catching up with the rest of the room. “I didn’t even know you were coming.”
Matt’s mouth softened when he turned toward you. “Happy birthday.”
You blinked at him. “I didn’t even know you and Ellie were back together.”
Beside you, Elektra took a thoughtful sip of her wine like this was all very normal and not at all insane.
“We are,” she said.
You stared at her.
Matt’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Apparently.”
Despite everything, despite Dex standing beside you like a wire pulled too tight, you felt a laugh threaten the back of your throat, because this was them. This had always been them.
You had known Matt since high school, back when Elektra was in college for art history. Your sister brought him home during holidays with the same indifference she used for all things she secretly cared about. You remembered him at your family table, too stubborn and too principled for his own good, arguing with Elektra about morality while she stole food off his plate. You remembered being younger and thinking their breakups sounded serious until Matt appeared again two months later with flowers.
So no, Matt being here was not strange. Matt being here with Elektra again wasn’t even that strange.
Matt recognizing your boyfriend was the problem.
You looked between them. “How do you know each other?”
Dex went quiet.
“Our paths crossed professionally,” Matt said.
You stared. “How vague.”
“That’s all you need to know,” Dex said.
Elektra’s smile widened behind her glass.
Matt looked worried, but it wasn’t really dramatic. Matt never looked dramatically anything unless Elektra was bleeding or lying to his face. But you knew him. You knew the slight tension in his mouth, the way he seemed to listen to more than what people were saying.
“You look worried,” you said.
Matt paused. “I’m not worried.”
“Matthew.”
Dex’s eyes twitched at the familiarity in your voice.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
You glanced back at him and found him standing there with perfect manners, trying very hard not to strangle a blind man from across the table for no apparent reason.
Elektra noticed too, and naturally, this pleased her.
“Well,” she said, stepping aside to let everyone further into the apartment. “This is already a much better birthday dinner than I expected.”
“It is my birthday dinner,” you said. “Not an interrogation.”
“That depends entirely on your boyfriend.”
Dex looked at Elektra then.
For the first time since the door opened, his attention moved to your sister, realising the human hurdle had a knife in its hand.
You sighed and clutched your flowers a little tighter.
Matt stepped closer. “It really is good to see you.”
Your irritation waned, because he sounded sincere, so you hugged him.
Matt hugged you back, one hand warm between your shoulders, gentle in the way he had always been somewhat of a big brother to you. “Happy birthday, kid.” he said again, quieter this time.
“Thank you,” you muttered. “Even though all of you are being weird.”
“We’ve barely started,” Elektra said.
“That is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
When you pulled away from Matt, Dex was still watching him.
You looked at the three of them and pointed toward the dining room. “Everyone sit down,” you said. “And someone is going to explain what professionally means before dessert.”
—
Dinner began with Elektra leading you to the table, Matt followed by memory, and Dex stayed close enough behind you you could feel him breathing on your neck. The food was already laid out, far more elaborate than she had admitted over the phone, with candles burning between the plates and your cake waiting beneath a glass cover on the counter.
You sat beside Dex. Matt took the chair opposite him, and Elektra sat beside Matt with the calm of someone who had accidentally arranged the most interesting seating plan possible.
For the first few minutes, the conversation stayed on you. Your birthday, your Broadway production, the lead actor who kept trying to make the sword fights faster, the balcony rig that had failed inspection twice. Matt asked intelligent questions and Elektra asked whether anyone deserved to be pushed from the balcony for real. Dex was deathly silent, and you assumed it was for fear of saying the wrong thing and losing Elektra’s favour, which in turn meant losing your favour, too.
Then, Matt mentioned teaching now, and your eyes went as wide as dinner plates.
“Holy shit,” you managed. “Professor Murdock?”
Matt had laughed under his breath. “That surprised you?”
“A little. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
Then you had turned to Dex, trying to make it casual, trying to move the night away from whatever ugly thing was coiling beneath the table. See? this is fine, you tried to say with your eyes
Well. It was until Matt decided to say, “And Poindexter, you’re still in security?”
Dex’s eyes had flicked to Matt for half a second.
“Yeah,” he said, with his hand warm on your knee, “She knows my work.”
Matt had gone still.
Dex hadn’t smiled, but you felt the satisfaction in him anyway.
You could feel him think, Matt cannot use that against me.
Except Matt kept going.
Matt didn’t sound like he wanted to humiliate him. He sounded worried, and maybe that was what made Dex more anxious. Accusation, he could meet. Concern made him look like an animal.
And because you had no idea what the fuck to do, you blurted out the one thing you probably shouldn’t have.
“Um,” you choked out. “Would you like to tell us how you met?”
Oh fuck.
Mistake, you could tell from the way Dex was looking at you now. Big mistake.
“It was years ago,” Matt said finally. “During my work on a civil suit. Nelson, Murdock, and Page represented several former employees of a private security firm.”
Dex’s thumb stopped moving on your knee.
Matt continued. “We found evidence of illegal surveillance, witness intimidation, and coercion.”
Elektra leaned back slightly, actively thinking of Dex’s bad influence on you now.
Dex’s face didn’t change.
“He worked for them?” Elektra asked.
Matt’s head angled toward Dex. “Ask him.”
Dex’s teeth shifted once.
You felt the violent urge in him before you saw it. His body didn’t lunge and his hand didn't move. But you could tell he was thinking of hurling a fork in Matt’s direction.
You put your hand over his and squeezed hard.
Dex’s eyes snapped to you.
You didn’t say anything. You only dug your fingers into the back of his hand, right where the skin was thin over bone. It was a warning, a plea not to escalate things. Your nails pressed in harder when his eyes moved back toward Matt.
Dex. You warned with your eyes.
His nostrils flared.
Please don’t.
Matt kept speaking, unaware or too aware. “His name came up in access logs and reports.”
Dex’s hand flexed under yours.
You pressed harder, until your nails broke skin. A tiny crescent of blood welled beneath your thumb, bright against him.
Dex looked down, and that’s what did it. All the focus in him fractured around the sight of your hand gripping his hard enough to hurt him, your fingers trembling. This was your silent refusal to let him become the thing Matt was describing right in front of you.
Though the haze in his mind didn’t disappear, he turned his face away from Matt. It came back to you and the fact that you were frightened enough of what he might do to stop him with pain.
Dex swallowed. Under the table, he turned his hand over and caught your fingers carefully, like he was afraid you might pull away.
Matt was still talking, though. “One witness was hospitalised the night before deposition. Another vanished for three days and came back with a different story.”
Elektra looked at Dex. You looked at Matt. Dex looked at nobody but you.
“And nothing stuck,” Dex said.
His voice was too controlled.
Matt paused. “No.”
Dex’s fingers tightened around yours once, not enough to hurt, enough to ask whether you were still there.
You were.
You hated that you were.
Dex’s eyes finally lifted to Matt again, and there it was: you knew he wanted to fucking hurt him, and not because Matt was lying. Because Matt was telling the truth in front of you. Because Matt had dragged a past version of him into your sister’s dining room and set it between the candles.
Your grip tightened again.
Dex breathed in slowly, then he looked at you.
You shook your head once. Please.
The fight went out of his shoulders by force, not surrender. He leaned back a fraction, still holding your hand under the table, your bloodied little nail marks hidden between his fingers like a secret.
Elektra set her wine down. “Dex,” she said. Her voice was smooth. “Can I speak with you?”
You looked at her immediately. “Ellie.”
“Privately.”
Dex didn’t answer right away.
His thumb moved over your fingers once. There was blood on his skin because of you, and somehow that made his touch gentler.
“It’s fine,” he said.
It was absolutely not fine. He stood anyway.
Before he followed Elektra, he bent close enough that his mouth brushed your temple. It was not quite a kiss and more like proof of control.
Then he left with your sister as the balcony doors shut behind them.
For a second, you only stared at the glass, watching Elektra turn on him with folded arms while Dex stood very still in front of her, hands visible, every inch of him pretending he had not almost lost himself at your birthday dinner.
Matt was still across from you when you turned back to him slowly.
He looked… worried.
You wiped your thumb against your napkin, and tried to breathe like your heart was not still stuck somewhere in your throat.
“Ummmm,” you said, because if you started with Dex, you might cry. If you started with the lawsuit, you might scream.
Matt turned his face toward you.
“So,” you said, voice smaller than you wanted it to be. “Are you sticking around this time?”
Matt didn’t answer right away.
That was very Matt of him.
He sat across from you at Elektra’s dining table with one hand curled near his wine glass, head angled faintly toward the balcony doors. Outside, your sister had Dex backed into a conversation you could not hear properly through the glass. Elektra’s arms were folded. Dex’s hands were visible at his sides.
That alone told you he was trying very, very hard.
You watched them for another second, then looked back at Matt.
“So,” you said, because there was no clean way to ask it. “Are you sticking around this time?”
Matt swirled a bit of his wine. Awkward.
“I… think so,” he said.
You stared at him. “You think so?”
The smile he gave you was small. “I’m trying.”
“Mmm. Very convincing.”
He huffed, almost a laugh, and it tugged at an old memory in your chest.
Because before he was Professor Murdock, he was Elektra’s on-again-off-again disaster boyfriend, and that made him your on-again-off-again big brother. He had been the person who helped you with homework at the kitchen table because Elektra said she was too busy and then corrected every other answer from across the room anyway. He had been the person who let you complain about school and teachers and boys without making you feel stupid for being young. He had been the one who said, very seriously, that no, you probably could not sue your PE teacher for being annoying, but he admired your commitment to the argument.
And then he would leave.
“She was awful last time you guys broke up,” you said.
Matt lowered his head.
You picked at the edge of your napkin. “Not in the fun way. She was actually awful.”
“What do you want me to say?” He sighed.
The candles on the table flickered between you. Elektra had made too much food, of course. Your flowers sat in a vase near the counter, lush and ridiculous and beautiful, and you could still feel the small dent of Dex’s hand where he had held yours under the table.
“She missed you,” you said. “She pretended she didn’t, obviously, but she did.”
His mouth fell.
“And I missed you,” you added, staring very hard at the napkin. “Who else do I get to complain about her to? Mom and Dad don’t give a shit anymore.”
Matt’s laugh was tiny and helpless. “I missed you too.”
That almost made you forgive him.
You looked back at him. “Then stay. Or don’t. But don’t drift in and out like we’re all supposed to just reset every time you and Ellie get bored again.”
He nodded once, accepting the hit. For a second, it felt like being sixteen again. Like he was still family, sitting at your family table.
Then his head shifted slightly.
Toward the balcony. Towards Dex.
And you felt the whole conversation distort.
Matt didn’t pounce. He was much worse than that. He eased into it, like he was only following the evidence where it naturally led.
“You know why I’m worried about your boyfriend,” he said.
You sat back and sighed. “There it is.”
“I’m not trying to start a fight.”
“No,” you shook your head. “You’re building a case.”
He didn’t deny it.
“I know you care about me,” you said. “I do. But please don’t do that... That lawyer thing with your wording. You're making me feel like I’m supposed to realise I’ve accidentally admitted something.”
“I’m not cross-examining you.”
“You are.”
“I’m asking questions.” Matt exhaled.
You hated how much you still wanted his approval, because he was one of those people who had seen you grow up and therefore they had earned the right to worry.
He leaned forward a little.
“How did he tell you about… what he does?”
You looked at him and took a sip of wine to buy yourself time. “I’m not thick.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No,” you said. “But he didn’t have to tell me shit for me to realise his job was more than sit around looking pretty with a gun.”
Matt’s jaw clenched slightly.
Outside, Elektra said something to Dex that made his shoulders go tense.
“He gave you a version,” Matt said.
You laughed once, without much humour. “Everyone gives a version.”
“Some versions are omissions.”
“God, you are so irritating.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” you cocked your head. “You think irritating is fine when you’re right.”
Matt tried again.
“There are patterns,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Patterns.”
“Yes.”
“With Dex.”
“With men like him.”
You looked sharply at him. “Men like him.”
Matt’s mouth tightened. “Men who know exactly how much truth to give you.”
Your throat tightened despite yourself.
He heard it, because damn that freakish hearing of his was apparently still going.
His voice flattened a bit. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Always very generous.”
“I mean it. I think you’re smart. I think you know more than most people would.”
You looked down at your hands.
There was still the faintest mark beneath one nail where you had dug into Dex’s skin hard enough to pull him back. You could still feel the moment he snapped back into himself. The way his fury turned, not gone, just redirected because you had asked without words.
Matt said your name, like he used to when you were younger and trying not to cry.
“I think you’re too close to the facts,” he said. You almost smiled because only Matt Murdock would say something like that at a birthday dinner.
You set the fork down. “You mean I’m biased.”
“I mean you’re involved.”
“I’m allowed to be involved in my own life.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Matt went silent.
You looked at him now, studying his posture “Because it sounds like you think if you arrange the argument properly, I’ll reach your conclusion.”
“I think you’re making a dangerous choice.”
“There we go.”
His face soured. “He is dangerous.”
“So is Ellie.”
“She’s different now.”
“And?” You leaned forward. “And?”
Matt didn’t answer fast enough.
You lowered your voice. “We both know what she’s done. We both know what half of that collection cost before she started using invoices and whatever else she claims is legitimate now.”
“She got out.”
“Good for her.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I,” you groaned. “But she still deserves love, doesn’t she?”
Matt looked pained, and you hated hurting him.
“You love her with a whole archive of exceptions,” you said. “But I’m supposed to treat Dex like one bad document is the entire record?”
“It’s not just one bad document—“
“It’s close enough.”
“No,” Matt said, and there was that courtroom firmness in him now. “I’m saying you probably know what the record looks like. You're just ignoring the parts you don’t want to read.”
You swallowed.
“I know what it costs,” he said. “To love someone and start making room for things you would have condemned.”
You looked toward the balcony.
Dex had turned his head slightly, like he could feel you looking.
Matt kept going, though kinder now. “You start with mitigation. Then you start giving out exceptions. I’m just asking you to consider—”
“No.” Your voice cracked a little. “No, you’re asking me to accept your ruling.”
Matt stopped.
Ruling.
Huh. You really have changed over the two years he was gone.
You breathed in shakily. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about him. Maybe you’re not. Maybe there are things I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll regret this so badly I’ll hear your voice in my fucking head for the rest of my life.”
Matt’s shoulders lowered.
“But my mistakes are mine to make,” you said.
Oh.
You saw the tiny break in his knuckles. The big-brother part of him, the one who never really had anyone but himself, the part that still remembered you as a teenager at the kitchen table with bruised knees and far too much attitude for your own good, wanting to protect you from yourself because he had loved a more bloody Elektra the way you loved Dex.
“I don’t want to watch you get hurt,” was all he managed to say,
You looked down. “You might have to.”
He looked down.
You reached across the table first and found his hand, because touch had always been a sensory experience he reacted to.
“I’m not blind,” you said, then immediately groaned. “Sorry.”
Matt’s mouth twitched. “It’s fine.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I know he’s not safe.”
Matt’s thumb brushed once over your knuckles.
“But he listens to me,” you said. “And maybe that’s not enough for you. But it matters to me.”
Matt didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue either.
For once, it felt like mercy.
Outside, you heard a scrape against the balcony table.
Matt’s head tilted. “What’s happening?”
You looked past him through the glass.
Elektra and Dex were no longer standing in their neat little interrogation positions. They looked like they were seated across from each other at the tiny balcony table, elbows planted, hands clasped, Dex’s shoulders covering half the scene.
You blinked.
Then, despite the ache in your chest, you laughed. “I think they’re arm wrestling.”
Matt closed his eyes.
The look on his face was so exhausting that it only made you laugh harder.
—
The rest of dinner went by quickly after Elektra and Dex came back in from the balcony with no visible injuries, which you counted as a birthday miracle.
Elektra looked smug and Dex looked composed, but there was a tightness around his lips that made you narrow your eyes. When you glanced between them and asked who won the arm wrestle, Elektra only smiled into her wine. Dex said nothing. Which, unfortunately for him, was an answer.
After that, everyone behaved, mostly. Matt stopped trying to lawyer you out of your own relationship. Dex stopped looking like he wanted to fling Matt through one of Elektra’s very expensive windows. Elektra told a horrible story about you at seventeen trying to jump from the garage roof into the pool and missing by an amount she called “humiliating but educational.” Matt laughed, Dex looked absolutely fascinated, like your teenage stupidity was precious. He asked one follow-up question, and you kicked him under the table.
By the time you left, she kissed both your cheeks, held your face for one second longer than usual, and said happy birthday one more time and told you to call her tomorrow.
Matt hugged you too, while Dex and Matt shook hands, proving to God and each other that they could survive physical contact without committing a felony.
Then Dex took you home.
You were sleepy in the car, full from dinner, cake, and emotional warfare.
At your apartment, you kicked off your shoes by the door and padded into the kitchen for water. Dex followed, taking off his coat, watching you with that careful quiet he got when he was not sure whether he was allowed to touch you yet.
You leaned against the counter and looked at him over the rim of your glass.
“So,” you said. “Who really won?”
Dex’s expression went flat. “No.”
You smiled. “No?”
Dex flexed his hand once, as if remembering. “She’s irritating.”
You laughed. “Mmm.”
“But you love her,” he said.
Your laugh faded.
Dex leaned back against the counter opposite you, arms crossed. “And she loves you. And she’s capable of protecting you.” He said, as if it was the only metric that mattered. “So I guess I’ll try.”
You stared at him. “That is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about anyone.”
Dex rolled his eyes, but there was no bite in it. He looked tired now. Not physically, more like tired from pretending to be a decent person.
You walked across the kitchen and took his hand.
The little marks from your nails looked worse up close. There were tiny, red, broken crescents on the back of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” you said, trailing small kisses on them
Dex looked down at your lips touching the wounds. He shrugged as if you did what you had to do to get the result you wanted, and Dex had always been pragmatic like that.
That night, Dex fell asleep with his arm locked around your waist.
He slept heavy, going slack against your back, his breath warm at the nape of your neck, his hand spread beneath your sleep shirt like he had reached for bare skin even in his sleep.
Your phone pinged just after two.
Then again. Then again.
You reached for it carefully, lifting Dex’s arm just enough to drag the screen close without waking him.
It was a text…. From Elektra.
I’m glad he’s on your side.
Then the next text.
That’s still not the same thing as him being safe.
Another message came through before you could answer her.
Make an informed decision. That’s all I’m asking.
Then, she sent a link.
You stared at it for a long time in the dark.
Dex shifted behind you, his arm tightening automatically around your middle, his face pressing closer to your shoulder, still asleep.
You opened it… and there it was. The lawsuit Dex was allegedly involved in.
The text was dense and written in bloodless language detailing private security and consultants. It detailed alleged intimidation and coercion, resulting in witnesses withdrawing statements and misplaced evidence.
Dex’s name was there.
You read until the words blurred, until the apartment turned orange in the early morning. Dex slept against you while a colder version of him lived through depositions and sealed complaints and things nobody had ever proved.
But you knew your boyfriend. You knew he was capable of this.
You waited for the feeling to change.
Maybe, you expected to be disgusted. Fear, more likely.
It didn’t come.
You felt the same about him as you did before.
And of course it wasn’t fine. Matt was not wrong and Elektra wasn’t worried for no reason.
But you had always looked at the world through rose-tinted glasses.
By dawn, you closed the file.
Dex stirred when you set your phone down, as if even the sound of it against the nightstand was enough to pull some half-asleep part of him back to you.
His arm tightened around your waist first. Then he dragged you closer, face pressing blindly between your shoulder and neck, making it impossible to move even if you had wanted to.
“Sweetheart?” he mumbled, barely awake.
You hummed and covered his hand with yours.
For a second, you lay there with the lawsuit still burning behind your eyes. All those careful words and sealed statements. All those allegations circling the man in your bed like vultures.
And maybe Matt was right.
Maybe Elektra was right.
Maybe Dex was dangerous.
But Matt had loved your sister through her murderous years, hadn’t he? So who were they to look at you like you were insane for dating an assassin?
You were now thoroughly informed, now, weren’t you?
You turned carefully in Dex’s arms until you were facing him. His eyes stayed closed, his brow furrowing faintly at the movement, but his hand slid up your back on instinct, keeping you close.
“Go back to sleep,” you whispered, kissing him softly.
Dex exhaled against your mouth, already sinking again. You tucked yourself beneath his chin, his arm heavy over your waist.
Informed decision made.
—end.
NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5.
That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation (keep this post in mind for July and August 2026). If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else.
Please remember I run this blog for free, so any support means a lot, only if you’re able to give it! Love y’all and thank you for reading!!! <3
TW/tags Bucky Barnes x reader, established relationship, drowning mention, mentioned death of a family member and best friend, blood and bruising, nosebleed, reader has an inherited curse
You woke up tasting ash and dust in your mouth.
Sometimes, you tasted metal when sleeping with your mouth open, the faint aftertaste of the New Avengers’ tower recycled air. This was different. This coated your tongue, bitter and scorched, gathering between your teeth as if you had spent the night breathing through smoke.
You swallowed and felt grit scrape down your throat.
Behind you, Bucky shifted beneath the sheets.
He was still half asleep when he pressed his mouth to your back, kissing the bare skin between your shoulder blades. His stubble dragged pleasantly over you, his lips unhurried as they travelled along your spine. His metal hand rested heavily on your hip, thumb moving in an absent circle.
Usually, you would have smiled. You would have pushed backwards into him until he tightened his arm around your waist and complained that you were trying to crush him, despite both of you knowing perfectly well that you couldn’t, even if you tried.
This morning, you couldn’t move.
The curse of premonition had been in your family for centuries, bestowed by a witch who had wanted your ancestors to suffer long after their own deaths. You would feel every tragedy creeping towards you and still remain powerless to name the hour, the place, or whose blood would be spilled.
Your grandmother had tasted saltwater for three days before her brother drowned. Your mother had heard bells ringing inside her skull before the hospital called about her father.
Before your childhood best friend died a brutal death, bruises appeared on your skin and you woke up with blood running from your nose.
Bucky kissed the back of your neck, then stopped when you flinched.
His hand became still on your hip. “You’re awake.”
You nodded, although he couldn’t see it.
Bucky pushed himself up behind you. The mattress dipped as he leaned over, brushing your hair away from your face. You could feel him watching you before he gently rolled you towards him.
His hair was tangled from the pillows, and there was a crease across one cheek from your pillow and warmth lingering in his eyes that disappeared when he saw your face.
“What is it?”
You opened your mouth, but the taste of smoke became stronger. You tried to speak and had to swallow dust first, drowned in a coughing fit. When Bucky offered water, you refused and forced the taste down.
Oh.
Bucky caught your face between both hands, because he knew that look too well by now.
“What did you feel?”
“Ash.” Your voice came out raw. “I… I can smell smoke.”
Bucky inhaled through his nose, as though he might be able to smell it too.
There was nothing for him, just the warmth of your shared bedroom in the tower and lemony clean sheets.
You reached for him, twisting your fingers into his shirt and pulling yourself against his chest.
Bucky wrapped himself around you immediately, metal arm across your back while his flesh hand cradled the base of your head.
“I think something bad is going to happen,” you managed.
Bucky pressed his mouth to your temple. “How bad?”
“I don’t know.”
You never knew.
Bucky pulled back just enough to look at you. “I’m not letting anything happen to you.”
Bucky had survived so many things, from himself, to armies, alien invasions and the end of the world. He had spent his entire life teetering too close to the edge, but had never let you do the same.
You held him tighter and whispered, “I’m not worried about me.”
Bucky went still. His breathing stumbled, and the arm around your back tightened until you could feel every plate in his hand. “Oh,” he looked down. “Is it…”
“I—” You cut him off, before biting the inside of your cheeks so hard it almost bled. “I don’t know that it’s you.”
“But you think it is.”
You couldn’t answer.
Ash gathered beneath your tongue again, and you squeezed your eyes shut and buried your face against his bare chest before he could see what you were still feeling.
Bucky kissed your hair. “Whatever it is, you know we’ll handle it,” His hand moved along your back, trying to soothe you while his heartbeat raced beneath your ear. “I promise everything’s gonna be okay.”
Outside the bedroom, the New Avengers Tower began to wake up, an elevator door chiming below. Alexei laughed in the corridor, followed by the muffled slam of a door.
These were all ordinary morning sounds you had grown fond of over the last six months.
And to think it could be taken away, just like that….
Bucky pulled the blankets higher around both of you and held you, pretending nothing in the world could reach you there.
You knew better.
You knew promises had never stopped the curse before.
But Bucky sounded so certain, and he loved you so much, and there was no harm in letting him believe it for a little longer.
if you’re still taking short story request, maybe a hate sex scenario with Dex but it’s not really hate sex it’s just complicated with a lot of history.
(congrats on the wedding btw! I feel like everyone and their mother in this fandom knows of you getting married and I’m personally treating it as a celebrity wedding hehe)
You and Dex Have a Complicated Relationship
WC 1.1k
TW does this count as exes with benefits? violence, gun threat, ex!FBI reader, toxic situationship, enemies-to-lovers-ish-maybe, explicit sexual content, Dex is implied to work for Mr. Charles.
You and Dex used to sleep with each other, back when you worked together in the FBI.
Now, almost a decade later, he’s apparently a CIA black ops assassin and you’re working private security for dickheads.
Your dickhead for the evening is a billionaire who’s aware he has too many enemies, attending a gala full of people pretending not to hate him. He pays well enough that you spend the night in silk with a gun strapped high on your thigh, scanning balconies, reflective surfaces, and every bored rich bastard with a hand inside his jacket.
Then you see Dex across the ballroom, and you know immediately who he’s been sent to kill.
His eyes drop, not subtly, to the slit of your dress where he knows a weapon is hidden, and he smiles.
Dex doesn’t make attempts at your client like an amateur. He waits until the crowds gather and the music swells. Then, your client steps too close to the west corridor because he wants to whisper some disgusting thing to a senator’s wife.
Dex tries to get him there.
You catch his wrist before the blade clears his sleeve and twist. Dex pivots into it, because he was always slippery like that. You drive your knee into his side, hook your ankle behind his, and put him on the ground.
The knife skitters under a decorative table and Dex hits the carpet on his back.
You step over him and plant your heel in the middle of his chest.“Stay down.”
Dex looks up at you, pupils blown, mouth parted.
He should be calculating his next move, except Dex has always liked being overpowered by you.
He swallows. Your client makes a pathetic noise behind you.
You can see exactly how much Dex is enjoying himself.
For the next two hours, the gala becomes the most expensive foreplay you have ever been forced to participate in. Dex tries the balcony so you shove your client under some cover. Dex switches to the service corridor, and you’re already there. He tries to use a champagne flute off a waiter’s tray as a projectile, and you push your client behind a marble pillar.
Every time he gets close, you put your body between him and the target.
At midnight, your contract ends.
Your client checks his watch smugly, like surviving the evening means he won. You escort him to his car, already done, already thinking about getting out of the dress.
Dex kills him in his own home. Technically not interfering with your job.
You find him in your hotel room twenty minutes later because he wants to be found. He is sitting on the edge of your desk, still in that black suit, bruising blooming at his throat where you grabbed him.
The bastard looks pleased with himself.
You sigh and take off your earrings. “Did you kill my client?”
Dex tilts his head. “Technically, he stopped being your client at midnight.”
You tilt your head. “You think that makes it better?”
“I think it makes it funny,” he says.
You slap him, and then he looks back at you with a red mark on his cheek.
You grab his shirt and shove him further into the desk.
He lets you be rough with him like it’s a privilege. After all, your anger is still attention and attention from you is the only thing he has ever really wanted
“You ruined my job,” you hiss.
His hands find your waist. “I’ll pay whatever they dock you.”
“You can’t.” It almost makes you laugh thinking he can afford you. It doesn’t matter anyway. The contract was done, you still get paid.
“No,” Dex says, and there he is, honest in the worst possible way. “But I can make it up to you.”
Dex flips this around and drops to his knees. He’s on the floor in front of you, hands sliding under your dress, mouth pressing against the inside of your thigh.
Your hand goes into his hair to shove him away, but it’s a weak attempt. Before you know it, you’re gripping him to drag him closer to your arousal.
“I missed this.” His teeth scrape carefully over your thigh enough to remind you exactly what his mouth can do. “Missed when you were mad at me.”
You pull his hair hard enough to make his eyes lift. “Shut up and do your fucking job.”
For once, he does and puts his mouth where you need it.
After your first orgasm, he looks up with his mouth wet.
“You forgive me yet?” he asks.
You shove him back by the forehead.
He laughs, then stands because he knows you too well. He knows the limit of your patience, he knows that you’re two seconds from climbing him like a tree.
He turns you around and bends you over the desk, and for whatever reason, you let him. Papers scatter and the lamp wobbles. Dex is behind you, one hand dragging your dress over your hips while the other works his belt open.
He fills you in one steady stroke.
“Sweetheart,” he breathes as he thrusts, pressing in close behind you. “Come on. ‘M sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s the idea.”
You should hate that it makes you laugh.
Dex kisses the back of your shoulder, your spine, anywhere he can reach while he takes you apart like he used to in the New York FBI office, in the blindspot between the filing cabinets and the copy machine. He keeps saying please like it means something. Please forgive me. Please don’t throw me out yet. Please, sweetheart, I missed you, I missed you so much, you have no idea.
By morning, the desk has moved halfway across the room and your dress is ruined.
Dex is sitting on the edge of the bed, buttoning his shirt carefully as if he didn’t spend half the night on his knees and the other half making a mess of you.
You pick your gun up from the nightstand and point it at his chest.
Dex looks at the barrel. He knows you won’t pull the trigger. Worse, he knows you know he knows.
You cock your head toward the door. “You can fuck off now.”
For a second, he just stares at you, eyes sparkling with a hint of fondness.
Then the cocky bastard leans down and kisses you.
You should bite his fucking nose off. You kiss him back instead because you’re not entirely sure, anymore, if the gut feeling in your stomach is still hatred. It feels too familiar, like wanting him to come back so you can throw him out again.
When Dex pulls away, he smiles against your mouth. “See you soon, sweetheart.”
You should spit in his face, but Dex would like that too much.
A month later, you are at a different gala with a different dickhead, watching champagne bubbles rise, when you see Dex across the ballroom, already smiling at you.
You roll your eyes because, unfortunately, you know exactly how this night is going to end.
Rinse and repeat.
—
Note : thank you for all the wedding-related comments! I didn’t expect everyone to care this much, I just wanted people to know why I would be on a little break. Eternally grateful, though!🫶🫶🫶
ETAAAALOCURAAAA🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷🇦🇷 the fact that wilson filmed a movie in Argentina!!!! VAMOOOO CARAJOOOO!!! dex is Argentine and it makes so much sense !!!!!
bro I love my partner with all my heart but he is an English man and he deadass stared at a wall for 30 minutes after the game 😭😭😭 ya’ll I'm neutral and I think I have to finally admit that Argentina might be the best team in the world rn. Imagine winning copa America and WC back to back ya’ll. best of luck for the final!
