Warning: Please excuse any bad grammar. That's the only warning lol
The Chronic Care Center staff parted around him in the same manner as a school of fish when a shark passes through, their eyes flicking across his hulking frame and polite utterances of “good afternoon, Dr. Gideon” or nods of respect tilted towards him as he moved through the world with silent steps and shoulders held down by the terrible weight of a dream.
He exited the main building, made his way towards the wooden house on the outskirts of the yard, and entered before heading to the bookshelf. He raised his massive hand to the lined novels, his fingers skimmed past the various titles on the second-highest shelf before settling on a thick red book titled “Neverland”. He gently pulls the book out just enough for it to lock in place, a subtle click as it settles. The hidden elevator floor began to sink into a large, lit shaft. Gideon rolled his shoulders back and let out a long, tired sigh. He brought his hands to his neck and loosened his tie before running a single hand through his hair, pushing back any stray grey strands.
The elevator lowered into an intersection with four openings. It moved to the right, entering a large hallway and approaching a large, makeshift titanium-vaulted door. Two separate, armored cameras were stationed high in the corner of the door, their eyes trained on anything that moved. In the middle was a single large pad with a small camera.
He placed his hand flat on the screen, the pad lighting up as it scanned him from fingertips to the end of the palm. Only lifting away his hand once it flashed “Verified” before prompting him to lean down. He opened his right eye wide, a bright light aligned over his orbital region before zeroing in on his pale-yellow eye.
“Acceptable. Welcome Home.”
With a series of hisses, various large metal latches released the first door, followed quickly by a second door cut diagonally that split into two before disappearing into the walls.
Stepping into the underground home, Gideon briefly flexed his fingers. Behind him, the doors closed, sealing him inside. The enclosed apartment was a mix of contemporary and artful Victorian Gothic, every piece carefully selected to fit within both aesthetic dispositions, resulting in something unique.
He walked past the single grand piano in the living room into a dark hallway, where he passed a warmly red-lit enclosure, where a single large python sat coiled, waiting, its tongue flicked out in greeting, and its eyes following. The door to the primary bedroom was left purposely ajar, the dim, warm lighting shining through. He gently pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was spacious enough to accommodate his size and general desire for free movement. It was neatly organized, matching the rest of the home's design, with a large TV opposite the bed, a large walk-in closet, and wooden shelves lined with books. In the middle was a custom extra-large bed, its bamboo sheets ebony as night, its pillows grey and black.
In the middle, lying peacefully asleep and on your side was "you". Dressed in a short sleeping dress and covered with your favorite white faux fur blanket. He lifted one of his hands to your face and trailed his fingers lightly over your cheek.
“I won’t be long,” he whispered fondly.
He let his fingers linger for a moment before Gideon turned away toward the closet. He slithers off his coat and hangs it on one of the closet hangers. One by one, he removed his rings and placed them in a jewelry display box, then took off his shoes and the rest of his clothes to dispose of them in a hamper. He entered the restroom and then the shower. He turned on the showerhead, the scalding hot water a blissful balm to his cold-blooded body.
He was efficient. He was fast, and within minutes, he was out of the bathroom, dressed in comfortable fleece sleepwear. He walked toward the side of the bed and pushed on a specific plain place on the wall. A small cutout appeared, the wall leaned down, bringing with it the waft of cold refrigerated air and perfectly filled syringes. Below it was an open steel discard tunnel leading to the compounds' AVAC system. Gideon carefully took the closest syringe to the right, opened the bedside table, and grabbed an individually packaged medical alcohol wipe.
He strided over to you, then gently got to his knees; still, his frame towered over you and the bed. He set the syringe aside. He tore the medical alcohol pad in half before retrieving the wipe. He again cradled your arm and carefully sanitized the area around the middle junction of your arm. He set the wipe aside, grabbed the needle, and, with the practiced ease of a professional, inserted it into your medial cubital vein and steadily injected the light blue liquid into you. Once empty, he stood, promptly discarded the syringe and alcohol pad’s trash. He pressed the same side of the wall again, and the makeshift tray disappeared once more.
Once more, he loomed above you with blown pale yellow eyes, firmly captivated by you. He was careful to sit down softly on the side of the bed. His hand gently reaches out to envelop yours, its warmth an invisible radiance that drifted through the conjoined connection as a gentle transfer of thermal conduction. A pleasant sedative that made him want to coil around you and subsist off your vitality for eternity.
You had always had that effect on him. Even long before he’d turned cold-blooded.
He gave your hand a brief but gentle squeeze. Victor loved you. So deeply. Far more than any rational man should. More than he especially should. His poison, which he drank so willingly, and the oxygen that sustained his very breath.
You, whom were Victor’s first true friend. His first crush. His first love. Only equal to his obsession with biological science and evolution. In many ways, he credits you for helping in the development of such passion. After all, it was your sickness, the fated cosmic catalyst, that forced him to focus his young, wondering mind into a sharpened scalpel. Spencer was his inspiration. The wise guidance that showed him the way. You, however, cradled his mutated heart, an essence transplanted behind your ribs, sown somewhere beside your own, its malformed organs fused and arteries shared in perfect symbiosis.
Victor lifted his hand to your face and swept the expanse of his large, pale hand over the side of your cheek, pushing away the loose strands of hair that had fallen in disarray. He trailed his fingers softly over the smooth surfaces of your skin, enjoying the mosaic of tactile sensations in every pore and vellus hair, an inhuman sensitivity that came with his mutated form.
You were perfectly preserved and as beautiful as you were on your wedding day.
An occasion almost thirty-two years ago.
He lies opposite of you, mirroring your position to lie on his side, his own massive form poorly imitating your own naturally graceful pose. His gaze never left your face, even as his eyelids fell heavy, his often clenched jaw eased, and his mouth slightly parted. Your serenity was contagious, a balm to his ever-wondering mind, where thoughts and ideas didn’t follow in neat succession but in uneven cascades that often left him rather manic or deathly serious but rarely peaceful.
He was a genius.
Even as a child, it had been evident to everyone. Regardless, his parents had insisted he go through school “normally”. He hated it. The mindless work and the teachers who taught things he had long learned in his spare time. However, what he hated the most were his fellow “peers”. Peers that he struggled to relate to in any way. Mindless sheep unable to comprehend a world beyond sports and dolls. Peers that he often found himself excluded by or outright bullied by.
Fools, all of them, and likely to die in his and Spencer’s new world.
But not you. Never you.
He leaned in toward you, placing his cracked lips on your forehead.
“Goodnight, my love,” he whispered between a gentle kiss, his lips lingering.
Perfect. So perfect.
He pulled back slowly. His hand slithered around your waist and pulled your comatose body to his own. He gently tucked your head under his chin, carefully not to disturb the perfect parting of your hair more than necessary, while he engulfed you.
I will follow my Master’s dream. I will make this world perfect for us.
You know you're on Tumblr radar when suddenly the porn bots start dating in the comments and the Gaza scammers are trying to squeeze money from lgtbq fanartists lol. Y'all go wild! :D
i finally had an entire weekend off since forever and was able to draw and hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngwehewbdjwnsdjjrk
and god he‘s so hard to draw for me. like. the problem is he‘s not a cartoony videogame villain. his character model is pretty damn realistic. but i‘m specialized in cartoon dudes 😭😭 tf2 humans shaped my understanding of anatomy lol. and idk maybe i‘m also just rusty but trying to draw him is hard esp. when i wanna stylize him. but my brain battles this every second since i wanna draw him as close to the source material as possible but that‘s not gonna happen aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (i also wanna do him justice aaaa stupid brain just DO)
(also i hc that he‘s got the split tongue maybe in his 30s as a body mod? so it‘s not part of the parasite transformation but a choice lol. (he also loved going to kink parties and is heavy into electro / industrial stuff aaaaaaargdh i‘d love to draw comics about how things changed after the infection, inhibition center completely wrecked and all… man i wish i could write))
i‘ve also scribbled down a storyboard for an alternative ending for re9 which contains over 40 thumbnails already orz but i need more time for this.
also also i'm not getting enough sleep as it is....................
Summary: In a drowned world ruled by sirens, Illumi Zoldyck discovers the last surviving human in a sunken ship and slowly convinces himself she was never meant to belong to anyone but him.
Notes: this one’s going to be a long one. check my ao3! @krystalisedsoul on there too <3
Word Count: 2686
The water is black this far down, thick and endless, pressing from all sides like a thought too vast to hold. It swallows the light and hums with old voices, the kind that never learned how to fade. Illumi moves through the darkness as if he were born from it.
His body glides without effort, the faint shimmer of scales tracing his path like the memory of a blade. Fins whisper against the current, his hair drifting behind him in slow, weightless ribbons. Every movement is deliberate, a study in stillness interrupted only by the faint pulse of the ocean echoing through his body.
He is hunting, though hunger has long since stopped feeling urgent. It is simply a habit. It’s something instinctual and quiet.
There is little left in the deep worth chasing. Most creatures that wander these depths are small and half-mad from the pressure. The leviathans that remain are dull and predictable in their movements. They fill the body but not the mind.
For Illumi, the act of killing has become more ritual than necessity. He hunts because the sea expects him to, because his blood remembers that it should. The satisfaction is fleeting, the silence afterwards absolute.
Yet even that monotony shifts when he senses something strange below. It's an unfamiliar resonance that does not belong to the ocean. It smells faintly of rust, salt, and something sweet, fragile, almost floral. It feels alive.
He follows the scent through a forest of collapsed metal and coral until he finds it: a shipwreck, old enough to be part of the seabed itself. Its hull lies cracked open against a ridge, covered in barnacles and white coral growth that glows faintly under the dim bioluminescent haze. The letters along its side are long gone, its name devoured by the sea.
Illumi circles the wreck twice before entering, moving like a shadow through the shattered ribs of the ship. The silence here feels thicker than outside, the silence waiting for something to break it. He glides past broken furniture, rusted steel, and glass that drifts like frozen breath. Everything about it hums with age, and Illumi feels something stir beneath the surface of his composure for the first time in a very long while. He recognises this shape of ruin. It is human.
Humans have been gone for thirty thousand years. His mother told him their history the way other families might tell bedtime stories. The Zoldycks sang entire continents into the sea, driving humankind from the land until the last of them drowned beneath their own cities. It was an era of cleansing, she said, a necessary act of balance.
Humans were fragile but proud; they built lights that rivalled stars and thought themselves untouchable until the ocean took them. Illumi has never seen one, only the relics - broken machines, crumbling temples, bones bleached white by salt. He never cared to imagine what they might have looked like alive.
Now, in the belly of this sunken corpse of a ship, he finds something wrapped in white.
At first, he mistakes it for a remnant of the wreck. It’s a bundle of decayed cloth caught in a current. But as he moves closer, his eyes adjust to the dimness and he sees the slow rise and fall beneath the fabric. A shape, small and delicate, suspended in the last pocket of air. For a long moment, he does not move. The water around him seems to hold its breath.
He studies the figure with the same dispassionate focus he would give a strange creature he intends to dissect, but when he senses the faint vibration of a heartbeat, something inside him stills.
Alive.
The word echoes in him like a current. It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be possible. The ocean swallowed every last trace of human life thousands of years ago. He knows this as the truth because his family made it so.
Yet here one lies, wrapped in a decaying blanket, breathing the ghost of air through half-parted lips. She is impossibly still, the thin lines of her body outlined by the fractured light filtering through the wreck’s broken walls. Her hair drifts across her face in threads of shadow. She is colourless and utterly defenceless.
He should kill her. That is the first and simplest answer. The instinct flares naturally, like a muscle memory; snuff out the anomaly, silence the unknown. The old song in his blood urges him to end it yet his hand doesn’t move.
He only watches. The faint trembling of her fingers in the water, the fragile pulse beneath translucent skin, the quiet rhythm of a chest that should not be rising. The longer he looks, the more the space between reason and impulse erodes. There’s no logic to the thing that coils slowly in his chest, that low hum that feels dangerously close to recognition. It is not mercy. It is not a curiosity.
He blinks once, as if the thought might dissolve with movement, but it doesn’t. It lingers, spreading through him like warmth in a body that has forgotten how to feel. The air pocket above trembles faintly as she exhales. The bubbles rise and brush against his face, warm even through the cold.
He reaches for her, and his hand closes around her wrist. The bones shift beneath his grip. She’s too soft and too fragile. He can feel the pulse flutter weakly against his palm; uneven, human. It sends a ripple through him that he does not understand. Her skin is cold, and yet somehow it feels like heat.
He studies her face closely now, drawn toward it despite himself. There’s no awareness in her eyes, only the faint flicker of life. She’s caught between the edge of drowning and waking, her body half-asleep in the water’s hold. The sight of her feels unreal and almost sacred in its impossibility. He wonders if this is what his ancestors felt before they learned how to kill without hesitation.
He knows he should destroy her; his mother’s voice in his memory reminds him of what happens to things that defy extinction. But when he imagines it, the image feels wrong, incomplete, as if some small part of him would break with it.
He gathers her carefully, almost reverently. Her head falls against his shoulder, the movement weightless and slow. The sound of her breathing is barely there, but he hears it as clearly as if it were echoing in his own chest. For a moment he stands motionless, holding her and listening to that fragile rhythm, and in that silence, something inside him begins to rearrange itself.
The wreck creaks behind him, the last breath of a dying structure. Illumi turns away, drawing her against him more firmly, his fingers pressed to the nape of her neck as though anchoring her to him will keep her from dissolving into the sea.
When he leaves the ship, the darkness seems to bend with him. The light above is faint, shifting like smoke through layers of water, and it pulls him upward. The weight of the ocean feels different now, heavier and yet strangely alive.
He does not question why he is bringing her with him or what he will do when he surfaces. Those thoughts belong to a part of him that has gone quiet. All that remains is the steady rhythm of her pulse against his skin, the proof that something impossible has survived, and the quiet certainty forming at the edges of his mind that she belongs to him simply because he found her first.
The ascent is slow. The pressure changes against his skin in waves, whispering of depth and distance, reminding him how far below the world he has lived for centuries. Illumi’s movements are effortless but careful. The body in his arms is too soft to withstand the ocean’s indifference. Every current feels like a threat, every brush of movement like a risk of breaking something that isn’t meant to exist anymore.
She drifts against him, limp and pale, her hair fanning in ribbons that shimmer faintly when the weak light touches them. The blanket clings to her like seaweed. He keeps her close, almost possessively, though he tells himself it is practicality and he doesn’t want to lose the specimen to the tide.
When he breaks the surface, the world is dim and endless. The sky is a sheet of dull grey, heavy with mist that merges seamlessly into the horizon. There are no stars or a moon, no birds. The air smells of iron and salt, and the faint hiss of distant waves echoes like static across an empty sea. Once, there were lands here, mountains and cities. Now there are only fragments of islands scattered like teeth.
He can see the outline of one far to the east, sharp against the fog. That is home, though the word feels abstract, more ritual than comfort. The Zoldyck territory. It’s what remains of an island chain carved into stone by their ancestors. His family dwells there, in caverns lined with luminous coral, their palaces sinking deeper each century as the land continues to drown.
He doesn’t turn toward it. Not yet.
The surface feels fragile, like a skin stretched thin over something much older. He floats for a while, listening. The air trembles faintly with sound, the constant hum of the deep.
Even above water, the ocean speaks in low frequencies, the song of sirens vibrating through the bones of the world. Somewhere below, he can feel the distant awareness of others of his kind, a collective pulse of voices drifting across the currents.
If they were close enough to sense what he carries, they would come. They would ask questions. They would take her from him before he had the chance to understand what she is. He lowers his gaze to her face.
The light here is weak but enough to see the fine details: the curve of her mouth, the faint tremor in her eyelids as her body struggles to adjust to the air. She’s breathing, shallow but steady. Her heartbeat is slow, uneven. The sight feels unnatural in the open sea, this fragile creature meant for another world is still clinging to life in his arms.
Humans were not built for water. They belonged to the land that no longer exists. He wonders what it would be like for her to wake here, surrounded by an endless horizon, no sky bright enough to promise survival. Would she scream? Would she understand what he is?
The thought lingers longer than it should. He doesn’t remember the last time he cared to wonder about another being’s reaction.
He begins to swim again, slow strokes carrying them across the quiet surface. The water parts easily for him, shimmering faintly where his tail moves beneath it. In the dim light, it appears almost black with hints of blue-green iridescence, long and sharp-edged. The fins that fan from his back shift and fold like thin veils.
His kind were made to be beautiful in ways that frightened prey. Their symmetry is too precise, their movements too graceful to seem natural.
Even among them, Illumi is known for the stillness that never cracks. His brothers are restless, volatile, and expressive in ways he has never been. His mother says that his quiet is the sign of a perfect predator. Although now, he feels the silence pressing too heavily around him.
He glances at her again, studying the way her fingers twitch slightly when a drop of water touches them. The motion is small, involuntary, but it captures his attention completely. There is something about human fragility that unsettles him. Everything about her seems unfinished. He’s unsure if it’s because her skin is so thin it shows veins beneath, her breath shaky and uncertain or because her bones felt delicate enough to shatter under his hand.
But somehow, across thousands of years and the ruin of her species, she still exists. It feels wrong but it feels important.
He thinks of his mother’s voice, melodic even without singing, teaching him as a child about the order of life. Sirens consume what is weaker. The sea consumes what is careless. There is no cruelty in it, only necessity. To spare something weaker is to disrupt the balance.
But as he holds this impossible creature, he cannot help but feel that she has already disrupted something far older than law. She does not belong to the sea, and yet the sea has kept her. Perhaps that means she belongs to him now, because he was the one who found her. He pushes the thought aside, though it continues to circle like a slow current beneath his calm.
The fog grows denser as he drifts further from the wreck. The surface light dims to a dull glow, and the air chills. The only sound is the quiet lapping of water against his shoulders. He finds a fragment of rock jutting above the waves, a piece of drowned land, nothing more than a jagged ridge slick with moss and barnacles. It will serve.
He hoists her gently onto it, the movement careful but firm, arranging her so her head rests where the stone dips shallowly into water. She doesn’t wake. The blanket clings to her body, soaked through but still somehow bright against the grey.
He studies her in silence. The air here is too thin for him. He rarely surfaces for long, the weight of the open sky pressing on him like a threat. He feels exposed, unnatural. Still, he doesn’t return below. He kneels half-submerged beside her, watching the slow rhythm of her breathing. His thoughts shift between logic and something older, harder to name.
There’s no reason to keep her alive; she cannot survive long in this world, and he cannot take her among his family without consequence. His mother would want her voice tested, her mind picked apart, her body kept as an ornament. His brothers would mock his hesitation or try to claim her themselves. He can almost hear their voices in his head already. The curiousity, the cruelty.
No, she cannot go to them. Not yet. He needs to understand what she is first. Perhaps she isn’t entirely human. Perhaps some fragment of siren blood kept her alive. Perhaps she is something new. These are rational explanations, but none of them feels true.
He leans closer until he can hear her heartbeat again. The sound is small but clear, a fragile percussion against the quiet sea. He realises, distantly, that he likes the way it sounds. It is inconsistent and unpredictable.
Every siren heartbeat is perfectly timed, a rhythm that never falters. Hers stumbles, catches, resumes. It feels alive in a way his kind no longer does. The thought should disturb him. Instead, it steadies something inside him that he didn’t know was shaking.
Illumi straightens slowly, his gaze never leaving her face. The mist gathers around them like gauze, the sea rolling gently beneath. Somewhere far below, the songs of his kin continue to hum through the water, but none reach this high. For now, this place belongs to him alone. He does not know how long he will stay here before the pull of home becomes impossible to ignore. He only knows that he will not leave her. At least not now.
He lowers one hand back into the water, feeling the vibration of the deep return through his skin. The ocean wants her back, but he will not give her to it. The logic of the world has always bent for his family’s will, and he does not see why this should be different. If the sea has chosen to preserve her, then perhaps it did so for him.
The thought comforts him enough to quiet the unease. He lets the water ripple against his hand, the motion almost tender, and watches the faint rise and fall of her chest. In that fragile rhythm, he imagines the beginning of a new kind of silence. One that belongs only to him.
Summary : Benjamin Poindexter confesses that he has been obsessively fantasizing about a domestic future with you.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : Fluff!!!! (Maybe flangst?) Domestic but still unhinged Dex, obsessive love, possessive relationship, reader is mentioned to be a PhD student in forensic psychology (no age is mentioned), codependency, romanticized violence, injury care, talks of marriage, future children talk, brief mention of breeding kink and sex is implied (but it’s for set up I swear), established relationship, hurt/comfort, Dex's version of a nuclear family is a bit unhealthy but he means well!! (Let me know if I miss anything!) set right after the ending of DDBA Season 2.
Word Count : 9.8k
Requested by : multiple people asking for Dex fluff!
Notes : this is my attempt to write a domestic (yet still obsessive) Dex while not being too ooc, inspired by the song Bloom by the Paper Kites. Also, should I start a Dex taglist? Anyways, Enjoy!
You had not meant to start talking about employment while you were wiping blood off Benjamin Poindexter on your bed.
It just slipped out of you, somewhere between the towel going pink under your fingers and the smell of peroxide rising through the warm, lived-in air of your studio apartment.
You and Dex shared that space in New York, which sounded more pathetic than it felt. It wasn’t luxurious. It wasn’t really the kind of place people imagined when they said they wanted to build a life with their love of their life. There was no separate bedroom, no separate dining room, no hallway to put your coats in. The kitchen was barely its own room, more of a stubborn little strip of counter and cabinets pretending to be separate from the rest of the apartment, and the bed sat close enough to a cabinet that you had once knocked a stack of your research books onto the mattress by accident and Dex had caught two before they hit your knees.
But it was yours, and that made a difference.
Dex didn’t really need much. That was one of the first things you had learned about him, and one of the saddest.
He owned what he could carry, what he could hide, what he could use: clothes, weapons, toothbrush, a plain black jacket that had seen through more death than most people. He hadn’t moved into your life so much as folded himself carefully into the empty spaces of it, as if he was still waiting to be told he had taken up too much room.
You had filled the rest. Your desk sat in the corner under the window, always drowning in highlighters, case studies, printed articles, and half-dead pens. Your forensic psychology textbooks were stacked wherever they would fit. There was a mug full of rulers and pencils beside your laptop, a corkboard with notes and deadlines and a photobooth strip of the two of you in Coney Island that Dex pretended not to care about but always noticed when it tilted crooked.
Of course he cared. It was your first date.
And though he didn’t tell you, he had made a copy of it and put it under his suit when he went out, right over his heart. It was a reminder that you wanted him home.
But this space was enough. It was more than enough, somehow.
There was still room to dance in the kitchen if you were careful. Last Saturday, barefoot and half-asleep, with the radio turned on, you had twirled yourself into his arms to Tina’s Proud Mary. Dex had just stood there like he had no idea what to do until you took his hands and put them on your waist. There was still room for him to lift you onto the counter when you kissed him too sweetly for too long. There was still room for dinner eaten on a small table with two folding chairs, there was still room for your laundry tangled together in one basket, for his shoes beside yours by the door.
There was still room, somehow, for Dex to crowd you back against the wall, hands firm on your hips, mouth hot against your throat while you laughed under your breath and told him the neighbors were going get tired of hearing how well he fucked you.
Room for him to murmur filthy and wrecked things, that he should “throw your pills away,” that he was going to “knock you up, huh? Want me to put a baby in you?”
You’d pull back with a wicked smile, nails hooked in his shirt, and you’d whisper, “That is not the threat you think it is, baby.”
You chalked it up to your boyfriend being a kinky little shit. You should have paid more attention to the way his eyes went black, the way his grip tightened on your skin. When he kissed you again, it was with the devoted certainty of a man who had just realized his most unhinged fantasy was not his alone.
Still, even in this small fantasy, there was still room to pretend, on the good nights, that you were normal.
Tonight was not one of the good nights.
Dex had come home after a day across the Supreme Court building with blood dried dark along his cheekbone, though you suspected none of it was his.
Even if it was, you knew he wasn’t hurt at all, because Dex didn’t stagger or slump. He didn’t come through the door gasping or cursing or asking for help. He entered the apartment with rigid control in his body, like every step had been measured in advance. He came in like arriving home had been a decision, not an escape. Like whatever had happened in this room, with you, was sacred compared to the rest of the world.
He came home like he had not been part of the makeshift siege at court.
Like he had not shot the Mayor’s aide.
Like the whole city had not been tearing itself apart on the news for hours while you sat on the bed with your phone in your hand, refreshing headlines you didn’t want to read and listening for footsteps in the hallway.
When he looked at you, his pupils tracked your face. Before he let you touch him, before he let you ask questions, before he decided whether his own body was allowed to matter, his eyes went over you like a security sweep to make sure you were safe.
Then they landed on your arm and saw a bruise.
It was nothing, really. You had caught yourself badly against the fire escape earlier when you’d climbed out for air because the apartment had felt too small with sirens in the distance and Dex not answering his phone. It was a mean little scar, blue and purple, but shallow enough not to hurt you permanently. It was annoying, more than anything. You had almost forgotten about it.
But Dex looked at it like it was evidence.
So now you were sitting beside him on the bed with a towel, a bottle of peroxide, cotton pads, and the sad frozen bag of peas you had pulled from the freezer because neither of you owned a real ice pack. You were trying to clean blood from his face. He was trying to ice your bruise.
It would have been funny if it did not make you want to cry.
“Give me your arm,” he said.
“There’s literally blood on you,” you sighed.
“Not mine,” he said dismissively, confirming your suspicions, “give me your arm.”
“Benjamin.”
His hazel eyes flicked up, mostly because you only called him that when you were annoyed at him.
You stared at each other for one stubborn second, but he didn’t seem like he was going to let up.
Then you sighed and gave him your arm.
He took it carefully, his fingers gentle around your wrist despite the split skin across his knuckles. He pressed the frozen peas to the bruise like he was handling precious and breakable gemstones, his mouth set in a hard line, his focus absolute.
That was the thing about loving Dex: it wasn’t sensible. It had never been sensible.
You’d always had a practical head on your shoulders. You were getting your third degree in forensic psychology because you liked patterns, motive, broken systems, and the strange little hinges inside people that made them choose one door instead of another. You were both a student and a research assistant at the university, which sounded better on paper than it felt in your bank account. You were technically employed, technically building experience, technically lucky to have the position at all. In reality, you were paid in a way that felt insulting once, tuition costs, books, and subway fare had finished carving you hollow.
Still, you were smart. Academically, you understood obsession. You had annotated articles on attachment trauma, violent conditioning, hypervigilance, and maladaptive devotion. You had spent whole nights highlighting phrases that described people like Dex in clinical and sterile language.
You knew the warning signs and studied the red flags. You knew the vocabulary you were supposed to use. You knew what you were supposed to do when someone like Bullseye looked at you like you were the last fixed point in the universe: run.
But when Dex saved your life during an Anti-Vigilante Task Force raid on the lab you were visiting, all that practical knowledge had become extremely inconvenient.
It had been chaos: glass breaking, alarm screaming. Your supervisor shouted for everyone to get down. The AVTF had come in hard, looking for records, samples, names, anything connected to vigilante research and enhanced activity. You had hidden beneath a workstation with one hand clamped over your mouth and your heartbeat so loud you thought it might give you away.
Then Dex had arrived.
He had been hunting that day. You later found out because he told you.
He had moved through your lab with a purpose, turning the room itself into a weapon. A glass beaker found its way into a man’s throat. He had thrown a ruler with such perfect force, it split skin and cartilage. A metal clipboard managed to dislocate a man’s jaw, even through the helmet. Pens, scalpels, broken glass, a heavy ceramic mug from your professor’s desk were all used. Ordinary things became fatal in his hands, as if the universe had been waiting for him to point at something and decide what it was for.
He killed twelve men with office supplies and lab equipment, and then he crouched in front of you, breathing hard, blood on his cheek, and asked you if you were okay.
You should have been horrified. You were horrified.
Part of you had been shaking with terror. Another part, the part you did like to examine too closely, had understood with awful clarity that some monsters were safer when they were loved than when they were not.
You should have run from him.
Instead, you had fallen in love.
Worse, he had fallen, too.
The love that grew between the two of you wasn't sweet, nor safe. Not in the way people with normal jobs and normal apartments and normal dinner plans fell in love. Dex loved wholly. He loved like if he took his eyes off you, the world would immediately try to take you from him. He loved like affection and violence had gotten tangled in him so early that he no longer knew how to separate protection from possession.
And you, for whatever reason, loved him right back.
You loved him in the studio apartment with the too-small kitchen and the desk in the corner. You loved him when he stood behind you while you brushed your teeth, chin resting against your shoulder, silent and half-asleep and watchful even then. You loved him when he checked the locks twice before bed. You loved him when he pretended not to care about your old Greek and Roman mythology books and then remembered every story you had ever told him. You loved him when he came home with blood under his nails, but looked at your scraped arm like the city owed him an explanation.
“Hold still,” he said, pressing the frozen peas more carefully against your skin.
You stared at him, at the slight bruise under his jaw and the split knuckles he was ignoring because your shallow scrape had somehow hurt him more.
“I should get a job,” you said, almost offhandedly.
His hand stopped.
You hadn’t meant for it to come out like that: flat and sudden. Not while he was sitting on your shared bed after a long day. But there it was anyway sitting between you and the ruined silence of the apartment.
Dex looked up slowly. “You have a job.”
“I have half a job.” You laughed without much humor. “I have a professor who thinks payment is optional because experience is apparently a currency. Because PhD students clearly don’t need to eat, right?”
He huffed. A few months ago, he did offer to dispose of your professor and you just waved him off, saying the person who would take his job would be worse. He offered to dispose of him, too, but stopped offering half-measured solutions when you kissed his forehead and said the department would probably just shut down because they can’t afford two murders. “But you’re in school,” he said.
“So?” You shrugged, “Lots of people are in school and have extra jobs.”
“You babysit Mrs. Smithers’ cat,” he frowned.
You snorted before you could stop yourself. “She pays us in lasagnas.”
“She makes good lasagna,” he insisted.
“That is not an income stream, Dex.”
“No,” he shook his head, knowing how hard you actually worked for your spot in the institution. “But you’re always busy anyway. I can take care of you”
“You’re wanted, baby,” you reminded him.
That hurt.
Dex’s eyes barely changed, but you knew him too well now. You saw the tiny shift in his eyes. His fingers adjusted around your wrist. He looked down at your arm again, focusing too intently on the ice pack, as if his obsession to keep you safe could be used to cover a wound in the conversation.
“I can provide,” he said.
You sighed immediately, because of course he would say it like that. Like a vow, like a reflex, like a wound of his own.
“I know.”
“I pay rent,” he reminded you, though he said it like it was a responsibility. He didn’t use it against you; it was just a fact.
“I know.”
“I pay groceries,” he said.
“Yes, Dex,” you huffed, “I know.”
His teeth clenched, more disappointed in himself than at you. “Then what?”
You looked around the apartment because it was easier than looking at him.
Yes, Dex paid rent. Dex bought groceries. Dex came home with cash sometimes, folded tight and tucked away in envelopes. He made sure there was good coffee in the cabinet because you hated your mornings without it. He bought the brand of cereal you liked and pretended it was because it had been on sale. He fixed the loose leg on your desk chair. He remembered bills before you did.
He provided, but it was not stable.
Dex didn’t clock into shifts. Dex didn’t have a payroll department, a predictable deposit, a pension, or a neat little tax form with an employer’s name printed at the top. His work came in fragments and dangerous calls from powerful people who knew what he could do.
Odd jobs, if you wanted to be generous. Assassination, if you wanted to be honest.
He did it because he was good at it.
But mostly, lately, he did it because of you.
Because rent was due. Because the fridge needed filling. Because your textbooks cost you too much. Because he liked watching you eat takeout on the bed with your legs folded beneath you, he liked seeing you safe and warm and full in his room. Because every dollar he brought home became proof that he could keep you satisfied, that he could build a life, that he could be more than the worst thing he knew how to do.
And that terrified you almost as much as it touched you, because there was no stability in that kind of work.
Sometimes, Dex wished he had known you when he was still with the FBI.
Before prison. Before Fisk. Before his face was plastered on the news. Before every job application in the world became a joke. He imagined it sometimes in a way that felt masochistic.
He imagined coming home to you in a suit and taking you to dinner with a paycheck that had his name on it. He imagined you flowers, buying you pretty things and whatever else you asked for.
He could have been a man for you. As outdated as he knew that sounded, he still wished he could be that man again.
“It’s not about whether you do,” you said carefully. “It’s just that… it’s not steady.”
His teeth tightened further.
“I’m not insulting you,” you reassured.
“You think I can’t take care of you.”
“No.” You leaned closer, your voice softening the impact. “I think you take care of me so much that you forget I should be allowed to take care of you, too.”
He didn’t answer.
Outside, a siren wailed below, then faded into traffic and distance. The studio felt very small around you, too warm and intimate.
Dex looked down at your arm again and pressed the melting bag of peas more gently against your skin.
“I’ll find something steady,” he said.
Your heart clenched. “Dex.”
“I will,” he promised.
“Where?”
His eyes lifted to yours. You tried to smile, but it came out tired and fond and sad all the same. “You shot Buck Cashman in front of half the city. I’m not saying that like I’m mad. I’m saying maybe LinkedIn is not going to work out this month.”
“I’ll find something,” he said.
It came out too quickly, too flatly, like he was sealing a wound before you could see how deep it went.
You looked at him where he sat on the edge of the bed, one knee pressed against yours, the frozen bag of peas melting slowly in his hand. You saw the bruise smudged high beneath his cheekbone, the split in his lower lip that he kept worrying with his tongue like he had forgotten it was there. He looked awful. Beautiful, too. The world had tried, again and again, to make him unlovable, and your stupid heart had taken one look at him and said, mine.
“What, a desk job?” you asked.
Dex gave you a look.
He wasn’t offended exactly. More like you had asked him to picture himself, in his Bullseye suit that you loved so much, sitting under fluorescent lights, wearing a lanyard, filling out forms, and smiling politely at coworkers named Brad from HR.
The idea was so absurd that, despite everything, your mouth twitched upward.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” you said, leaning in a little. “Did I insult your very promising administrative career?”
He frowned unwillingly, and for a second you hated yourself for accidentally being a little too mean.
Still, you couldn’t help yourself. You leaned closer and kissed the scar near his cheekbone so gently it was barely anything at all. Dex closed his eyes for half a second. When you pulled back, he still kept his eyes closed for one breath longer.
“Baby,” you whispered, voice gentler now, nearly breaking with fondness, “you cannot put ‘excellent with projectiles’ on a résumé.”
His eyes opened and found you immediately. “I could.”
You shook your head, “You really, really shouldn’t.”
“I have skills.” He pouted. It was cute.
“You have criminal charges.”
“Transferable skills,” he said, with such dry seriousness that you chuckled before you could stop yourself.
His posture changed, like he always did when you laughed. Not dramatically, though. He didn’t transform all at once. He softened by millimeters, as if your happiness had reached into some fortified part of him and loosened one bolt at a time. The hard line of his shoulders eased. His teeth unclenched. His thumb, which had been pressing the peas too carefully to your bruise, shifted a little.
For a moment, he looked less like a weapon that was left loaded in your apartment and more like a man who had come home to you because there was nowhere else in the world he could bear to be, because he was yours. Because he wanted so badly to be good for you that it almost broke your heart.
He adjusted the ice pack again. “You shouldn’t have to worry about money.”
“We live in New York, Dex.” You tried to sound light but it just came out tired. “Worrying about money is basically a civic duty.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” he said again.
He didn’t say it like a boyfriend trying to be useful. He said it like a soldier stating a mission objective. Like he had identified the enemy— rent, groceries, tuition, your professor underpaying you, the whole grinding machine of the city— and had decided that he would kill it if he could. “Not you,” he added, quieter.
And Dex didn’t feel this way for you because he had learned to be a sympathetic person. He wasn’t.
He didn’t suddenly feel tender toward the whole world because he learned how to love. He didn’t look at strangers and imagine their mothers. He didn’t hesitate before hurting people who had put themselves on the wrong side of his line. He could kill a room full of people and sleep like a baby afterward. He didn’t ask himself if the Anti-Vigilante Task Force agents had families who were waiting for them. Their blood did not weigh on his conscience in any meaningful way.
He hasn’t learned to be secretly good and noble under all the damage in some easy, redeemable way. He was only tender with you, and even that was not because you were an exception to his nature.
It was because somewhere along the way, Dex had thought of you and him as the same person.
You weren’t some separate innocent woman he loved from afar. You were not a moral compass he worshipped because you made him better. You were his life. His home.
Your body was his body outside his body. Your exhaustion was his exhaustion. Your money was his money, and his money was yours, not because he felt entitled to it, but because the two of you had stopped existing as separate organisms somewhere around the first month he slept in your bed and woke up with your hand on his chest. You were one system now. One thing. One fused unit pretending to be two people for legal convenience.
So watching you work long hours in a lecture hall that barely paid felt like self-harm. That was the clearest way his mind could understand it. Like the two of you shared one nervous system, and every hour you worked yourself past exhaustion was pain traveling down the same wire until it reached him, too.
“Come on, Dex,” you frowned. “You think I want you running yourself into the ground because you decided you have to pay every bill?”
His eyes lifted to yours, and all you saw was terrible sincerity. It was desperate enough to frighten you because it didn’t know how to ask for love without offering blood in return.
“I should take care of you,” he said.
Not I want to. Not I’d like to. Not even let me.
I should.
You swallowed. “Dex…”
“I should.” His voice roughened, and it was absolute, like he had said this to himself before. Like maybe he had been saying it for months, in his head, every time he bought groceries, every time he counted cash, every time he watched you fall asleep over your notes with your cheek pressed to an open textbook. “You shouldn’t have to think about it. Rent, food, school, any of it. You should just—” He stopped, eyes darting away. “You should just sit there and be pretty.”
That ruined you a little.
There were things you could have said: Things about partnership, equality, how love was not supposed to turn into duty, how his need to provide came from some wounded place in him that still believed usefulness was the same as worth. You knew those things. You believed them, mostly.
But then he looked at you like taking care of you wasn’t a burden but a privilege. Like the idea of failing at it scared him more than the city hunting him. Like every terrible thing he had ever been made into could be balanced, somehow, if he could use it to keep you warm, fed, safe, untouched by the worst parts of the world.
He sat there, bruised and exhausted, dried blood at his temple, your scraped arm cradled in one hand as if it mattered more than every wound on his own body.
So you kissed him.
You didn’t mean to make it deep. You meant it to be reassurance, just a little press of your mouth to his, a way of telling him you were not leaving, not angry, not disappointed in how his love manifested even when it frightened you.
But Dex never received you halfway.
He leaned in, immediate and helpless, his free hamd coming to your waist with that familiar, possessive spread of his fingers. It was not rough, because he was never rough with you unless you asked him to be. But it was intense, as if the second your lips touched his, his body decided the only thing that made sense was pulling you closer.
You kissed him until the frozen peas slipped slightly against your arm and neither of you cared. Until his muscles relaxed under yours. Until he made a small sound in the back of his throat that made you hum, pleased with yourself.
When you pulled away, his eyes stayed on your lips, looking at your mouth like it had betrayed him by leaving.
You brushed your thumb over his chin. “You cannot just decide to provide by sheer force of will.”
Dex blinked, still dazed enough from the kiss that it took him half a second to find the conversation again.
Then his eyes sharpened in that almost boyish, almost hopeful way. “What if I got work?”
You exhaled through your nose. “Again. Where?”
His thumb moved once against your waist in small strokes that were barely there.
“I heard that the CIA director is looking for someone to take over a contract,” he said.
You blinked.
It sounded clean on the surface and filthy underneath.
He said them carefully, like he was testing whether they could pass as normal if he used the right tone.
“You mean black ops,” you said blankly.
“I mean work.”
“Benjamin,” you tilted your head.
“It’s steady enough.” His eyes did not leave yours.
“That is not the same as safe.”
His eyes looked like guilt passing quickly through the devotion. “I can handle that.”
“I know you can.” You touched his cheek again, achingly gentle. “That’s what scares me.”
He looked at your face, taking inventory of every emotion there. His hand tightened at your waist.
“I’d come home,” he said.
Your heart ached. “You can’t promise that.”
“I’d make it true.”
“That’s not how promises work.”
“It is for me.”
And there he was. Your Dex. Your impossible, obsessive man, sitting in your too-small studio with blood on his face, telling you with complete sincerity that he could bend fate into obedience if the reward was coming home to you.
You wanted to argue, but he cut you off before you could even finish forming thoughts.
“If I got a job,” he said carefully, “I could buy you a ring.”
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
For a second, you forgot how to breathe.
He had said it so quietly, so carefully, like the word itself was fragile. Like if he had manifested it into the room too hard, it might shatter before you could touch it.
A ring.
Dex watched you like he was waiting to see if he had ruined everything.
He didn’t look casual. He was never casual about you. He didn’t toss out precious things like the future just to see if they landed. He offered them like they had been a piece of his flesh cut out of him.
And you realized, in that second, that this had not been a stray thought.
Dex hadn’t just imagined it. Dex had been living with it.
You could see it now, in the way he held himself in the way his fingers had tightened just slightly at your waist, in the way his eyes kept flicking down to your mouth like he wanted to kiss the answer out of you and was forcing himself not to.
He had carried this around. Maybe for weeks. Maybe for months.
Maybe he had been thinking about marrying you while listening to your rant about your professor. He had been thinking about it while fixing the wobbly leg on your desk chair. He had been thinking about it while watching you laugh at Mrs. Smithers’ cat through the cracked door.
Maybe he had been thinking about it while buying groceries. Maybe he even stood in the pasta aisle with blood still under his sleeves, picking the brand you liked better because you once said the cheaper one tasted “dusty.”
“Mm,” you managed.
It was barely a sound. Your throat had gone tight. You were trying very hard not to break apart, trying not to let the whole sweetness of it take you down completely, but your hand was already lifting to his face. Your thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, careful of the split in his lip.
“You sure you wanna marry me?” you asked.
Dex looked genuinely offended. “Yes.”
It came so fast you almost laughed. You did, a little, but it cracked around the edges. “Really?”
His brow furrowed, as if the question itself made no sense. “Yes.”
“You’ve thought about it?”
Dex stared at you, and the answer was so obvious then.
He had probably thought about it too much. Dex didn’t daydream. He planned. He mapped. He calculated. Even his fantasies came with exit routes and contingency plans.
“Okay,” you whispered. “What would that life even look like?”
You saw this glint in his eyes, the way they widened by a fraction. You had asked the one question he had been dying to answer.
His hand stayed at your waist. His thumb moved once, almost unconsciously, a small stroking motion through the fabric of your shirt.
“I’d get us a house,” he said.
Your heart gave a helpless little kick.
His gaze drifted past you, not away in dismissal, but as if the apartment disappeared from his eyes.
“Not in the city,” he said. “Close enough if you still wanted it, for work or whatever you wanted, not right in it. Not sirens under the window all night, not this building where you can hear every footstep in the hall and know which ones don’t belong.”
His thumb moved once against your waist, like even with his head in the clouds he needed one hand on you to make sure the dream had a center.
“We’d look at the suburbs,” he continued. “I’d want roads I could learn. I want neighbors so you can bake them pie, but I don’t want them too close. We need a neighborhood with space between houses. We need streetlights that work. A sidewalk, maybe, where you could walk in the morning if you wanted and I wouldn’t spend the whole time looking over your shoulder.”
You stayed quiet.
You didn’t want to interrupt him. There was something too precious about the way he was speaking, like he had cracked open a safe inside himself and all these impossibly domestic things were spilling out.
“It would have a yard,” he said, smaller now. “Not huge. We don’t need huge, but we need enough. We would need a fence. A good one. Tall, but not ugly. I’d make sure it looked nice. You’d care about that.”
Your throat tightened.
“I’d make sure I have good sightlines in there,” he continued, “no blind spots.”
There he is.
“And I’d plant flowers,” he added.
You blinked. Dex glanced at you, then looked down again as if the admission embarrassed him more than the blood on his face.
“You like flowers. The wild-looking ones. The ones outside delis in buckets, or growing through fences. You slow down when you see them.” His mouth twitched faintly, affectionate. “You pretend you don’t, but you do.”
He… noticed?
“I’d plant those,” he said. “I don’t know anything about gardening, but I could learn.”
He kept going before you could answer
“There’d be a porch, or a back deck. I’d put a chair there for you.” A little warmth moved through his eyes, as if imagining it. “You’d probably bring a blanket out even if it wasn’t cold.”
You smiled, and it seemed to give him more courage.
“And you’d have an office,” he said. “A real one, not a desk shoved into a corner with your papers stacked on the floor.”
Your eyes stung.
“Built-in shelves if we could, for your research books,” he continued. “Your fiction books, all of them. You wouldn’t have to pile them on the windowsill or keep the heavy ones under the desk. Your desk would face a window, but no one should be able to see into it from the street.”
You let out the smallest laugh, but he kept drifting deeper now.
“There’d be a couch in there,” he said. “So I could sit with you while you worked. I’d be quiet.”
The confession was so completely him that something inside you melted. He said it without shame, without trying to make it sound less obsessive than it was. Of course he would watch you. Of course he had already imagined sitting in a room built for your mind, staring at you while you read and wrote and thought, content just to be near the machinery of you.
“I like when you’re focused,” he murmured. “You make that face.”
You did not ask what face. You wanted him to keep talking.
“The kitchen would be big,” he said next, and there was certainty in that, like he had stood in it a thousand times. “Big enough for that island you like.”
Your mouth parted.
“We’d have one with those ugly pendant lights,” he added, with the resigned tone of a man making a grave sacrifice.
You smiled fully now. “They’re not ugly,” was all you could manage under your breath.
He heard it and very quickly added, “They are. But you like them, so we’d have it.”
That nearly did you in.
“There’d be storage,” he said. “Pans would be in the cabinets, not in the oven. I’d build you a spice drawer and I’ll organise them.”
You pressed your lips together, smiling harder.
“I’d make coffee before you woke up,” he continued. “Yours first. I’d make breakfast and I’d make more than eggs. Pancakes, maybe. You like pancakes when you’re sad.”
Your smile trembled.
“I’d make dinners, too,” he said. “You could sit at the counter and read to me while I cooked.” He looked almost shy at that. “Or talk. I don’t care. I just like your voice.”
The room felt too small for him then. Too small for the size of what he wanted.
“And a dining table,” he said, his thumb stilled against you. “With more than two chairs.”
He swallowed once and kept going.
“The bathroom would have that shower,” he said. “Like the hotel you wouldn’t stop talking about.”
You almost laughed. “A rain shower?” You asked
“Yes,” he said seriously. “With a glass door, a bench, and heated floors, because you hate cold tile.”
His eyes flicked to your face.
“I’d spoil you,” he said, like a vow. His eyesight lowered to your hand, then back to your face.
You couldn’t speak, but he went on anyway, because now that he had started, the dream seemed to pull him forward by the heart.
“There’d be security,” he said. Of course there would be. But from Dex, even that sounded like love.
“I’ll get good locks with reinforced doors. I’d install cameras.” he said immediately, almost gently. “I’ll get motion lights and window sensors.”
He breathed out slowly.
“You wouldn’t have to check anything,” he said. “I’d do it.”
What he was saying was wouldn’t have to listen at night, or wonder, or brace, or be scared just because the world was dangerous. Dex would take the ritual of fear and make it his. He would check the doors, the windows, the shadows, so you could go upstairs and sleep.
“I’d check the locks before bed,” he said. “You could just go up and get in bed. Read or sleep with the light on if you want. I’d turn it off.”
He said it with such certainty that tears gathered before you could stop them.
He didn’t notice yet. He had gone too far into the house.
“There’d be a gun cabinet,” he continued, practical now. “Locked, of course, and separate from ammunition. I’ll get biometric locks and a backup key hidden somewhere only we knew.”
His focus sharpened slightly as he pictured it.
“And a weapons cabinet too, with knives, anything tactical, anything I wouldn’t want left out. It would be hidden or built into the wall somewhere no one would look. Not near the kitchen. Not near the bedrooms.” He said it like he had already rejected three possible locations. “Everything would be secured,” he continued. “No exceptions. Nothing lying around.”
Then, still looking into that future house, still seeing the walls and the locks and the rooms and all the dangerous love he wanted to put inside them, he added, almost absently, “at least until the kids are old enough.”
Oh.
“The kids?” you asked.
Dex blinked. For a second, he looked almost confused that you had stopped him there, like the kids had been so naturally integrated into the architecture of his fantasy that he had forgotten you were only just now seeing the floor plan. In his head, apparently, they already existed.
“Yes,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Kids.”
He said it as if this were already settled. As if the universe had filed the paperwork. As if somewhere, in some future suburb with a fenced yard, your children were already waiting for him to come home.
“You just assumed?” you asked, your voice dazed.
Dex’s brows pulled together like he was only now realizing assumption was supposed to be a problem.
Then his eyes searched yours, suddenly cautious.
“I—” He paused, his fingers tightening slightly at your waist. “I assumed you’d want them,” he finished. “I assumed I’d give you anything you wanted. And I assumed…” His eyes dropped, then lifted again. “I assumed if there was any way the world let me have you like that, I’d take it.”
There it was.
Dex didn’t want a family because he had always dreamed of domestic happiness. He wanted it like conquest. He wanted children because they would be yours, because they would be his, because they would be the physical evidence of a future he had no right to expect. Benjamin Poindexter didn’t want in half measures. He consumed possibility whole. If he loved you, he loved the future of you and the shape of you extended forward. The house that held you. The children that might come from you.
That was deranged. That wasn’t normal. But to you, that was also, for reasons you could not explain without sounding like you needed professional intervention, romantic.
Dex watched your mouth part. “I’d love them,” he said. “I would. I know I would. Because they’d be yours.”
There it was, not the socially acceptable version. Not I love children or I always wanted a family. Dex didn’t know how to make love sound normal when it came from him.
He would love them because they would carry your eyes, maybe, or your mouth, or your stubbornness. Because he would look at them and see you continued into another body.
“They’d be mine too,” he added, like that part was harder for him to trust. “And maybe that part could be good because it came through you.”
Dex looked down at his hands that had done terrible things and could still hold you like it was made of light.
So you only sat there letting him talk, letting him show you the things he had apparently been thinking around for months.
“Have you thought about names?” you asked.
Dex nodded slightly.
Your lips parted.
“You have,” you whispered.
He looked almost offended again, but not at you this time. At the idea that he could have built this whole imaginary house, this whole impossible future, and not named the children already running through it. “Of course I have.”
“Tell me,” you said.
Dex watched you carefully. You could tell that there was still that small, frightened part of him, the part waiting for the insult, the laugh, the moment where your wonder hardened into common sense. But you just looked… patient.
“For a boy,” he said, “Jason.”
Jason.
Dex’s voice lowered. “Because you loved Jason and the Argonauts when you were little. The way everyone went after something impossible.”
You remembered telling him that, barely. It had been one of those late-night conversations with your cheek on his chest. His fingers moved through your hair as you rambled about mythology books you used to check out of the library, about heroes who were never as perfect as people wanted them to be.
Dex had listened.
“And for a girl?” you asked, already knowing he had one.
“Callie,” he said then immediately added, “Short for Calliope. Callie at school. Calliope if she liked it. Whatever you liked.”
Your eyes stung. “Callie,” you whispered.
Dex nodded. “You said she was the muse of epic poetry. You liked that she belonged to stories.”
You pressed your fingers to your mouth. He remembered that too.
“Jason and Callie,” you said with a sigh.
You realized then, that Dex had not chosen names because he liked them. He had chosen names because he thought you would.
Because even in his most private fantasies, the children were not abstract. They were not trophies. They were not little versions of him he could shape into whatever he wanted. They were pieces of you carried forward into the world, proof that some part of you could exist outside your own body and still belong to him, too.
“You like them,” he realised.
“I love them.”
His hand tightened around yours. Then, as if the names had opened a door he could no longer close, he kept going.
“Jason would have your eyes,” he said, voice distant again, head fully in the clouds now. “He’d be quiet, I think, the kind of kid who watches first. He’d notice everything.”
Your throat tightened.
“And Callie,” he said, and a faint helplessness moved through his face. “She’d be trouble.”
You laughed a little.
“She’d climb things,” he continued. “She’d argue. She’d look right at me while doing exactly what I told her not to do.”
You could see it.
Worse, you could see how much he loved it.
This imaginary little girl, stubborn and wild, already had him wrapped around her tiny, nonexistent finger.
“She’d have your mouth,” he said, almost to himself. “Your attitude.”
“My attitude?”
His eyes flicked to yours, and there was something wickedly fond in them. “Your attitude.”
He looked down at your joined hands again, thumb moving over your knuckles, and his voice changed.
“They’d need to be ready.”
For what?
But you knew what for. This part that should’ve made you want to retreat, but it only made you want to lean in more, because this was Dex’s love too. The same root, grown through darker soil.
“Ready?” you asked.
“For the world,” he clarified.
Dex’s eyes were calm now, focused and devoted. There was nothing theatrical in him, nothing performative. He was not fantasizing about violence for the sake of it. He was imagining two children made from you and him, and his first instinct was to make sure nothing could ever make them helpless.
He wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. He was in the woods with Jason and Callie when they were older and taller.
“I know what I am,” he said with finality. “I know what I’m good for.”
Your heart pinched. “Dex…”
“No,” he said, because he knew you. Because he could hear the protest forming before you even opened your mouth. “Don’t do that.”
You tilted your head.
“I know what I’m good for,” he repeated, gentler this time, but no less certain. “And if I’m good for anything, I will make sure they have every tool in their disposal to survive.”
There was no self-pity in it. He didn’t sound like a man condemning himself. He sounded like a man who had finally found a use for the worst parts of him and decided that they would serve you.
“They won’t be helpless,” he said. “Not our kids.”
Our kids.
“Jason and Callie won’t be fragile and easy to hurt. I won’t do that to them.”
His jaw tightened, and pride flickered through his face.
“They’ll be smart. They’ll be aware. They’ll know when a room feels wrong. They’ll know what a threat looks like before it reaches them.”
You listened, heart thudding.
“And they’ll be skilled,” he said.
It mattered to him. You could hear it.
Skilled.
Not broken. Not molded. Not made into little copies of him. He wanted them skilled, accurate, and alive.
“I’d start small,” he continued. “I’ll teach them hand-to-hand, teach them how to use their reflexes. I’ll teach them how to move without panicking, how to get up when they fall, how to breathe when they’re scared. Jason would overthink it at first. He’ll want every movement perfect before he tries. Callie would rush in and get mad when I made her slow down.” His mouth curved up faintly. “She’ll hate slowing down.”
You almost smiled through the ache in your chest.
“But she’ll learn,” he said. “They both will.”
His eyes darkened around the imagination.
“When they’re older, I'll teach them how to aim.”
Aim was not violence to him, not really. It was discipline. It was proof that the body could obey the mind.
“They better have their old man’s aim,” he murmured.
It should have sounded awful.
And it did, a little.
But it also sounded like him imagining a son and daughter with pieces of himself; His focus, his loyalty, his ability to lock onto a target and not shake.
“They’ll know how to throw,” he said. “How to hit what they mean to hit. I’ll get them knives, when they’re old enough. Take them to the range to shoot guns when they're older. No one fucking picks on my kids and lives to see another day.” He looked at you then, and the obsession in his face had turned holy. “I’ll make sure they understand that.”
You swallowed.
“If they find themselves in a bad situation, I’ll make sure they’re better than lucky. Lucky runs out. Lucky gets them killed. I want them trained. I want them calm. I want them to be able to look at danger and know they’re more dangerous.”
His hand tightened around yours.
“I want Jason to know how to get Callie out if something happens. I want Callie to know how to get Jason out. I want both of them to know how to get back to their mother.”
Your breath caught.
Their mother.
Dex said it as if it were the center of the whole plan.
“I’ll make sure they come home in one piece,” he said, voice rough now. “Ready for dinner. That’s the point.”
Your throat tightened.
“I’ll make damn sure they can leave this house and come back to it. I’ll make sure you’re not sitting at that kitchen table wondering if they’re safe.” His eyes dropped to your mouth, then back up. “I don’t want you afraid.”
Fuck.
The whole deranged, violent, tender fantasy had always curved back to that. Dex teaching your future children to fight, to aim, to survive, not because he wanted war in the home, but because he wanted peace for you. Because his idea of fatherhood was Jason and Callie walking through the front door with backpacks tossed on the floor, cheeks flushed, while you stood at the stove or sat at the island with your coffee and didn’t have to imagine every terrible thing that might have happened to them.
“I’d kill for them, you know this,” he said, rubbing a slow circle on your skin, “I’d burn the whole world down for them.” Dex did not look away. “But if I know they can take care of themselves, then my eyes can stay where they belong.”
His hand cupped your face fully now.
“On you.”
He said it like it was obvious. Like the whole future had a single center of gravity and he had been circling it the entire time, pretending he was talking about houses and kitchens and gun cabinets and kids, when really he had only ever been talking about you.
“Because all of this,” Dex whispered, “would happen because of you.”
His thumb moved beneath your eye, catching the tear before it could fall properly. He looked at you like the city and the sirens and the blood on his knuckles were temporary, like the whole world outside the window was an environment he could outlast if it meant getting you somewhere safe.
“You understand that, right?” he asked, but his voice made it sound less like a question and more like a confession he needed you to survive hearing.
Dex leaned closer, his hand cupping your cheek now, holding you with that possession that never felt casual.
“I’d make sure the kids knew that,” he said. “I’d make sure they knew anything good in me came from you.”
Your lips parted, but nothing came out.
“The warmth in the house, the fairytales they would hear before bed, the flowers they pick from the garden.” His thumb brushed slowly along your cheekbone. “They’d know that was you. That all of it was you.”
Your eyes burned.
“They’d love you,” Dex whispered. “because you’re perfect.”
“Dex…”
“And they’d love me because I’d earn it.” he said.
Oh, Benjamin.
Your heart broke a little at that.
He said it simply, like love was not something he had ever expected to be given for free if it was him.
His hand slid a little lower, thumb brushing the corner of your mouth, parting your lips.
“You wouldn’t have to learn how to shoot,” he reassured. “Because you’d have me.”
His voice dropped lower, intimate and possessive all the same.
“I’d take care of you,” he continued, “because that’s the only thing I was made wrong enough to do right.”
It should have sounded suffocating. Maybe from anyone else, it would have. But from Dex, it felt less like a cage and more like a shelter.
A small, broken laugh caught in your throat.
His mouth curved faintly, almost shy and almost wicked. “You can just sit there and be pretty, huh, baby?”
Your heart gave in completely.
He said it like a promise, like he would happily make a fortress of his own body if it meant you never had to lift a finger.
Your tears started falling quicker before you could stop them.
They started coming too quickly, gathering along your lashes and breaking loose before you could blink them back. One rolled down the side of your nose. Another slipped along your cheek toward his thumb. Suddenly you were crying in front of him over a house that didn’t exist, children who hadn’t been born, a ring he hadn’t even given you yet, and the sincerity of Benjamin fuckin’ Poindexter imagining a life precious enough for you to be loved.
Dex noticed and his whole face changed. His hand, still cupping your cheek, squeezed slightly. His eyes moved over your face, searching for the wound, the mistake, the exact word that had hurt you.
“What?” he asked, his voice wound tight. “What did I say?”
You shook your head, but that only made another tear fall.
He frowned. “I upset you.”
“No.” Your voice cracked. You hated how small it sounded. “No, Dex.”
“I did.”
“You didn’t.”
There was a panick-y edge beneath the flatness of his voice. Dex could handle blood and anger Dex could handle fear if it had a direction, if it could be aimed back at something. But your tears did something awful to him. They made him look helpless in the one way he could never tolerate: like he had caused pain he couldn’t kill.
You caught his wrist before he could pull his hand away from your face.
“Baby,” you whispered, “no.”
You pressed your cheek harder into his palm, making him understand that you were not resisting his grand plan. “These are not bad tears.”
Still, you could tell he didn’t believe you yet.
“They’re not,” you promised, laughing weakly even though your throat hurt. “You just… fuck, Dex. You just said all of that like it was real.”
His mouth parted slightly.
“You really want all of that?” You asked, though it sounded more squeaky than you’d like
Dex stared at you, looking almost offended again, as if he was wounded by the possibility that you could still doubt the size of what he wanted when he had just laid it open in front of you.
“Yes,” he said.
You breathed in shakily. “The house?”
“Yes.”
“The kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“The flowers?”
His thumb moved under your eye, wiping away another tear. “Yes.”
“Jason and Callie?”
His eyebrows relaxed immediately at the mention of the names. “Yes.”
You shut your eyes.
And for one second, because he had given you permission by wanting it so badly, you let yourself imagine it.
Dex driving with one hand on the wheel, the other reaching back at a red light because Calliope had dropped her stuffed animal and immediately made it everyone’s emergency. You could see it his eyes flicking from the mirror to the road to her little outstretched hand, his mouth set in that serious line like recovering a plush rabbit from the floorboard was a tactical operation. Callie would kick her feet in the car seat, impatient and bossy, already certain her father would retrieve anything she dropped because Dex had never once been normal about anyone he cared for needing something.
Dex in a school parking lot, terrifying every other father by accident. He’d stand there in a dark jacket and smart-ish trousers, trying to look approachable and while still planning thirteen ways to neutralize a PTA committee just in case someone tried to speak wrongly about his kids. Jason walking beside him with a too-big backpack and the solemn concentration of his father. Callie skipping ahead, fearless because her father was behind her and therefore the world hadn’t yet invented anything that could touch her.
Dex teaching Jason how to throw a ball in the backyard. His son would squinting with concentration, little shoulders tense, trying too hard because he had inherited that from you. Dex crouched in front of him, adjusting his grip, telling him to breathe. Then he’d step back, watching Jason throw too hard and too wide, and smiling anyway. He’d be proud anyway, because it was a start. He’d make his way to the knives eventually.
Dex standing behind you in the kitchen, arms around your waist, chin tucked against your shoulder while your children ran through the yard beyond the window.
He’d kiss your temple and ask for another one, and you’d say, “We’ll think about it,” because you two were a unit. You were two parts of the same whole.
You opened your eyes, and he just looked terrified of how much he wanted it.
Your hand tightened around his wrist.
“When you eventually ask me,” you said, voice shaking, “know that I’ll say yes.”
For a moment, Dex didn’t move.
He didn’t even seem to breathe.
His eyes searched yours once, twice, desperately, like he had to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
“You will?” he asked.
You smiled through the tears. “Of course.”
Joy did not sit easily on Dex, but you knew this was what it looked like.
You let out a watery little laugh, because if you did not laugh you were going to sob properly.
That seemed to bring him back to himself.
Dex leaned in and kissed your neck once, then your cheeks, then the damp place beneath your eye where a tear had slipped down.
Each kiss was careful and possessive in the best way. He wasn’t trying to stop you from crying. Instead, he wanted to claim every tear.
Dex kissed your jaw again, then tucked his face into your neck, and for a long time he just held you.
What you did not know was that the ring was already more than a fantasy to him.
What you did not know was that earlier that evening, before the Supreme Court had gone to hell, he shot Buck Cashman, before he came home, Dex had received confirmation of an advance from Mr. Charles.
He had a government contract. He had a stable job.
Dex had read the confirmation once.
Then twice.
Then, because he was Dex, he had memorized the number. The second he saw the advance, his mind had gone to you.
Rent. Groceries. Your tuition. The overdue utility bill you had tried to hide under a stack of journal articles like paper could make debt disappear. The textbooks you kept putting off buying because you said you could “probably survive with library copies,” even though he had seen the way you frowned when you said it.
And then the ring.
He’d already planned the ring.
And no, he hadn’t told you any of this yet.
Maybe he will after the first payment cleared. Maybe after the first job was done and he knew the money was steady. Maybe after he had washed the blood off well enough to convince himself he was allowed to touch something as clean as your hand.
He’d find the right jeweler, though he already had one in mind: a shop in the Upper East Side that did custom pieces. He’d get one commissioned specifically for you. Nothing too delicate, because he wanted people to notice it. Nothing too flashy, because you would wrinkle your nose and tell him he had lost his mind.
He’d get something that looked right on your hand when you reached for your coffee in the morning. A gem that would catch the kitchen light when you turned pages in your office. Something Jason might touch curiously as a child, asking if Dad gave you that, and Dex would hear you say yes from the doorway. Something Callie would one day ask to try on, and you would laugh and tell her when she could when was older. Something that said you belonged to him.
And more importantly, that he belonged to you.
For now, he said none of that.
For now, he only held you tighter on the bed, making sure you were okay.
“You’re going to be so spoiled,” he whispered against your skin.
You smiled, eyes closing, tears still drying on your face. “Am I?”
“Yes.”
“By a wanted man with frozen peas?”
That got the smallest laugh out of him.
“By your future husband,” he said.
Your heart did a helpless little flip.
Little did you know, with this contract, the future wasn’t just a fantasy to him anymore.
He just needed to ask.
—end.
-
Extra note: at this point I think everyone’s seen that clip of Wilson saying Dex should get an equally unhinged girlfriend, and I just can’t help but think of this reader getting as obsessed with his plans for the future as he is and she would not let anything stand in her way! Like she’d kill her way into it if she had to, and her being a forensic psychologist would make for interesting storytelling. (This is just a thought, I make no promises!)
Y'all.... I think we need to invest in this idea; this victor + his regular outfit PLEEAASSSEEEE hear me out HE WOULD LOOK SO GOOD
also. I think he'd look really good with an army buzz cut....or even bald but that's my Ruvik fangirl side coming out, I just love Victor so much fr fr
Yo you should def write that yandere Victor fic, you write him so well!!!!! You understand the depths of depravity this pervert would delight in (I want him to drag me down with him). I know he'd chew me up & never spit me out.
thank you sincerely anon, very appreciated, you will be remembered <3
it's very motivating to hear that somebody is interested in our writing. Victor Gideon really lets me explore my fondness for deranged characters... there's just no way he's normal about relationships, no way at all.
one of my favorite yandere types if you will are the characters who become obsessive about their s/o to an entirely inappropriate degree - wanting to learn everything about you, watching you often &etc, especially when they're shameless about it. a true version of this character doesn't abide social boundaries when expressing their "love". to me Victor is this way (as are most of the characters I've written for); my headcanon is when he falls for someone, he'll try to maintain symbiosis with them. you'll be indispensable. he's completely infatuated with you, the actual naked you, irregardless of how you relate to him, irregardless of whether or not you want to be with him. it's a visceral & disquieting form of love. the only condition is that you're never allowed to leave :)
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