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No Absolution

Summary : Mr. Charles assigns Benjamin Poindexter a new partner: a super soldier who may not be over her ex. Too bad Dex has never been good at sharing, and he’s determined to make her forget anyone ever touched her before him.

Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x Supersoldier! reader (she/her)

Warnings/tags : Slow Burn. Friends with benefits to lovers. Mostly hurt/comfort, jealous! Dex, sexual themes, sex in a church, praise/worship kink, religious imagery during sex, obsessive/possesive love, morally ambiguous reader, Bucky Barnes is mentioned to be your ex but you do not have feelings for him anymore (he doesn't physically show up in this either). graphic violence, blood and injury, Hydra trauma, mention of brainwashing and programming, PTSD/nightmares, dissociation, Hydra torture references, unhealthy coping mechanisms, reader is mentioned to be smaller, but stronger than Dex (Let me know if I miss anything!) set after the ending of DDBA Season 2.

Word Count : 20.8k

Requested by : Anons! This is a combination these requests: X X X

Notes : I think this is the longest fic I’ve ever written? Inspired by God Must Hate me by Catie Turner and Take me to Church by Hozier. Enjoy!

Keeping Benjamin Poindexter alive had never been the hard part. He had always been very good at staying alive, even when he didn’t want to be. He survived gunfire, broken bones, spinal trauma, institutional failure, and even the kind of loneliness that hollowed a man out. Survival was familiar to him. Survival had rules: Keep breathing, keep moving, find the exit.

Keeping him employed, however, was a different matter entirely. That was where Mr. Charles came in.

He didn't come to Dex with pity, which was wise. He didn't sit across from him in some cold room and talk about redemption or recovery or all the other fluffy words people used when they wanted a dangerous man to feel grateful for being tolerated. Dex had heard those words before, and they always meant the same thing: behave, be useful, don’t make us regret leaving you alive.

Charles, at least, had the decency not to pretend otherwise. He wore a plaid shirt under a vest (questionable fashion, but who was Dex to judge?), carried a leather folder, and looked at him like he wasn't a tragedy, nor a project, nor a rabid dog somebody had been foolish enough to feed. Instead, he looked at him as an asset with very specific applications.

Dex respected that, because the humiliating truth was that he needed a job.

Not a freelance gun-for-hire thing he got going on to fund his crusade against Fisk’s task force. He needed an actual, stable job. He needed money that came in regularly enough to pay rent. He needed a place with working locks, decent heating, and a refrigerator that contained more than condiments, protein bars, and eggs. He needed prescriptions filled before the bottles were empty. He needed ammunition that didn't come from old caches, stolen evidence rooms, or men who sold illegal ordnance out of storage units and thought calling him “buddy” was a good idea.

He needed structure.

Dex had spent so much of his life being pointed at things that he didn't entirely know what to do when no one was pointing. Freedom sounded good in theory, but freedom also meant waking up in a silent apartment with too many hours in the day and nowhere to put the violent itch crawling under his skin. It meant no orders, no parameters, no approved targets, no neat little box where the worst parts of him could be made useful. It meant his own mind, unattended, circling the same dark rooms until he started looking for a window to break.

Charles offered him work instead.

He said it was black ops, but clean enough. Government-adjacent, but deniable. There were forms, salaries, coded assignments, medical access, housing arrangements, travel papers, and weapons clearances. It was ugly in all the ways Dex understood, but it had a shape. It had a beginning, a middle, and, theoretically, an end.

Dex missed that.

Maybe.

He sat across from Charles in a windowless conference room. The table between them reflected the overhead lights in long white strips. There was coffee untouched near Dex’s elbow and a pen placed exactly parallel to the folder.

“So what?” Dex asked eventually, his voice flat. “I’m one of the good guys now?”

Charles chuckled. “You’re useful,” he shrugged. “Let’s start there.”

Dex stared at him for a second. Then, against his better judgment, he smiled.

It wasn't a friendly smile, but it was the closest thing to approval Charles was likely to get. There was something almost refreshing about not being lied to. At least one was asking him to hold hands with his past or apologize to a circle of strangers under fluorescent lights. Charles wanted him because Dex could do damage with precision, and after all this time, there was comfort in that kind of honesty.

After all, in Dex’s book, Charles might not be a good person, but he wasn’t a horrible one either. Unlike Wilson Fisk. Unlike Vanessa Fisk.

He knew that because he saw who was funding the mission: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.

Charles tapped the edge of the file once with two fingers. “She also bankrolls the Avengers.”

Dex’s expression didn't change.

“The new team,” Charles clarified.

“Yeah,” Dex said flatly. “I know who the New Avengers are.”

“Then you understand the nature of this operation.”

Dex looked back down at the file.

Sure, he understood enough. If Val was paying for Avengers, that meant she was funding heroism. If Charles worked for her, then Charles cannot possibly be that bad, can he?

The logic was stupidly simple, so simple a child could have made it. Dex knew that. He knew goodness didn't transfer through payroll.

He liked it anyway. He liked clean lines. He liked being told where to stand.

He looked down again before Charles could read too much on his face. The next few pages were maps, photographs, shipment records, old Hydra symbols carved into walls and stamped onto yellowing documents. Europe had been marked in red: Germany, Romania, Austria, Italy, Poland, Norway.

When he flipped through, he found photos of safehouses, labs and weapons caches. The next page had details of facilities hidden under abandoned factories and bank accounts buried beneath shell companies and dead men’s signatures. There were names in multiple languages, some with photographs attached, some already crossed out.

Hydra, apparently, was like black mold. You could burn the house down and still find it growing behind the walls.

“They’re just remnants,” Charles said. “Y’know, splinter groups who aren’t really Hydra anymore, they’re just borrowing the name and the branding. Opportunists, mostly. Scientists who kept copies of files they were meant to destroy. Brokers moving old weapons systems through private channels. Buyers interested in serum research, cryogenic technology, asset conditioning protocols, enhanced human restraints, anything that survived the collapse of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the years afterward.”

Dex turned a page.

“This would be a seven-month assignment,” Charles continued. “Possibly longer, depending on what you recover. You’ll move through Europe, locate the caches, secure the weapons, and retrieve as much intel as possible before it disappears into the black market. You’ll have safehouses, false identities, medical support, and extraction options when necessary.”

“When necessary,” Dex repeated.

Charles’s mouth twitched. “You understand the kind of work this is.”

Dex did. He understood it so well that a now-ancient part of him had already begun arranging itself around the mission, routes, and sight lines. He wasn't a spy, but he would try his hand at a language he didn't speak but could fake long enough to get through a checkpoint. He would map the distance between cover and exit in every photograph. He would process the likely angle of fire through the windows of a Croatian warehouse shown on page six.

His mind liked having something to do.

“And the priority?” Dex asked.

“Weapons first. Intel second. People third.”

“Dead or alive?”

“Alive if possible,” Charles said, adjusting his glasses.

Dex glanced up, raising an eyebrow. Charles sighed, almost imperceptibly. “If practical,” he amended.

That was better.

Dex leaned back, the chair creaking softly beneath him. He turned another page, then froze.

The photograph clipped to the next sheet wasn't of a weapons cache, a scientist, or some grey-faced man in a tactical vest.

It was you.

Dex stared for a moment longer than he meant to.

The picture looked like it had been taken without your permission from a street corner. You were wearing a winter coat, one hand tucked into your pocket, the other holding a paper coffee cup like you were just another pretty socialite in another expensive European city, not something pulled out of Hydra’s worst nightmares.

Pretty was the wrong word, Dex realised. Pretty was too soft.

You were… intense in a way Dex didn't immediately trust. Your posture was careful, your stride was disciplined. Dex knew a little of what that’s like; he had seen it in mirrors.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Charles’s eyes flicked down to the file. “Your partner.”

Dex’s smile disappeared. “No.”

“You haven’t heard the rest.”

“I don’t do partners anymore.”

“You do now.”

Disappointment moved through Dex’s eyes, but Charles didn't retreat from it. That made Dex dislike him again. Or respect him. Sometimes the two were close enough to be irritating.

“I work better alone,” Dex said.

“Uh uh. You survive alone,” Charles replied. “There’s a difference.”

For a second, he considered standing up and walking out, just to prove no one in that room could decide anything for him. He could go back to whatever came before this. Cheap rent, unclear income. Too much time. Too many thoughts. His talents were left without purpose, especially after Task Force agents were being rounded up and locked up one by one.

Dex tapped one finger against the edge of the photograph. “What is she?”

The question was rude. Charles seemed unsurprised by that, too.

But Dex knew that a man like him would not be put to a mission with some other average agent. She must be equipped to handle him in some way, and he needed to know how.

“She is a super soldier,” he said. “From the Siberian program. She might be smaller than you, but she is faster than you. Stronger than you. More durable than you.”

Dex’s knuckles flexed. Charles, annoyingly, looked amused by that. “Don’t take it personally. You're here because she’s strictly close quarters only. Her aim is dogshit. She can’t pin the tail to the donkey if it was the size of an elephant.”

Dex looked back down. The photograph changed with the information, though nothing in it moved. The pretty coat became a costume. The coffee became a cover. He knew enough of the infamous Siberian Program to know what it meant: cryo, programming, asset conditioning, and brutal compliance. You were a war crime with a pulse.

“Zemo killed them,” Dex said. Or so he’s heard.

“He missed one,” Charles said dismissively.

Dex’s eyes narrowed, but Charles just continued, “She was recovered at the end of the conflict. Barnes and Rogers found her before anyone else did. As far as our records show, Zemo believed the termination was complete.”

“And it wasn’t.”

“No.”

Dex looked at your face again. There you were, alive by accident. A cute little clerical error in the middle of a massacre.

“Is she deprogrammed?” he asked.

“Enough.”

Dex gave Charles a dry look. “She’s stable, then?”

Charles tilted his head. “Are you?”

Dex huffed a laugh, short and humorless. Fair.

Dex knew this made sense: you probably knew Hydra architecture, internal coding systems, and old asset routes. For this assignment, there was probably no one more useful, save for the Winter Soldier himself. But then again, he was too busy pretending to be a public facing hero, which meant this probably read too much like grunt work to him.

“When do I meet her?” he asked.

Charles’s eyes shifted by the smallest amount, just enough for Dex to understand that he had given the answer Charles had been waiting for.

“Tomorrow morning.”

Dex shut the folder, though he kept the photograph on top. Then, he agreed to the mission.

—

As promised, Dex met you the next day on a rain-slick air base that didn't officially exist.

You were already waiting by the plane when Charles led him across the tarmac, hands in your jacket pockets, hair tugged loose by the wind, looking entirely too calm for someone being sent across Europe to clean up an evil organisation’s leftovers.

Charles stopped between you like a middle school teacher introducing two students he already knew would become a disciplinary issue.

“Benjamin Poindexter,” Charles said. “This is your partner.”

“Dex,” he corrected.

You tilted your head. “Do you correct everyone that fast?”

“Usually faster.”

Your mouth twitched, but it wasn’t quite a smile. You gave him your name, and he recognized it from the file. You took a sip from your cup, still watching Dex over the rim. “So. You’re the knife throwing miracle worker.”

“That what he called me?”

“No,” you rolled your eyes. “That’s me being generous.”

Dex felt the corner of his mouth lift before he could stop it.

He folded his arms. “And you’re the super soldier.”

Your face stayed mild. “Allegedly.”

“Allegedly?”

“I don’t like confirming things for strange men on runways.”

“Smart.”

“I try.”

Charles glanced between you like he had already decided this was as good as civility was going to get. “You’ve both read the operational brief.”

“Yes,” you said.

Dex said nothing when Charles looked at him.

Dex eventually said, “Enough.” He said it with a smile a little too charming for your peace of mind.

You scoffed and Dex’s gaze dipped over you once, interested. You noticed, because you were trained to notice changes in breathing, pupil dilation, heart rate, weight distribution. Instead of calling him on it, you gave him your sweetest, most harmless smile.

Dex stared at it like he wanted to peel it off you with a knife just to see what was underneath.

Charles cleared his throat and handed you both slim black folders. The paper inside was minimal, most of the real information tucked away behind encrypted devices and dead drops. You flipped yours open anyway, mostly to give your hands something to do.

“The two of you will have limited external support,” Charles continued. “You’ll have a plethora of assumed identities. You’ll share safehouses when necessary.”

Dex said, “When necessary?”

“Frequently,” Charles said.

You looked up. Dex looked at you.“I don’t snore,” you said.

Dex’s eyes narrowed. “Congratulations.”

“I do steal blankets.”

Charles pinched the bridge of his nose. “Any objections before departure?”

Dex opened his mouth. You interrupted before he could say something predictably unpleasant. “Nope. Bucky talked me into it, so technically if this goes badly, we can blame him.”

Charles looked amused; Dex’s flicked to you.

You kept looking at the file, not because you missed the reaction, but because you didn't entirely want to deal with it yet.

“Barnes?” Dex asked. His voice had not changed much. The word came out casual, almost indifferent, but his eyes widened, if only a little

You lifted your head. “Yes.”

“As in James Barnes.”

“Do you know another famous Buckys?”

“No.”

“Then yes.”

Dex studied you.

You had expected curiosity. Most people got curious about Bucky. Some got reverent, others got afraid. Some got that awful pitying look, that suggested they thought they knew Hydra to imagine they understood anything at all. Dex did none of that.

“What did he talk you into?” he asked.

You shrugged, tucking the folder beneath your arm. “Working. Y’know. Doing something useful.”

Charles didn't interrupt. Coward.

You glanced toward the aircraft, watching two ground crew members load another case into the hold. “He said I couldn’t just sit around waiting for someone to piss me off.”

Dex’s mouth twitched.

“What did Barnes say?” Charles asked, tilting his head.

You sighed, and without meaning to, your voice shifted into an imitation of Bucky’s low, exasperated drawl. “‘You can’t keep breaking people’s bones and making me explain to the cops why they shouldn’t press charges.’”

Dex stared at you.

You smiled faintly, fond despite yourself. “He had a point. Apparently regular civilians get upset when you dislocate someone’s shoulder in a grocery store parking lot.”

“What did they do?” Dex asked.

“They touched me.”

Dex only shrugged, as if it was a reasonable thing to do.

“Well,” Charles said, producing a small bag of peanuts from his coat pocket, “try not to kill each other before Germany.”

You looked at Dex. He looked back at you. Then your mouth curved up, entirely too pleased. “Don’t worry,” you said. “I have a feeling we’re going to be just fine.”

—

The first few missions were okay.

Dex had expected friction. He had expected you to get in his way, or slow him down, or make some sentimental speech about doing things cleanly because he’d expected a partner with principles. Instead, you were efficient. You were talkative, but quiet when you needed to be. You were quick in a way that made him understand, very quickly, that Charles had not been exaggerating about the super soldier thing.

Germany was a weapons ledger hidden behind a false wall in a private gallery. You smiled at the owner’s security like you were there to admire post-war sculpture, then put one guard through a locked door with your shoulder when the alarms tripped. Dex handled the cameras and anyone who would eventually get to you. By the time the police arrived, both of you were already three streets away, walking under one umbrella you had stolen from the cloakroom and laughing at how untrained these guys were.

Austria was colder. You had gotten intel of a Hydra courier in a ski town, three dead drops, one safe full of expired serum that didn't do anything except maybe get you high. Dex put a knife through a man’s hand before he could reach the panic button, and you raised a brow at him like you were impressed. Later, in the car, you told him his aim was annoyingly theatrical.

Taking it as a compliment, he told you that your melee skills were not too bad yourself. You smiled at the window and tried your hardest not to deflect it.

By the time you reached Romania, the process had become familiar. You took the left side of a room without being told. Dex took the high angle. You never walked directly in front of his line of fire. He never asked you to move. In safehouses, you cleaned weapons at the kitchen table while he checked exits and pretended he wasn't watching the way your hands worked. You drank terrible coffee. He made comments about it. You ignored him and made him a cup anyway.

You didn't talk much during jobs, but afterward, little pieces of you slipped out.

Unfortunately, a lot of them had Bucky fucking Barnes attached.

“Bucky hated safehouses like this,” you said once, standing in the doorway of a flat in Bucharest with peeling wallpaper and a radiator that knocked all night. “Said they all smelled like wet concrete and black mold.”

Dex looked around. “He sounds poetic.”

“He was mostly complaining.”

Another time outside Salzburg, you watched Dex hotwire a silver sedan and said, “Bucky used to do that one-handed.”

Dex didn't look up. “Congratulations to Bucky.”

You laughed like he had meant to be funny. He had not.

It was annoying, how he kept happening.

It wasn't a constant and definitely not enough for him to call it a problem without sounding insane. It was just often enough that Barnes became a third person in the room even though he had never met the man before, he found him irritating because he was apparently very good at everything.

Bucky had warned you about old Hydra storage locks. Bucky had taught you how to sleep sitting up without waking with a crick in your neck. Bucky had said Romanian winters were worse than Russian ones because at least Russia was honest about trying to kill you. Bucky had this dry little laugh when Steve and Sam got sentimental. Bucky, Bucky, Bucky.

Dex told himself he didn't care. It was obviously a lie, but it was a convenient one.

He didn't care that your voice changed around the name. He didn't care that you said it easily, like muscle memory. He didn't care that Barnes had known you before this, before Charles, before rain-slick bases and seven-month assignments and Dex learning that you hummed under your breath when you were stitching wounds.

He definitely didn't care that Barnes was the reason that you were here, with Bullseye, instead of the picture perfect ex-congressman, now leader of the most high profile superhero team in the world. Emphasis on hero.

The fourth mission was in Hungary, in an old textile factory outside Budapest that had been turned into a weapons relay point by boys too young to remember Hydra properly and too stupid to fear it enough. It went clean until it didn't. Someone burned the files before you could get to them. Dex shot out the sprinklers. You ripped the office door off its hinges. Together, you dragged what you could from the smoke and left six men zip-tied in the loading bay for Charles’s people to collect, not before killing twice as much along the way.

By midnight, you were in a safehouse above a closed bakery, both of you smelling like smoke and wool.

You sat on the floor with your back against the couch, cleaning soot from under your nails with the tip of a knife. Dex stood near the window, watching the street below through a gap in the curtains. For a while, neither of you spoke.

Then you said, “Bucky once set an entire warehouse on fire by accident.”

Dex closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, his reflection looked annoyed in the dark glass. “What is he,” Dex added, “your boyfriend?”

He meant it lightly, mostly. It came out almost like a joke.

The room’s air seemed to change at that; but you didn’t flinch. You didn’t look wounded. You only looked back down at your hands, at the knife balanced between your fingers, and for the first time since he had met you, Dex saw the answer arrive before you decided whether to give it.

“He used to be,” you said.

Ah.

He waited for more but gave him nothing.

The knife moved again, scraping soot gray wasn’t there anymore. Your face had closed in that gentle, polite way he was starting to recognize as armor. And it wasn’t the super soldier armor. Not even the Hydra armor. It was more… personal.

Dex should have asked. He wanted to ask: How long? Why did it end? Did you love him? Do you still? Did he touch you? Did he know what to do with you?

He asked none of it, mostly because that would have meant admitting he cared. So he only said, “Huh.”

You looked up. “Huh?” you repeated.

Dex shrugged, turning back toward the window. “Didn’t peg Barnes as your type.”

“And what’s my type?”

Dex seemed to consider it for a second. “Bad decisions.”

That got a small smile from you. “You’re not wrong.”

Dex stared out at the empty street, fist curled tight, his heartbeat skipping stupidly beneath his skin.

He told himself it was just curiosity. Barnes was relevant because Barnes had been Hydra, because Barnes knew the program, because Barnes had known you before Dex did. That was all: information, context, and nothing else.

But behind him, you went quiet again, and Dex could only assume and spiral about what you had not said.

He didn't want to know.

Ha! That was a lie.

He wanted to know so badly it made him angry.

You shifted on the floor, stretching one leg out, your boot nudging his discarded jacket.

“He’s a good man,” you said after a while.

Dex’s fingers tightened against the curtain.

Ugh.

He didn’t know what that shift of note was in your voice. Was it longing? Did you miss him?

“Lucky him,” Dex said through gritted teeth.

You didn’t answer. When he glanced back, you were looking at the knife in your hand like you had forgotten why you were holding it.

—

The next mission went wrong.

At first, it was just another Hydra remnant with more confidence than sense, tucked beneath an old municipal archive in Prague, guarded by men who thought stolen weapons made them important. Dex took the cameras. You took the stairs. It should have been clean.

Then one of them said a name: Vasily Karpov

Dex didn't know who that was at the time, but he would later learn that he was your old handler.

Still, he witnessed hearing it did to you.

He saw the split-second absence in your eyes— the way your face dropped first, almost blank, before an old and brutal version of you came up underneath it. The man laughed like he knew exactly what nerve he had touched.

He didn't laugh for long.

You hit him once and shattered his jaw.

Dex heard the teeth crack inside the man’s mouth before the body even hit the floor. Blood sprayed across the concrete in a hot arc, one of the molars skittering away into the dark like a dropped coin. The man tried to scream through what remained of his face, choking on it instead.

Then you hit him again.

Your fist came down with enough force to cave his nose flat against his skull. Bone gave under your knuckles with an ugly crunch. The back of his head smacked the floor hard enough to leave blood blooming beneath it, but you didn't stop.

The third punch ruptured his eye.

Dex watched as your knuckles sank into ruined flesh already turning unrecognizable, he saw red slick burst across your sleeve. The man’s limbs jerked once beneath you, involuntary, nervous system still firing even as his face stopped looking human. This was when Dex had to remember that you Hydra didn't just make a super soldier out of you; you were once a Winter Soldier, too.

You kept going.

Again.

Each hit sounded worse than the last. Your breathing had gone frighteningly steady, not angry or frantic, just mechanically brutal, like your humanity had slipped somewhere far away from yourself and left only an asset behind.

Blood coated your hands to the wrist.

One of the punches split the skin over your knuckles open. You didn't notice.

“Hey!” Dex barked, because this was brutal, even for his standards, which was saying a lot.

The body beneath you had stopped moving entirely now. One arm twitched occasionally from the impact, dead weight bouncing under the force of your blows. There was barely a face left.

You hit him again anyway.

Dex grabbed you then, hooking an arm around your waist and hauling you backward with a grunt. “Stop.”

You drove an elbow back hard enough to bruise ribs. Dex barely held on. Your boots scraped through blood as you tried to lunge forward again, eyes empty, locked on the corpse like it could still speak.

“He’s dead,” Dex sneered into your ear.

Your fist clenched again.

For one horrible second, Dex thought you were going to tear free and keep going until there was nothing left on the floor but pulp.

Then your whole body jerked still.

The room went quiet except for your heavy breathing.

Slowly, your eyes dropped to the body. Or what used to be one.

—

In the safehouse that night, you took the bed.

You had made a rule three countries ago that the two of you would alternate between bed and couch because you both had trust issues and didn't want to compromise. Dex didn't argue.

So, tonight, he took the couch.

It was too short. The blanket smelled like dust. His ribs hurt where you had elbowed him. He lay there in the dark, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling and listening to the old building settle around him.

He didn't sleep much.

That was why he heard you scream when you did. It was a full, blood-curdling scream that tore through the apartment like a mortician had opened you up.

Dex was on his feet before it ended.

He had a knife in his hand by the time he reached your door. He kicked it open, expecting an enemy.

But there was no one there. Only you.

You were standing beside the bed in the dark, barefoot, shaking, eyes open, and yet, you looked wrong. Your hair was loose around your face. One hand was curled at your side like it expected a weapon. The other was pressed against your own throat, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.

Dex lowered the knife a fraction.

“Hey,” he said, smaller than he meant to. “It’s me.”

You turned toward him.

Then… you attacked.

This was what Dex had imagined Siberian-programmed Winter Soldiers to move like: a nightmare.

Dex barely got his arm up before you struck him, the impact driving him back into the wall. Pain flashed white through his back, but it was fine. His back could take a hit now. He twisted away from the next punch, caught your wrist, lost it when you wrenched free.

“Wake up,” he snapped.

You didn't. Instead, your fist cracked into the plaster beside his head when he ducked. He swept your leg; you went down and came back up too quickly. He had fought trained killers before. He had fought men who wanted him dead. This was worse.

Because he could tell, even now, that you were not trying to win. You were merely trying to survive something that wasn't in the room.

Dex said your name again. That got nothing out of you.

You lunged.

He caught you badly. Your strength drove both of you sideways into the dresser. A lamp shattered. His knife hand came up on instinct, not to strike, just to guard, just to keep space between you.

You twisted, and the blade sank into you in the form of a clean, ugly slice along the outside of your upper arm.

That was enough to wake you up.

Your eyes dropped to the blood welling against your skin. For a heartbeat, you only stared at it.

“Oh,” you whispered.

Dex didn't move.

You blinked once, then again, like the room was assembling itself around you piece by piece. The bed. The broken lamp. The wall. Dex in front of you, breathing hard, knife still in his hand.

“Oh,” you said again, and this time it broke. “Oh.”

He understood before you explained, that this was what Charles had meant when Charles said you were deprogrammed enough.

Enough to pass evaluation. Enough to work. Enough to know your own name in daylight. Enough to sit in cars and drink bad coffee and pretend you were only dangerous by choice.

Not enough to stop a dead man’s name from reaching into your sleep and turning you back into his weapon.

Dex lowered the knife slowly.

Your eyes followed it. “I’m sorry,” you said.

He hated that. “Don’t.”

“I…” you choked, “I didn’t know where I was.”

“I know.”

“I could’ve—”

“You didn’t.”

“I could’ve killed you.”

That almost made him laugh, except nothing about you looked funny. You were standing in the wreckage of the little bedroom, barefoot and bleeding, trying to make yourself smaller when both of you knew you were not small at all.

Dex stepped closer, and you flinched.

For a second, the two of you just stood there with blood between you. Then, he said, “Sit down.”

You looked at him, eyes still adjusting.

His repeated, firmer this. “Sit.”

Maybe it was the tone. Maybe it was the simplicity in the command. Maybe you just needed instruction.

You sat on the edge of the bed.

Dex went to the bathroom, found the medical kit beneath the sink, and came back without looking too long at the broken lamp or the dent in the wall where your fist had landed. He knelt in front of you because the bed was too short and the room was too small and because, apparently, he had decided this was his problem now.

You watched him clean the cut, with hands folded tightly in your lap.

The antiseptic made you hiss through your teeth.

“Hurts?” Dex asked.

“No.”

“Liar.”

That got the smallest breath out of you. Not a laugh, but Dex decided it was enough.

He stitched you up quickly. You watched his hands instead of his face. Dex was grateful for that. He didn't know what his face was doing, and he didn't want you to see it before he figured it out himself.

When he finished, he tied off the last stitch and taped gauze over the wound. Dex sat back on his heels. “Do you know whose name he said?”

Your face went still. “Yes.”

He waited.

You didn't elaborate. He didn't push.

He stood and turned to clean up the kit, but your hand caught his wrist.

It was light and careful and so different from the way you had fought him that it made his chest lock up.

“Stay,” you said.

Dex looked down at your hand, then at you.

Your face was controlled again, but not enough. Your eyes were too bright in the dark, your mouth pressed too tight, your body holding itself together through sheer refusal.

“Please,” you added, a bit more desperate.

He should have said no. Boundaries, professionalism, all of Charles’ stupid rules and all. He should have gone back to the couch and pretended the sound of your scream wasn't still crawling under his skin.

Instead, Dex nodded.

You shifted back on the small bed, making room that didn’t really exist. It was ridiculous: the mattress was narrow and dipped in the middle, the sheets smelled faintly like laundry powder and dust, and there was no way for him to lie beside you without touching.

He did it anyway.

You lay on your side facing him, one arm tucked against your chest, the bandage stark against your skin. Dex settled stiffly beside you.

For a while, neither of you spoke.

Then your forehead lowered, just barely, until it rested against his chest.

Dex stopped breathing.

You whispered, “I thought I was back there.”

His hand hovered above your shoulder. Then he let it settle there. “I know.”

“You don’t,” you insisted.

The words were not cruel, but it was true.

Dex looked at the cracked ceiling.

No. He didn't know Siberia. He didn't know your handler’s voice. He didn't know the cold storage or the chair or whatever else had been dragged into the room with you when you screamed. He didn't know what cryo felt like. He didn't know what being erased felt like.

But he knew what it was to wake up and not feel like a person.

So he said, “Maybe not.”

Your fingers curled in the front of his shirt, and he found himself wanting to hold you a little tighter.

In the dark, in that too-small bed with your blood drying beneath his fingernails and the mission waiting beyond the walls, Dex realized he was jealous of Barnes for something even worse than having been loved by you.

Barnes had known how to comfort you because what was done to you was done to him, too. Dex didn't.

But you had asked him to stay anyway. So, he stayed.

—

After Prague, something changed between you.

The shift wasn’t dramatic, because let’s be real, neither of you were built for dramatic emotional breakthroughs. There was no late-night confession, no sudden honesty, no moment where either of you sat down and admitted that maybe the partnership had stopped being strictly professional somewhere around Austria.

Things just idly softened around the edges.

You stopped pretending the nightmares were rare. Dex stopped pretending he didn’t notice when you paced after missions instead of sleeping. Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night and find you sitting on the kitchen counter of whatever safehouse you were in, wrapped in one of his hoodies with a mug of coffee gone cold in your hands, staring at nothing.

It was a mutual understanding: he never asked what you were thinking about and you never asked why he always woke up exactly three minutes before dawn.

It worked. Mostly.

And somehow, you became easier around him. You rolled your eyes more openly when he was being difficult. You stole food off his plate. You started sitting too close to him on trains and planes and safehouse couches, like your body had decided he was safe before your brain had caught up.

Dex noticed every little bit of it.

Unfortunately, you still talked about Bucky.

Bucky liked this kind of weather. Bucky hated old countryside safehouses. Bucky once broke three ribs falling through a church roof. Bucky said Eastern European plumbing was cursed. Bucky this, Bucky that.

Dex was beginning to suspect the ancient world war two fossil had opinions on literally everything.

He hated how irrational the jealousy felt. Hated that it existed at all. It was ugly and stupid and embarrassing every time the name left your mouth so casually.

But he swallowed it.

Until Croatia.

The mission itself had been a disaster from the start. Charles had dropped a bad intel in the form of a wrong entry point in a Hydra splinter cell that turned out to be twice the size the files suggested. Dex got separated from you for exactly ninety seconds, which was apparently long enough for someone to nearly put a knife through your throat.

He found you in a collapsed stairwell with blood on your collar and three bodies around your feet. He had managed to cradle your face and slap your cheek twice to get you awake.

When you opened your eyes, though, he looked furious.

—

Dex tried to shoulder the safehouse door open, but the warped wood only groaned stubbornly against the frame, swollen tight from the rain.

Before he could hit it again, you shoved past him, “Move,” grabbed the handle, and yanked hard enough that the lock gave with a dull metallic snap, the door shuddering inward and banging against the wall. Cold air chased both of you inside as rain streaked down the back of his neck. Mud dragged across the floorboards beneath your boots. The cottage smelled like damp stone, stale smoke, and old wood that had spent too many winters rotting.

You stumbled in, one hand pressed briefly to your ribs because the movement annoyed whatever bruise was blooming there.

Dex saw it, refusing to take his mask off because he didn’t want you to see how frightened he had become.

Worse, he saw more that you seemed to understand. He saw the split at your lip. The blood at the side of your neck, dried now, but still there in a dark line where that knife had kissed too close. He saw the way you were favoring your left side even though you were trying not to. He saw the notch in your sleeve where a bullet had passed close enough to cut fabric.

The second the door shut, the whole night caught up with him at once.

For one horrible moment back in that compound, Dex had heard the comm go dead and had thought, with a certainty so violent it had hollowed him out, that he had lost you. Not misplaced or separated. Lost.

Asset unrecoverable kind of lost. Operative deceased kind of lost.

He had not felt that kind of panic in years, and he didn’t like what it had done to him.

So by the time you were both inside the cottage, wet and bleeding and breathing too hard, he had nowhere to put it except anger.

“You broke formation,” he said.

You tossed your ruined gloves onto the kitchen table, one after the other, like you had all the time in the world. “You changed the route.”

“The route was compromised.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“You were off comms.”

“I was busy.”

Dex turned from the door to see that you were standing in the yellow kitchen light, hair damp around your face, jacket hanging open, blood on your throat like some deadly necklace. And you had the audacity to sound bored.

Busy, you had said, like you had missed a call. Like he had not spent the longest thirty seconds of his life tearing through five men and half a corridor to get to you.

“You disappeared.”

You looked at him then. Your stare sharpened, the same way they did before a fight when some poor man realized too late that the pretty woman in front of him had never been harmless.

“Oh my god,” you said, though you looked annoyed, not cruel. In your head, the mission had gone badly but ended fine. You were alive. He was alive. The intel had been recovered and bodies had been left behind. That was success, by every metric either of you had been trained to respect.

So why was he acting like this? You didn’t understand.

“You disappeared,” he repeated, louder this time. “And then I walk into a room and there’s blood all over you—”

“Not mine,” you reminded me.

“I didn’t know that!” The words came thundering out of him before he could stop them. “You’re just so fucking reckless, are you?”

You barked out a small laugh, turning toward him, looking into his dark hazel eyes, the only part of his face not covered by fabric. “Oh, and you’re the picture of stability right now, Benjamin.”

Dex turned so fast you almost walked into him. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why?” Your eyebrows genuinely furrowed. “Do you not like your name?”

Still, there was no malice in your voice. You were being awful, yes, but not with the intention to wound. You didn't realize where the line was because no one had ever given you normal lines to stand behind. You were teasing him the way you tested knives: carefully, curiously, delighted when they were sharp.

Then, because apparently you had no instinct for self-preservation when it came to him, you added, “Bucky liked it when I called him James.”

Dex went still, but you didn’t notice immediately.

Not because you were stupid; you were not. You noticed threat, movement, weakness, exits, lies. You noticed the things that kept you alive. But this was different. This wasn't a gun drawn under a table or a man shifting his weight before a strike.

This was jealousy.

Dex hated how fast it rose in him. He hated that it didn't feel grown-up or controlled or even useful. It felt young, embarrassing, like a hot green pulse where his heart should be.

And you had no idea you had just fed it.

To you, it was a passing comparison. Bucky had been part of your life. James was a name he had let you use. It was a small domestic fact and nothing more.

To Dex, it was a door opening onto all the things he didn't want to picture.

Barnes smiling at you. Barnes letting you call him James. Barnes in your bed—

You caught the change in his eyes a second too late. “Dex?”

“Don’t.” His voice came out rough enough that even he heard the damage in it.

You stopped smiling, but that didn't help.

Because Dex knew you had not meant it. He knew. He could see it in your face now: the faint confusion, the way your mouth parted like you were about to ask what you had done wrong. You were not trying to make him jealous. You were not playing Barnes against him. You were not cruel in that particular way.

You were just carrying another man around inside your memories and forgetting Dex could see the outline.

And the worst part was that this wasn't even really about Barnes. It was about the fact that you were standing there, acting like nothing was wrong after almost dying, telling him you were fine while blood dried on your skin like he had not spent the last hour with terror clawing down his throat. You had almost died tonight, and for a second Dex had not thought of you as his partner, or Charles’s asset, or the super soldier who would probably outlive everyone in the room.

He had thought:

No.

Not you.

And now you were standing there saying another man’s name while Dex was still trying to scrape that terror out of his chest.

Dex stepped towards you before he even realized he was moving.

When he got to where you were standing near the kitchen table, he had you shoved backward to the wall behind you.

Dex planted one hand beside your head, boxing you in. The other grabbed your waist hard enough to pull you flush against him. The impact jolted through both of you. Your body heat hit him instantly through layers of damp clothing.

You looked up at him with wide eyes, not frightened.

You were stronger than him. If you wanted him off you, he would already be across the room. If you wanted space, you would take it. Instead, you stayed exactly where you were pinned against the wall, fingers curling into the front of his tactical suit as he desperately took his mask off.

God.

His grip tightened reflexively against your waist.

“I thought you were dead,” he said again, and this time the words cracked. “Do you understand that? You almost died.” Dex hated himself immediately for letting that much show.

“But I didn’t,” you murmured softly.

Dex looked down at you breathing hard against the wall, rainwater still dripping from your hair, blood drying at your throat, and suddenly the anger stopped feeling red and started becoming want.

Four months of tension crashed through him all at once. Every accidental touch in cramped safehouses. Every late-night conversation over bad coffee. Every time you had smiled at him after violence like the two of you shared some private language no one else understood.

And now you were looking up at him like this.

Your thumb brushed once against the front of his shirt where you still held him.

“You really don’t understand why that isn’t good enough,” he said.

Your eyes flicked over his face, and for half a second, the teasing left you. Then you tried to cover it, because vulnerability made you uncomfortable, too.

“Y’know,” you said, breath still uneven, “Bucky would’ve—”

Oh, fuck that.

“—known what to do with— Hmph!!!”

The kiss came so suddenly you barely had time to make a sound.

One second you were speaking, the next Dex’s mouth was on yours, hard and immediate and furious enough to steal the rest of the sentence clean out of you. His hand tightened at your waist; the other stayed braced against the wall beside your head like he needed to keep himself from doing something worse, or kind, or both.

You froze beneath him for one shocked heartbeat.

Dex felt the hitch in your breath, the way your hand tightened in his shirt without pulling him closer yet, fingers twisting in the wet fabric like your body had reacted before your mind could catch up.

He had kissed you to shut you up. That was the only explanation his brain could hold onto.

Not because he had wanted to do it for months. Not because the sight of blood on your throat felt like he had been skinned alive. Not because every time you said another man’s name, the hunger in him wanted to put his own there instead.

No.

He had kissed you because you would not stop talking.

Sure. That's why.

When you sighed into his lips, his whole body locked up.

The kiss changed in the space of a breath. Your lips began moving against his, tentative for less than a second before the shock burned off and heat rushed in to replace it. Your fingers dragged higher in his shirt, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away.

Dex made a sound low in his throat, and that seemed to snap both of you back to yourselves.

He pulled away, far enough that the kiss broke. For a second, neither of you moved.

You stared at him. He stared back.

Your eyes were wide, Your mouth was parted, damp from his, your breath coming fast.

He should have stepped back. He should have done anything except look at your mouth again.

Your eyes dropped to his lips at the exact same time.

That was all it took.

Dex barely had time to inhale before your mouth was on his again, harder now, more certain now. Your hands fisted in his shirt and dragged him down into you like you were done waiting for him to decide anything on your behalf.

He kissed you back immediately.

His hand slid from your waist to your hip, gripping there, pulling you against him while your back stayed pressed to the wall. The kiss turned rougher, open-mouthed and breathless, all teeth and heat and months of tension finally catching fire. You made a small whine against him when his body curved into yours, and Dex swallowed it whole.

Your hand slid up into his hair, and he nearly lost his mind.

Four months of looking and not touching, and now you were kissing him like it had meant everything.

Dex pressed in closer, chasing your mouth when you tilted your head, the angle changing. You kissed like you fought, he realized distantly: direct, no wasted movement, no mercy once you decided you wanted something.

Then you pushed him away, palm flattening against his chest.

Dex was suddenly stumbling backward like gravity had changed its mind. His back hit the edge of the kitchen table with a dull thud, wood scraping against the floor under the impact.

He stared at you for half a second.

You had not even tried.

You looked at him from against the wall, breathing hard, mouth swollen, eyes dark and bright all at once. You looked amazed now, wicked and dazed and pleased by the realization that you could move him so easily.

Dex knew that already.

He had known from the file, the missions, from watching you tear through men twice your size without breaking a sweat.

But knowing it and feeling it were different things.

Feeling your strength turned casually on him, not to hurt, not to threaten, just to move him where you wanted him, made his brain go haywire.

For one dangerous second, Dex wondered what you would do to him if you were given free rein. The next thing he realized was that he would let you do anything to him.

When you walked up to him, Dex’s hands found your waist again, but this time you were the one pushing into him, trapping him against the table, kissing him like you had decided he had started something and now you were going to finish it on your terms.

He let you.

Fuck, he let you.

Your mouth moved over his, hot and demanding, your fingers sliding into his hair again and tugging just enough to make his breath catch. Dex’s grip tightened on your hips, then loosened, then tightened again, like even his hands could not decide whether to pull you closer or surrender completely.

Dex leaned back against the table as you crowded him, and the old wood creaked under both of you. You had his knee pressed between yours, and even then he could feel the damp heat between your legs even through your trousers. He wanted to tease, but when hands roamed up his chest with a kind of greedy curiosity, he forgot language altogether.

He kissed you harder.

You answered immediately, biting at his lower lip until he groaned into your mouth.

Dex felt your smile against his lips for half a second.

Cruel little thing.

Dex pulled his mouth away for a second. You were about to complain, but whatever whiny words you were about to say was silence when his lips dragged down your neck instead. His lips found the place beneath your ear, then the line of your pulse, then the blood-dark smear where the knife had almost cut too deep, and you had mewled like a kitten in response.

This was fine, he told himself.

Practical, even.

You had both been wound tight for months. Too much blood, too many missions, and not nearly enough release. Wanting you didn't have to mean anything. Wanting to have you didn't have to mean he was already too far gone. This was just mutually beneficial stress relief, right?

Dex almost laughed against your neck at his own reasoning.

It was stupid.

He didn't care.

Your hands slid under the hem of his tactical shirt and dragged upward, impatient and clumsy. Dex pulled back only long enough to tear the fabric over his head and drop it somewhere behind him. He barely had time to breathe before your eyes were on him.

Then, without a word, you followed, fingers catching at the hem of your own shirt, lifting it over your head, tossing it aside.

Dex stared.

Your mouth curved up. “What?”

He stepped back into you.

“Nothing.”

His mouth was on you again before the word had fully settled, kissing you hard, kissing the answer into your skin instead of saying it. His hands moved over your sides, your back, your waist, like he still could not quite believe he was allowed to touch and needed to make up for every second he had wasted pretending he didn't want to.

You made a sound when his lips found your throat again. Your fingers curled around the back of his neck, pulling him closer.

Dex obeyed before he could resent how easily he did.

He kissed lower, then back up, restless, greedy, unable to stay in one place because there was too much of you and he wanted all of it at once. Your hand slid over his shoulder, blunt nails dragging lightly over skin right next to his spinal surgery scar.

Then you shifted your weight, pressing closer, and the table knocked against his back again.

Wrong angle, some still-functioning part of his mind decided.

To fix this problem, Dex’s hands dropped to your thighs.

You barely had time to inhale before he lifted you.

Even knowing you were stronger, even knowing you could have taken control from him without trying, there was something inherently satisfying about the small gasp you gave when he picked you up and turned. Your legs caught around him by instinct, and for one brief second his face was against your shoulder and your breath was in his hair.

Then he set you on the table harshly because he knew you could take it.

The old wood groaned beneath you.

Dex stepped between your knees immediately, one hand braced beside your hip, the other cupping the back of your neck as he kissed you again from the better angle, like he had been right to move you and was very smug about it.

And because you were as desperate as him, you hastily unbuttoned your trousers as he hooked his fingers under your panties and helped you take them off with your spit still dripping from his lips.

He looked at you again, mouth swollen from kissing him. You looked wrecked already, but not ruined. He thought you were beautiful, but he already knew that. Here, you looked less like a weapon with a heartbeat and more like a goddamn miracle pretending she wasn't one.

And then, immediately, his mind supplied Barnes.

Bucky Barnes had seen you like this.

Dex’s jaw tightened.

Barnes had known this version of you. He had known you warm and bare and breathless, too. He had looked at you in private. Had heard the sounds Dex was only beginning to earn.

Dex hated him for that. He hated him with that unreasonable jealousy that made his grip flex against your hips.

Your eyes narrowed slightly. “What?”

Dex didn’t answer.

He didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want to admit that a man he had never met had crawled into his head again. He didn’t want to give that name space here, not now, not with you in front of him looking holy. So Dex leaned closer instead, eyes dark, mouth brushing your jaw as he laid you down on the wood.

His hand slid along down your body, over your breast and your tummy, exploring and feeling and gripping until they settled on your thighs.

He wasn't a super soldier.

Fine.

He could not match that kind of strength. He could not promise superhuman stamina or metal fingers or whatever mythic thing Barnes had been in your bed and your memory.

Dex had other talents.

Dex had perfect aim.

And he was determined to make his precision matter more than aimless brute strength.

His hand slid closer between your legs, the other keeping it open, watching your face the whole time. Your breath caught before he even did anything.

Your fingers curled into fists.

Dex’s mouth curved, before he peppered kisses on your collarbone, his finger having minds of their own. He touched you like he was mapping a weakness, like every gasp, every shift of your hips, like every sharp little inhale was information he meant to keep and use. You tried to stay composed. Tried to keep the upper hand. It didn’t work.

“Not so mouthy now, huh?” he teased, voice rough.

You glared at him, or tried to.

You wanted to pull him down. You wanted to push him back. You wanted to have him every way the tiny kitchen would allow.

“Tell me what you want.” he said, grabbing your chin with his remaining still-dry hand to make you look at him.

You hated him for asking. You loved him for making you say it.

Your mouth parted, but nothing came out at first except his name.

It didn’t take long after you felt his fingers in your core for Dex to find what ruined you.

“There,” he said under his breath, a newfound glee in his voice.

That was the unbearable thing about him, the infuriating thing, the thing that made you want to curse his name and drag him closer in the same breath. Dex noticed everything. Every hitch in your breathing. Every tremor you tried to hide. Every tiny shift of your body beneath his hands. He had the focus of a sniper and the patience of a man who knew exactly when he had found his mark.

And right now, all of that terrible precision was on you.

Your back was pressed against the old wood, head only slightly lifted, looking at the ceiling as rain battered the cottage windows.

“Dex,” you breathed, and it barely sounded like a warning anymore.

“Pretty,” he murmured more to himself than to you, rough and pleased.

He curled a finger, and your head fell back against the table with a soft thud.

Your mouth was parted, your breathing uneven, your whole body tense with frustration and the awful realization that he knew exactly what he was doing to you.

Then he leaned over you, kissed the corner of your mouth, and whispered, “Again.”

You didn't know whether he meant his name or the sound you had just made.

Either way, you gave it to him.

—

Morning came thin and grey through the curtains.

Dex woke up slowly, which almost never happened.

He was aware of the sheets first, then the ache in his shoulders, then the faint smell of rain still trapped in the cottage walls.

Then he became aware of you.

You were beside him, half-buried in the blanket, hair spread messy over the pillow, one arm tucked under your cheek. Your breathing was calm and even, one knee had slipped out from under the sheet (which you had stolen), and there were bruises already blooming there, dark against your skin.

Dex stared at them for too long.

He knew exactly where they came from.

You had been on your knees for him the night before, looking up like a fucking fallen angel crawling up from hell. He barely lasted at all, because no amount of training or discipline could have prepared him for you.

Still, he looked at the bruises, and his chest turned over.

You stirred beside him with a sleepy little sound, blinking into the dull morning light. Your eyes found him, then followed his eyes down to your knee. For a second, you seemed confused, and then your lips curled with amusement.

“Don’t look so worried," you murmured, voice rough from sleep. “It’ll probably heal by sunset.”

Dex looked away. “I was assessing damage.”

You hummed, and for one ridiculous moment he wanted to put his mouth on that smile and keep it there. He wanted to ask if you were sore. He wanted to ask if he had hurt you, even though there was a statistically higher chance of you hurting him in such close quarters. He wanted to ask if you were going to regret it now that the sun was up and the mission was waiting.

He asked none of it.

You stretched under the sheets, lazy and unbothered, then rolled onto your side to face him. There was no panic in you, no awkwardness. No visible regret. If anything, you looked pleased with yourself, far too comfortable with the wreckage you had made of him.

Then you sighed happily and said, “Well. That was a successful evolution of our professional relationship.”

Dex looked back at you.

You were grinning.

“What?”

You propped your head on your hand. “I’m just saying. Good to know my fuck buddy has useful hands.”

For a second, Dex’s entire brain went blank.

Fuck buddy.

Fuck buddy?

You said it lightly, teasingly, like it was a joke between the two of you. Like it was cute.

Fuck buddy.

After that?

After the wall, the table, the bed. After your hands in his hair. After his name in your mouth. After he had woken up beside you and, idiot that he was, felt at peace in his own mind?

Fuck buddy.

He wanted to claw eyes out.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to ask if that was what he was. He wanted to say the words back to you, cruelly, just to see whether they hurt you, too. He wanted to get out of the bed, get dressed, put a gun in his hand, and see what the barrel felt like in his mouth.

Instead, Dex did nothing.

He did nothing because he understood that if he talked too much, he could lose this before he even knew what this was. If he asked for more, you might run away and give him nothing at all.

You were not trying to hurt him. You were smiling at him, sleepy and satisfied and completely clueless. To you, the arrangement was practical. A category: friends, partners, operatives, fuck buddies.

Ugh.

He wanted to tell you that if you called him that again, he might actually lose whatever was left of his mind.

Instead, he still said nothing, because he wasn't stupid.

Unstable, yes. Jealous, increasingly. Probably emotionally constipated beyond medical repair. But not stupid.

If he pushed too hard, you might make it a thing. And if you made it a thing, you might decide the arrangement was too messy and too complicated to continue.

Dex could not risk that.

“Useful hands,” he repeated eventually. His voice sounded normal. He was proud of that, in a distant, miserable way.

You grinned. “Mmhm.”

He gave you a sanitised look.

You laughed, nudging his leg beneath the sheet with your foot like you had any right to be that casual with him after detonating his life before breakfast. “Don’t be offended. That was a very good review.”

“Great,” he said flatly. “Should I expect a written evaluation?”

“I could make a rubric.”

“Don’t.”

Dex almost smiled.

—

Whatever had happened in the cottage didn't end there. It became a part of the mission, as much as false passports and burner phones were a part of the mission. The first time could have been dismissed as an accident. A one-time detonation after four months of tension neither of you had been handling well. But then there was the safehouse in Slovenia, where you came back from a mission with blood on your cheek and smiled at him across the hallway, and Dex knew that it was going to happen again.

Then Munich, against a bathroom sink in an apartment above a closed pharmacy. Then Warsaw, where you didn't even make it out of your tactical gear before dragging him down onto a mattress. Then a warehouse outside Lyon, because the extraction was delayed and apparently the two of you had lost all sense of professionalism somewhere around the fourth body. Then a supply closet in Milan, where he fucked you after you put his mask over your own face. An alley in Budapest. The back room of an abandoned train depot in Belgium.

And because Dex had the self-preservation instincts of a man chasing a moving target off a roof, he let it continue.

He told himself it was better this way. Casual meant stable. Casual meant you stayed. Casual meant you didn't have to examine anything too closely, and neither did he. It meant he got your mouth, your hands, your body in whatever safehouse Charles had arranged for the week, and all he had to do was not ask for more.

He even convinced himself it was more than he had any right to.

You reached for him. You kissed him first sometimes. You slept beside him when the safehouse only had one bed and, sometimes, even when it had two. You learned the scars on his body with your hands. You stole his shirts. You drank from his coffee. You called him by his name and it made him feel like it belonged to you now.

And then, in the morning, or in the car, or while cleaning a weapon at some tiny desk table in another country, you would say something that reminded him exactly where he stood.

“Don’t look so smug,” you told him once, adjusting the strap of your holster in a cracked mirror. “You’re still just my mission stress relief.”

You meant it as a joke, and Dex knew you did.

You looked over your shoulder at him with that wicked little smile, waiting for him to snap back. You expected him to say something dry, something cruel enough to be funny but not cruel enough to count.

He did.

“Good to know I have a job title,” he said.

You laughed and went back to your holster.

Dex stood behind you and wanted to break the mirror with his bare hand.

He had to remind himself over and fucking over again that you were not cruel, at least not like that. You were ruthless, yes. You were capable of killing a room full of people and then asking what was for dinner. But with him, you were not trying to wound. You were simply clueless.

You didn't understand that he had started listening for the way you called for him. You didn't understand that he noticed which safehouses made you sleep easier, which nightmares made you reach for him, which jokes pulled a real laugh out. You didn't understand that he counted every time you chose to sit beside him instead of across from him like a starving man counting coins.

And you really didn't understand what happened to him when you brought up Bucky.

You did it less now, as if you were just starting to get human customs: do not bring up the guy you used to sleep with to the guy you were currently sleeping with unless you were asked.

But when you did bring him up, it was clear as day that part of you loved being given the chance to talk about him.

See, you were guarded about everything else. You deflected questions about Siberia. You made jokes about getting shot. You went blank whenever Charles asked about your programming over the phone. You could talk for twenty minutes about tactical routes and never reveal one honest thing about yourself.

But if Dex mentioned Barnes, even casually, your face would change.

“Barnes teach you that?” Dex asked once, watching you bypass an old Hydra lock with a bent piece of metal and no visible effort.

You smiled immediately. “He tried.”

Dex should have stopped there, but because he apparently liked suffering, he didn't. “Tried?”

You glanced at him, pleased to have the thread. “He was terrible at explaining things. He’d just do it and then look at me like I was supposed to absorb it through proximity.”

Dex hummed.

You kept going. “He got so annoyed when I got better at it than him. He’d pretend he wasn’t annoyed. He used to do this thing with his jaw when he was trying to be mature about losing.”

You mimicked it without thinking. It was… fond.

Oh. Right.

He watched your hands move over the lock and wondered how many doors Barnes had watched you open. How many safehouses had held the two of you. How many times you had looked over your shoulder at him with that same spark of amusement.

“That sounds annoying,” Dex said.

“He is,” you said. “Very.”

And there was that warmth again.

Sometimes, Dex brought Bucky up on purpose. He hated himself for it, but there was a sickness to his curiosity. He needed to open that wound over and over again to feel something.

“Barnes cook?” he asked one night in Vienna, after you complained about the contents of a safehouse freezer.

You laughed immediately. “Badly.”

Dex regretted the question before you even continued.

“It was tragic. He could survive in the wilderness, dismantle a rifle blindfolded, and break a man’s neck before breakfast, but give him a pan and he can’t make anything that doesn't taste like bland meatloaf.”

Dex stared at the vegetables you were chopping.

You were smiling at the cutting board.

Dex made a noncommittal sound as you talked about it for ten more minutes.

It was unbearable.

It was also the most relaxed he had seen you all day, so he let you.

That was the misery of it all. Dex hated hearing about Barnes, but he loved what talking about him did to you. He loved watching that stiff part of you ease when you remembered being loved by someone who had not used you as a weapon. He loved the sound of your voice when it had history in it. He loved that, for once, you were not pretending to be harmless or terrifying. You were just a person with memories.

He just wished the memories didn't belong to another man. Another man who had been your boyfriend.

Not fuck buddy. Not mission stress relief. Not a bad habit in multiple countries. Boyfriend was a real word. A word that meant Barnes had occupied a place Dex had not even been allowed to ask for.

Bucky fucked you and was a boyfriend. Dex worshipped you and was a fuck buddy?

In what fucking world was that even fair?

He hated that he was jealous of a man who had saved your life. He despised that he could not make himself noble about it. He hated that every time you begged him to touch you, some childish, vicious part of him wanted to ask whether Bucky had touched you there, too.

He never asked, but he imagined plenty.

That was worse, because imagination didn't need evidence. It filled in everything: Barnes’s metal hand on your hip. Barnes’s mouth at your throat. Barnes in all the places Dex had put himself and still somehow felt like the original while Dex became the imitation.

And then you would turn around, clueless and bright-eyed, and ask, “You okay?”

Dex would say, “Fine.”

You would believe him.

That almost made him hate you, in the way a starving man might hate someone for leaving food just out of reach and not understanding why he was shaking.

The arrangement continued because Dex let it. Because he was too greedy to stop. Because having you underneath him, even temporarily, even without the label he wanted, was better than the alternative. Because when you reached for him, he forgot how much it hurt until afterward.

And afterward, there was always a moment that was too tender for his own good. You would button your shirt before going to infiltrate a gala. You would toss him his utility belt with a smirk. You would lean over a map like nothing had changed while Dex stood there with every nerve in his body still aware of the places your hands had been.

He would think, say something. He never did, because what could he say?

Don’t call me that. Don’t call me casual. Don’t talk about him like he still gets the best parts of you. Don’t make me ask for more when we both know you might say no.

So he kept quiet and kept his position, as miserable and humiliating as it was. And every time you called him your fuck buddy, your mission stress relief, your bad decision, Dex smiled like it didn't make him want to drown himself face first in a pool of starving piranhas.

Because for now, you still chose him. Not the way he wanted. Not yet, Maybe not ever.

But Dex had survived on less than scraps before.

So he took what you gave him, swallowed the rest down until it burned, and told himself that temporary was better than nothing.

Even if, some mornings, nothing would have hurt less.

—

Everything imploded during a mission in a church should have been empty.

That was what the file said. An abandoned stone church in a half-empty Italian village had an abandoned Hydra weapons cache beneath the crypt. Supposedly, there was no active civilian presence within a two mile radius, no active guard detail, no complication beyond an old lock.

It was supposed to be a simple recovery: Secure the intel, secure the weapons for extraction, and leave before anyone in the village noticed the old place had been disturbed.

Dex should have known better by then, that nothing involving Hydra stayed dead just because the walls looked old.

The church stood at the edge of the village with its bell tower cracked down the middle, weeds climbing the steps, and cypress trees stood around the graveyard like black-green sentries. The sky had gone a red late-afternoon color, clouds pressing down over the hills. Inside, the air was cold and wet and stale. Broken saints watched from their niches with missing fingers and chipped faces. Light fell through the stained glass in fractured strips, magenta across the pews, blue over the altar, gold bleeding weakly across the floor like the church still remembered how to be holy.

You found the crypt behind the altar.

The stone slab had been disguised well enough for anyone normal to miss it, but you were not normal. You crouched in front of the mechanism with one knee on the floor, pushing aside a false piece of carved stone until the panel beneath exposed.

It was made of steel, and had a keypad. A half-dead little light blinked red right beside it. Hydra, but older than the other caches. Not Soviet standard. Not the Austrian sequence from month two. Not the lock you had cracked in Romania with a hairpin while Dex stood behind you pretending not to be impressed.

This one made you look… confused.

Dex noticed.

You were very good at focusing and most people mistook it for calm. Dex knew better by now. Your stillness was a sign of assessment, memory, and calculation. You were trying to remember a thousand old lessons while your face gave nothing away.

But this time, there was no recognition. You only stared at the lock, teeth clenching once.

“You know it?” he asked.

You didn’t answer.

Dex shifted his gun in his holster and looked toward the nave. The church doors were still shut, but the place had too many broken windows, too many side entries, too many shadows. It was bad news, because Dex knew for a fact that you were being followed on your way here.

“No,” you said finally.

Dex turned back, irritated. “No?”

You shot him a look over your shoulder, annoyed and beautiful enough that he hated himself for noticing in the middle of a church with a possible kill team closing in. “Do you want to try?”

“I shoot things.”

“Yes. I’ve noticed.”

Dex might have smiled if he had not caught movement through the broken stained glass at the far left of the church.

“How long?” you asked, noticing it too.

“Maybe five minutes,” he said, preparing a throwing knife. “Less if they’re competent.”

You went back to the lock, fingers moving over the panel, testing seams, and possible reset catches. Nothing opened. Nothing even flickered. Dex could feel your frustration building like heat in a closed room.

You hated not knowing. You hated needing anything. That was one of the first things he had learned about you in the early weeks when he still thought learning you would help him keep distance instead of making him want to crawl inside your lungs and live there.

Then you sat back on your heels, reached into your jacket, and said, “I have to call someone.”

No. No, no, no.

He knew. Before you said it, before you even looked at the phone, before your thumb found the contact you should not have needed and Dex absolutely didn't want to hear. He knew the way he always knew when the bullet had already left the barrel.

“Who?” he asked, and his voice was too flat.

You didn't look at him. “Someone who might know.”

“Barnes,” he said through gritted teeth, because who else could you possibly know?

You hesitated, not long enough for anyone else to call it guilt. But Dex saw it, because Dex saw everything, because God or the universe or whatever rotten thing had assembled him had given him perfect aim and absolutely no mercy where details were concerned.

“Really?” he said.

“I’m calling someone with Hydra experience,” you insisted.

“Your ex-boyfriend with Hydra experience,” he shook his head.

You scolded him. “Dex.”

“It’s fine.” His smile was brief and horrible. You only caught a glimpse of it before he put his mask over his head. “Actually, it’s great. Let’s bring him into the room. Why not? He’s practically here most days anyway.”

You looked up then, irritation flashing across your face. “This is not the time.”

“It never is.”

“You want the cache?”

“I want you to know literally anyone else.”

“That is not my fault,” you frowned.

“No, I’m sure nothing is.”

Your eyes narrowed. “Barricade the door.”

Dex laughed once under his breath. It had no humor in it. “I don’t need to barricade the door.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No,” he said, voice flat with fury, “I really don’t.”

“Dex,” you said, voice strained, “Please.”

He stepped back from the altar, eyes set ahead, every muscle of his body pulled tight. “I don’t need to barricade the door while you call your ex about a lock.”

You stared at him, phone already dialing. Dex hated that he could hear the line ringing.

One ring. Two. Each little tone felt like a finger tapping the inside of his skull.

Then the call connected, and James Buchanan Barnes spoke through your phone for the first time. “Hey, doll.”

Dex had thought he was prepared for it. He wasn't.

It was just a voice, just a man’s voice through a tiny speaker, softened by distance and familiarity and whatever history lived between the two of you. It should not have done anything. Dex had heard men threaten him, beg him, scream under his hands. He had been praised by superior, insulted by criminals, given orders by bad men. A voice was air. It should be nothing.

But Barnes said doll like he had earned the right to.

And you changed, though not much at all. Your shoulders loosened by the smallest fraction. Your face relaxed before you could stop it. Dex didn’t know if it was still romantic, and Dex could not even decide if that would have been worse or better. It was familiar and lived-in, like a door in you opening because the voice on the other end had knocked in a pattern you still recognized.

Dex felt like he was on the brink of yet another mental collapse.

“Hey,” you said. “Sorry. I need help.”

Barnes answered with immediate concern, gentle as your hand had been on his skin last night. “You okay?”

Dex wanted to shove his head through the nearest stained-glass window.

He wanted to laugh until his throat split open. He wanted to walk outside, stand in the graveyard, and let the incoming kill squad do whatever they wanted just so he didn't have to stand there and listen to Barnes care about you in real time. It was one thing to know the man knew you. It was one thing to know he had loved you, touched you, saved you, left you for reasons Dex didn't know. Knowledge could be abstract. This wasn't abstract.

This was Barnes’s voice filling the church while you crouched over a lock in broken holy light, letting him help you.

This was a man Dex had never met reaching through the phone and occupying space that Dex had been clawing at for months with bloody fingernails.

“She’s fine,” Dex said, too loudly.

Dex knew he should have kept his mouth shut the second Barnes went silent.

It wasn't even a real silence, but Dex heard the shift in it anyway, because he was him, because he caught things no one else caught, because his whole body had become one raw nerve around the sound of that man’s voice.

“Who’s that?” Barnes asked. It wasn't panic, and not even jealousy. It was just a calm assessment.

Dex’s mouth moved before he could stop it. “The guy keeping her alive.”

Your head snapped toward him and Barnes went quiet again. Then, he said, “That right?”

Dex smiled harshly under his mask. “That’s right.”

“Oh my God,” you muttered.

Barnes’s voice stayed low through the speaker. “She usually does a decent job of that herself.”

“She had a gun to the back of the head last week,” Dex said.

“She mention why?”

“Boys,” you snapped, eyes flicking between Dex and the phone like you could physically strangle both ends of the conversation if given the chance. “Can we focus?”

Dex stared at the phone, rage crawling hot under his skin. It should not have hurt, but it did. It hurt because Barnes didn’t sound threatened. He sounded like he knew exactly what you were capable of, exactly how much danger you could survive, exactly where concern ended and respect began. He sounded like someone who didn't need to prove he belonged in the conversation because he had been there first.

You exhaled and looked back down at the lock. “Dex, meet Bucky. Bucky, meet Dex. Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it.

You clearly didn’t mean anything by it. You were just irritated, distracted, trying to do your job. But the words hurt him.

Don’t worry about it. Not he matters. Not he’s important. Not anything that could stand up against the familiar way that Barnes was calling you an old pet name through the speaker.

Barnes hummed once, unreadable. “Alright.”

Dex wanted to shoot the phone. He wanted to shoot the wall.

He wanted to walk outside and turn the incoming kill squad into a pile of meat just so he would have something to do with his hands besides stand there and feel pathetic in a church.

You pointed sharply at the side door without looking up. “Dex. Door.”

His teeth clenched.

Barnes said, almost mildly, “Might want to listen to her.”

Dex looked at the phone. Then at you.

“You alright?” Bucky asked when he was sure Dex was out of range. Unfortunately, he wasn't.

It was clear that he was going to say something again, but you shot him a glare to stop him. “We’re fine,” you said, “I have a lock.”

“A lock?” Barnes asked, and Dex hated the hint of humor there too, hated that he could hear the little frown in the man’s voice, hated most of all that you probably could picture his face when he made it.

“An older Hydra one,” you said. “It’s an Italian site with crypt entry. It’s not taking any of the sequences I know.”

Barnes went quiet, thinking.

Dex turned away. He could not stand another second of your face while you listened to him. He could not stand the concentration in your eyes, the trust.

You trusted Barnes’s voice. You trusted him enough to call. Enough to ask. Dex didn't want to know what else you had trusted him with.

He stalked down the nave, past rotting pews and the saints’ blind plaster faces, knife, boots grinding dirt and broken glass into the floor. Your voice followed him. “No, I tried the lower sequence.”

Barnes, apparently, was patient and understanding. “Not that one. Check the left side. There should be a false panel under the carved edge.”

Your answer came after, almost pleased. “There is.”

Dex shoved the side door open and stepped into the graveyard.

The first man came over the wall in black tactical gear with his rifle raised. Dex threw his knife, and it sliced him through the throat.

He dropped backward over the stone wall with a wet, choking sound, his weapon clattering against the grave markers. Two more appeared at the corner of the church, moving in formation, disciplined enough to be annoying. Dex didn't give them time to become more than geometry. He put a round through the first man’s knee, watched him collapse mid-stride, then shot the second through the gap between helmet and mask as he turned toward the sound. The first man reached for his sidearm when Dex crossed the grass and drove his boot into the side of his head hard enough to silence him against the base of a weathered angel statue.

Inside, faintly, through the open door and stone walls, Barnes was still talking. “Don’t force it, doll. If it’s the one I think it is, it punishes pressure.”

Dex’s vision narrowed.

He reloaded while moving, hands steady despite the rage making a live wire of his spine. Another four came through the cypress line on the east side, sweeping toward the church doors. Dex moved between headstones, using them the way lesser men used cover and smarter men used angles. He threw an old stone before the man could fire, because he needed him to drop the weapon, then threw a knife into the second’s exposed thigh, deep enough to make him buckle. The third got close. Dex let him, and he caught the man’s rifle barrel, redirected the shot into the stone at his feet, and slammed the butt of his own weapon into the man’s face until the mask cracked and the body limped.

The fourth hesitated, so all Dex had to do was put him down with a shot to the chest, then another to the head before he hit the wet grass.

He could still hear you through the door. “Like this?”

Barnes said something too low for Dex to catch.

You gave a small laugh.

Dex stopped breathing for half a second.

Then a bullet cracked against the stone column beside his head, spraying old dust across his cheek.

He turned toward the shooter and became what he was good at being.

The kill squad came in waves, and Dex dismantled them one by one. Three from the road, two from the lower wall, another pair trying to circle around the sacristy entrance. He moved constantly, cutting through the graveyard, forcing them into bad angles, making the churchyard’s dead stone work for him. A man lunged from behind with a blade; Dex caught the wrist, twisted until the joint failed, and drove the man’s own knife under his jaw. Another tried to retreat toward the road; Dex shot him through the calf, stepped over him, and finished him only after taking his spare magazine. It was definitely meaner than necessary, maybe, but he had Barnes’s voice in his head and no interest in being merciful.

Blood darkened the grass. Rain began again, soft at first, then heavier, ticking over helmets and stone crosses and the bodies Dex left where they fell. He was breathing hard by the time the last five made a push for the front doors, their boots pounding over the church steps. Dex came at them from the side.

He shot the man with the fancy scope first. The second man reached for it. Dex put a round through his wrist, then threw his empty magazine at the third man’s face hard enough to make him flinch at the wrong second. That second was plenty. Dex closed in, drew his sidearm, fired twice, then slammed the barrel into the last man’s throat when he tried to tackle him. The man gagged, stumbled, and Dex drove him backward into the church door with enough force to make the wood boom from the impact.

The man slid down the door, and Dex stood over him, rain dripping from his hair, blood spattered across his face and collar, chest rising and falling.

Through the thick old wood, he heard Barnes again. “That’s it. Good. Now wait for the second light.”

Good.

Dex’s fingers tightened around the gun.

Good.

Barnes was praising you. Barnes was inside, with you without even being inside. Barnes was at your shoulder, in your ear, useful and alive in all the places Dex wanted him dead. Dex had just killed fifteen men in the graveyard and on the church steps, had turned a kill squad into cooling meat, and still he had not managed to get Barnes out of the room.

When he went back inside, the church swallowed him whole. His boots tracked blood and rainwater down the nave. He passed beneath the broken blue glass while your voice drifted from below the altar. “Got it.”

The crypt panel was open now. A cold blue-white light spilled across the stone, illuminating your face from beneath while you crouched by the mechanism, one hand still on the panel, the phone lying on the floor beside you on speaker. You looked relieved and a little flushed from the rush of solving it. Dex hated how beautiful you looked like that. Hated that Barnes got to hear it.

“Good job,” Barnes said.

You smiled, and Dex felt it like a gunshot.

“Thanks,” you said.

Barnes was silent for a moment, and in that silence Dex imagined him somewhere far away, metal hand maybe resting on a kitchen counter, brow furrowed, voice gentle because he knew exactly how to be gentle with you. Because he had practiced. Because he wasn't a fuck buddy in some safehouse bed waiting for permission to matter.

Then Barnes said, “I… good luck, doll. We’ll catch up when you get back, yeah?”

The rage in Dex went utterly still, like a calm before the storm.

You reached for the phone. “Yeah. I’ll—”

Dex walked towards you in three strides and you looked up too late.

“Dex—”

He snatched the phone off the stone before you could touch it.

Barnes’s voice crackled through the speaker, confused now. “What’s—”

Dex smashed it against the floor. It was loud, amplified by the echo of the hall. The plastic cracked and glass burst outward in glittering pieces. The speaker gave a shrill little whine, but not enough. It wasn't dead enough.

Dex hit it again, harder, this time stomping it with his boots, the ruined device bouncing against the stone. A third stomp split the casing open. A fourth sent the battery skidding under the edge of the altar. He would have kept going until it was dust if your voice had not snapped him out of it.

“Dex!”

Dex froze over the pieces. For a second, the whole church held its breath.

Rain tapped against the shattered windows. Outside, one of the men he had left in the graveyard made a weak, wet sound and then stopped forever. The crypt light washed over you from below. Dex stood in front of you with blood on his hands, blood on his jacket, and the shattered remains of your phone between his boots.

You stared at it then at him as he took his mask off.

You were not confused anymore. You were angry.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” you demanded. “We got the cache. The lock is open. We can go!”

Dex laughed. It came out wrong, scraped raw in his throat. “You can go,” he said. “Maybe he can talk you through that too.”

Your eyes narrowed and your mind clicked into place to see just enough.

Not all of it, though. You could never see the full, ugly, pathetic cathedral of feeling he had built around every careless mention of Barnes’s name. Not the months of swallowing down jealousy. Not the way hearing Barnes’s voice had made Dex feel like he was standing outside his own body watching another man touch what he had never been allowed to keep.

Dex looked away because if he kept looking at you, he might say something dumb.

You stood slowly from the crypt steps. “You destroyed our only secure phone because Bucky helped me open a lock?”

“No.” The lie was so bad it was almost insulting.

You stared at him. “No?”

Dex’s teeth clenched once.

He had killed fifteen men outside without hesitation. Had moved through a kill squad like violence was language and he was finally fluent again. But this, standing in front of you while you looked at him like he was unreasonable, like he was the problem, like Barnes had not just reached through a phone and put his stupid vibranium arm around Dex’s throat.

“What, then?” you asked.

He said nothing.

Because if he opened his mouth, all of it would come out.

Because he called you doll and you smiled. Because you trusted his voice. Because he knew the lock and I didn’t. Because he had you first. Because he gets to be James and I’m your fuck buddy. Because I just killed fifteen men in the rain and came back to find you making plans with your ex-boyfriend to "catch up”.

Because I want to matter to you so badly I’m starting to hate you for not noticing.

He could not say any of that.

So he stood there, breathing hard, eyes fixed to a random point over your shoulder while the broken saints watched from the walls and the graveyard outside held the bodies of every man Dex had killed because rage was easier than asking you to choose him over that other man.

You stepped closer, anger burning bright in your face. “Dex.”

He looked back at you, and whatever you saw in his eyes made your own falter for half a second.

Then the mission reasserted itself.

You swallowed, “We need to move.”

Dex nodded once. “Then move.”

—

Turns out, Hydra had hidden enough weapons under the crypt to arm a small war, packed in old military cases and reinforced steel crates stamped with symbols half-scraped away. Some of it was familiar: guns, charges, vials long since gone dark inside cold-storage cylinders, and files sealed in polymer sleeves. Then there were the stranger things, things that made even you go quiet while you put them into inventory: crystalline components, serum stabilizers, old prototype tech sealed inside glass casings with warning labels in Russian and German.

Half of it was water-sensitive, which became a problem when the storm thundered.

It came down hard over the village, wind screaming through the cracked bell tower, rain hammering against the broken stained glass until the whole church seemed to tremble. Water sheeted down the outer walls and leaked through the roof in thin, shining threads.

Extraction was impossible because moving the cache would stupid. Trying to carry it out through that much rain would ruin half of what Charles needed and possibly kill both of you if one of the more unstable components reacted badly.

So you stayed. You and Dex packed what you could, sealed the crates, and wrapped the sensitive cases in altar cloths and plastic sheeting from your field bags. You worked in silence for nearly an hour, both of you moving around each other.

Neither of you mentioned the phone.

By the time everything was secured, Dex was sitting on the altar steps, forearms braced on his knees, hands loosely clasped in front of him. He had washed most of the blood from his fingers in a rain barrel near the side entrance, but some of it still clung beneath his skin. His jacket was damp. His hair was wet from outside. The scar on his cheekbone caught a bit of dirt and he hadn't bothered to clean properly.

You stood in the center of the altar above him, leaning back against the old stone podium with your arms crossed. The blue-white crypt light spilled up from behind you. The stained glass threw broken color over your face. The church was ruined, filthy, half-flooded by rain and full of weapons, and somehow you looked like you belonged at the center of it.

Dex tapped his knee twice, because he hated being silent with you.

Silence gave him time to feel things. Silence let the church fill with everything he was trying not to say. Barnes’s voice. He hated that he still expected to see you after the mission, as if he had the right to imagine your return, as if he had some claim on you after he dumped you.

Dex looked down at his hands and hated them for shaking. He lifted his eyes to look at you. You were staring out into the nave, not looking at him.

He should have apologized for the phone. He should have said something practical about the cache. He should have asked if you were cold.

Instead, because jealousy had been chewing through him for months and had finally eaten its way to bone, Dex asked, “Did you ever fuck Barnes in a church?”

The question should have been crude enough to make you angry. It was crude; Dex meant it to be. He wanted you to be angry at him. He wanted you to roll your eyes or call him a dickhead or throw something at him so the two of you could turn this into an easier emotion.

You didn't answer. You only looked away, and that was answer enough.

His face changed before he could stop it.

“No,” he said.

You stayed quiet.

The rain struck the windows harder, wind dragging it sideways against the glass in long furious sheets. “No,” Dex repeated, as if he said it again the universe might take pity on him and rearrange itself. “No.”

Your arms tightened over your chest. “Once,” you said.

A stake through the heart would have been kinder.

He stared at you from the altar steps, and the whole church seemed to gather to watch a wound open. The broken saints, the pews, the stone columns.He could see it without wanting to. You, in another church, another place, another mission, Barnes with you. Barnes, touching you where Dex had touched you. Barnes, hearing you gasp in a place people were supposed to pray.

Dex’s fingers curled against each other. “Where?” he asked.

He didn't want to know. He needed to know.

You hesitated. That pause was its own kind of mercy and its own kind of murder. “On a pew.”

Dex looked toward the old pews in the nave.

They were rotting, dusty, half-broken, washed in fractured color from the stained glass. Innocent objects, really. Nothing but dead wood. But Dex looked at them and hated every church ever built. He hated every prayer ever said. He hated every saint carved out of stone and every man forgiven by grace he had not earned.

Of course Barnes got to make sin romantic.

Of course Barnes got to be the good man and still have that with you. None who came out of Hydra clean stayed clean all the way through, and yet somehow Barnes had managed to become holy in your memory anyway. Saint James with the metal arm. They should really make him a statue just to give Dex the satisfaction of smashing it into million pieces.

You looked at him in a new light now. “Dex.”

Your voice had changed, like you had finally realized he had gone past ordinary jealousy and arrived somewhere even worse.

He stood, slowly, as if every movement had to be chosen. He climbed the altar steps toward you, hands loose at his sides, eyes fixed on yours, making the space between you feel dangerously thin.

You didn’t move away. You never did when you should have.

He stopped in front of you. You were still leaning against the podium, arms crossed, trying to look unbothered when the pulse at your throat had started to beat harder.

Dex looked down at you for one long second, then lowered himself to his knees.

Oh.

Your breath caught before you could hide it. Your perspective seemed to realign around the sight of Benjamin Leonard Poindexter kneeling in front of you on cold altar stone, not mocking, not joking, not pretending. His hands came to your waist, firm but not rough, as if he were afraid that if he touched you too carefully he might fall apart, and if he touched you too hard you might scare. But no, you didn't scare easy.

“Did he worship you?” Dex asked.

Your eyes darkened. “Dex.”

He hated the warning in your voice. “Did he?”

You swallowed. “That’s not—”

“Don’t.” His fingers flexed against your waist. “You know what I’m asking.”

You looked down at him, anger and affection warring across your face. He had seen you covered in blood, shaking from nightmares, laughing over terrible coffee, bored while fighting men who should have known better. He had seen you naked under safehouse sheets and pretending it didn't mean more than bodies passing time. But he didn't think he had ever seen you like this: trapped by sincerity.

You didn't know what to do with someone kneeling. Especially not him.

Dex leaned forward before you could answer and pressed his mouth to your stomach through your shirt.

The kiss was placed at the center of you like he was making a promise beneath the fabric, beneath the skin, beneath the version of you that knew how to survive but not how to be adored.

You went completely still. Dex closed his eyes. “I would,” he confessed.

Your hand hovered for a second near his shoulder like you didn't know whether to push him away or touch him.

“I would,” he repeated, and his mouth moved lower, another kiss to your hip, then the side of your waist, then just above the place where his hand held you. “If you stopped dragging his ghost into every room we’re in, I would.”

The words should have made you angry again, but all you could feel was endearment.

Dex looked up at you from his knees, and whatever mask he had been wearing was gone. There was no dry comment, no mean smile. Jealousy, yes, but not only jealousy. There was want, devotion, and hurt, tangled together until it looked almost like worship already.

“I don’t think there’s a God,” he whispered, just enough for you to hear.

Thunder rolled over the church roof as if answering.

Dex laughed faintly, eyes still on you. “No, I don’t. I look at the world and I think there can’t be. Not a good one. Not a fair one. Not if your handlers can make places like Siberia. Not if they can put you in that chair. Not if they can take someone like Barnes and hollow him out and then hand him back to the world like the world is supposed to know what to do with him. Not if they can make me and still expect me to be grateful to be alive.”

His thumb dragged slowly over your waist, grounding himself. “Most days, I think if there is something up there, it’s either blind or cruel.”

You should have said something, but you could not.

Dex was looking at you like he had started confessing and didn't know how to stop, like the church had brought out the darkest parts of him, and now all the things he had swallowed for months were spilling out at your feet.

“And then I think of him,” he said, the word bitten off with bitterness. “James Buchanan Barnes. And I hate him. I hate him so much it’s stupid. It’s pathetic. I know that. I know exactly how pathetic it is, and it doesn’t help.”

Your lips parted, but Dex shook his head once, not letting you interrupt.

“He gets to be the good one. The Winter Soldier who became a hero. He gets to have done terrible things and still be looked at like the tragedy belongs to him instead of the people he killed.” His jaw flexed. “And maybe that’s fair. Maybe he suffered enough. Maybe he earned whatever peace he found. I don’t know. I don’t care. I can’t fucking care.”

Your hand lowered onto his shoulder. Dex’s eyes flicked to it, then back up at you.

Your touch was light, but he looked like it nearly undid him.

“But I care that he got you first,” Dex said, and that was the confession beneath all his sorrows. “He got to know you before me. He got the history, the forgiveness. He gets to be James. I get to be Benjamin when you’re mad at me and Dex when you want me and fuck buddy when you’re trying not to think.”

You sighed. He was wrong, and you wanted him to know. He was wrong, but he would not let you talk your way out of this.

“That’s not fair,” he whispered, and he sounded so furious with himself for saying it that it hurt. “That’s the part that makes me think there’s no God. Because what kind of divine hand puts you in the world and lets someone else find you first?”

The storm crashed outside, hard enough to make the stained glass tremble.

Dex leaned in again, pressing another kiss to your stomach, then another along your belt line, then to the top of your thigh through the fabric of your clothes, each one less controlled than the last but still reverent. Then he looked up at you again, eyes dark and fever-bright.

“But then I look at you,” he said, “and I think I’m wrong.”

You stared down at him. “About God?” you asked quietly.

“About there not being one.” Dex’s hands tightened at your waist, not enough to hurt, enough to say he was holding on to the thought with both hands.

“Because you don’t happen by accident,” he said. “You can’t. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the universe is that careless. I don’t believe a bullet just missed and that’s why you’re here. I don’t believe you survived because Zemo’s aim was off by half an inch. I don’t believe you happened by chance.”

Your eyes darted, tears welling on the corners. He saw the exact moment the words went under your armor and found skin. Because that had been the story, hadn’t it? The only reason you were alive was because someone had failed to kill you correctly. You had built yourself around that fact, maybe without meaning to. You had seen yourself as the surviving mistake, the remaining weapon. Dex looked at you like he wanted to tear that version of the story apart with his teeth.

“No,” he said, as if you had argued with him. “No. Some divine hand must have made you. Something had to. Because you’re too—”

He stopped, jaw working, searching for words and hating that none of them were enough.

“You’re too… perfect,” he said finally, almost angry with how mild it sounded.

A faint, wounded sound escaped you.

Dex rose slightly on his knees, still not standing, still keeping himself below you.

“Hydra tried to turn you into a weapon,” he said. “That’s all they know how to do. But they didn’t make you. They don’t get credit. They don’t get credit for who you are. They don’t get credit for the way you taste like rain after a fight or the way you stand in this ruined church like the whole place was built just to make light fall on you properly.”

Your fingers tightened on his shoulder, and they shifted slower to his neck.

When he looked back up, his voice had gone lower. “You are part of some grand design I don’t understand,” he said. “You must be, because if you’re an accident, then nothing means anything. If you’re just what was left after everyone else died, then the whole world is worse than I thought.”

He put his forehead against your diaphragm just so he could feel you breathe. For a moment, he just stayed there.

You looked down at him, and your hand moved into his hair. Carefully, like he was the dangerous thing and you were the one trying not to startle him.

Dex shuddered.

“You’re not an accident,” he said against you. “You’re not someone’s failed termination. You’re not his second chance story either. You’re not proof Barnes got better. You’re not proof of anything but yourself.”

Your throat tightened.“Dex.”

He lifted his head, and the look on face made your chest ache.

“I would worship you,” he said. “Do you understand that? I don’t mean I’d say pretty things and get on my knees because it looks good in a church. I mean I would build my days around it. I would make a liturgy out of it. I would become unbearable about it. I would be so devoted you’d hate me for it.”

You tried to breathe evenly, but failed.

“I’d worship the weapon too,” he said. “That’s the part you never understand. You think people only get to love one side of you? I want all of it. I’d kiss the knuckles you break skulls with. I’d kiss the bruises that heal before sunset. I’d kiss the scar tissue and the places they put needles and your pretty mouth that keeps saying his name because you don’t realize what it does to me.”

Your hand tightened in his hair, tugging, simply just because you knew he liked it.

He smiled faintly, almost ruined by it.

“There,” he murmured. “See? That. I’d worship that too.”

You looked down at him, eyes dark now, anger and heat and desire moving through them all at once. The storm had swallowed the world outside. The church smelled like rain, stone, old incense, blood, and the cold metal of Hydra crates waiting below. It should have been an ugly place. Maybe it was.

But Dex was on his knees in front of you, talking nonsense about God and design and worship like a man bleeding out through his mouth, and somehow the ruined church felt less like a tomb than a threshold.

“You’re insane,” you whispered.

“Yes,” he said immediately, like it was the easiest confession in the world.

That almost made you laugh, but the sound tangled in your throat and came out uneven.

Dex’s hands slid slowly from your waist to your hips, then back again, like he could not stop reassuring himself that you were close. His mouth brushed the side of your thigh through your clothes, then your hip, then your stomach again, each kiss more desperate than the last because the words had only made the wanting worse.

“I would,” he said again. “I fucking would.”

“Dex,” you called. When he looked up, you said, “Don’t make promises you can’t survive.”

For a second, the devotion turned visibly dangerous. “Oh,” he said certainly. “I’d survive you.”

You should have pushed him away.

Maybe that would have been kinder. Maybe that would have given both of you a chance to step back from the edge of whatever terrible, reverent sacrifice he had just placed at your feet.

Instead, your hand slid from his hair to the side of his face, your thumb brushing over the scar along his cheekbone.

For a second, you only looked at him.

Then you pulled him up.

You caught him by the front of his damp shirt and dragged him to his feet like you had run out of patience with being adored from a distance. Dex came willingly, his hands sliding from your waist to your hips as he rose into your space. He stopped close, eyes dropping to your mouth the second he was level with you.

“You want worship?” you asked, voice barely above the rain.

Dex’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”

Your fingers fisted tighter in his shirt. “Then show me.”

Whatever restraint he had left vanished.

Dex kissed you hard, the force of it driving your back into the cold stone podium. Not like the cottage, not like that first furious interruption. This was worse: It had all the confession in it, all the jealousy. His mouth claimed yours like prayer and punishment at once, desperate enough to make you hiss into him.

Dex swallowed the sound like communion.

His hands gripped your hips, pulling you closer, needing proof that the woman he had just called divine was choosing him. The storm broke over the church in a roar, rain pouring through the cracks in the roof.

Before he could think better of it, he dragged you to the other side of the old stone podium, and your back hit the edge of it with a dull sound swallowed by thunder.

He turned you toward the pews. He knew exactly what you were. He knew that you could have thrown him halfway down the aisle if you wanted.

You didn't.

You let him guide you forward until your palms braced against the cold stone. You let him settle behind you. You grinded against him fully clothed, and he moaned anyway. His chest was your back, his breath hot in your ear. Let his hands move over you like he was both claiming and praying.

The empty seats stretched out before you in dark, rotting rows, facing the altar like an audience waiting for confession. Dex saw them over your shoulder, saw the ruined aisle, the broken glass, the blue glow from the crypt below. His imagination had the whole church watching. Every ghost, every ruined saint, every dead thing in the walls forced to witness the truth of what you had become to him.

His mouth found the side of your neck, then your shoulder, then the place just below your ear that made your fingers curl against the stone.

Before you knew it, fabric shifted and zippers gave out. His touch grew greedier, less patient, dragging away layers of clothing like they offended him.

“You’re perfect,” he said.

You swallowed hard. “Dex.”

“No.” His mouth pressed to your bare shoulder. You were naked now, your tactical trousers pooling at your ankles, while he was still annoyingly clothed. Surprisingly, it didn't feel humiliating. It felt thrilling. “You don’t get to argue with me about this.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You always do.” His voice was low, finally fumbling with his trousers. “You always act like it’s nothing, like you’re less than because you think you were made by them.”

His hands slid to your hips again. “But look at you.”

The storm roared overhead, and the church seemed to breathe around you. You could feel him behind you, all heat and muscle and restraint worn down to nothing.

His hand came up to cover yours on the podium, fingers sliding between yours, pressing your palm harder to the stone. The gesture was grounding and possessive all at once. His other arm wrapped around your waist, holding you back against him, and his mouth found your ear.

“This is what worship feels like,” he whispered before bending you over to fuck you like you were delivering sermon.

—

An hour later, the storm had calmed down

Not stopped; not even close. Rain still sheeted against the broken church windows and slipped through the cracks in the roof in thin silver lines, dripping onto stone, into puddles.

You sat together on the steps of the altar.

After wearing each other out, Dex had found the thermal blanket in your pack. He had pulled it free with hands that were still a little unsteady and wrapped it around both of you like the act of keeping you warm was something he could understand better than whatever had just happened between you.

You were tucked against his side now, shoulder pressed to his ribs, one of his arms around you beneath the blanket. Your clothes were still drying on the makeshift line you had made. Your hair was still a mess, your skin warm where his mouth had been. Dex had his chin tipped slightly downward, pressing his cheek to your temple.

He wasn't talking. This was how you knew he was still bleeding somewhere you could not see.

You shifted beneath the blanket, close enough that your knee brushed his. “Dex.”

His arm tightened slightly around you as a reply

You looked down at your hands, then out toward the ruined church. “You never had to worry about Bucky,” you said.

Dex went very still.

It was almost impressive, how completely he could vanish into his own body without moving at all. His breathing didn't change, but you felt something was off.

“I’m serious,” you added quietly.

He looked down at you then. There was no sarcasm in his face. There was only caution, like if he let himself want to believe you, it would become another way to get hurt.

You hated that a little. You hated that you had helped put it there.

“I don’t love him that way,” you said.

Dex’s brows furrowed.

“Not anymore, and I haven’t for a while. It got complicated towards the end, before either of us knew what to do with it.” You exhaled slowly, trying to make the words come out right. “But I don’t want him like that. I don’t think about him like that. I don’t want to touch him. I don’t want him touching me, not the way I want you.”

Dex blinked once.

I want you.

Did he hear that right?

His fingers tightened very slightly at your waist under the blanket.

You gave him a faint, humorless smile. “I know I talk about him too much.”

Dex looked away.

“I didn’t realize what it sounded like,” you admitted.

The rain filled the silence for a moment.

Then you said, “Bucky was... proof, I think.”

Dex’s eyes moved back to you.

You searched for the right way to say it. It was difficult. Not because you didn't know the truth, but because you had never had to explain it out loud.

“He was Hydra’s weapon,” you said. “And then he wasn’t. He was still damaged, but he was free. He chose things. He chose Steve and Sam, and the Wakandans and me. He chose to fight. He chose to stop being what they made him.” Your throat tightened around the next words. “I needed to know that was possible.”

You saw comprehension take form behind his eyes.

“When Steve was around, he was that to me, too,” you continued. “Not the Hydra part, obviously. But he was a super soldier who could’ve been used as a weapon by anyone with a flag and a speech, and instead he fought for what he believed in. He disobeyed when it mattered. He was made and still stayed his own.”

You looked out at the pews.

“And I never loved Steve like that. He was my friend. My irritating, Nazi-killing, righteous friend.” Your mouth curved softly. “And Bucky is my friend, too. Even now.”

Dex was quiet. You looked up at him again. “I think I talked about him because I didn’t know how else to explain what I wanted to become.”

Oh.

Dex stared at you like something had finally clicked into place.

Inside Dex, the jealousy loosened all at once.

It didn't disappear; he wasn't that kind of man. Jealousy didn't simply leave because it had been reasoned with. It would probably still bare its teeth the next time Barnes called you, because Dex was Dex and wanting made a monster out of him faster than anything else.

But he understood now.

Bucky Barnes had not been a rival in the way Dex had imagined. Barnes had been a direction, a fixed point. He was your fucked up version of a North Star.

Dex knew what that was.

Eileen Mercer, and then Julie Barnes had been that for him once. It was never really romantic, but rather a proof of concept. A person he had turned into a map because he didn't trust himself to know where goodness was unless someone else stood there holding it.

Dex looked at you then, with the blanket tucked around your shoulders and your face softened by the blue gloom from the crypt. You had made Bucky into something similar. Not a lover you were still reaching for, but a symbol. A blueprint.

It made Dex feel better. It also broke his heart a little, because of course you had done that. Of course you had taken a person and turned him into proof you could survive. Of course you had mistaken a man for a conscience because nobody had ever taught you how to trust your own direction.

You were more alike than he had realized.

Not in the neat ways. Not in the ways Charles’s files could measure. In pathetic ways. In starving ways. In the way both of you had looked at someone else and thought, if I stand close enough, maybe it’ll rub off on me. It was almost funny that you had found vastly different people that happened to have the same last name to call a moral compass, and somehow still ended up in each other’s arms.

Maybe that was a confirmation of a higher power, and that they had a sense of humour.

You watched him carefully. “Say something.”

His mouth curved faintly. “You’re asking the wrong man.”

“No, I’m not.”

That got him a little.

His eyes dropped to your mouth, then back to your face. “You really didn’t know?” he asked.

“That it hurt you?”

He looked away, and you felt awful immediately.

“Dex.”

He huffed a quiet laugh, but there was no humor in it. His hand shifted beneath the blanket, fingers finding yours, almost awkwardly. Dex stared at your joined hands.

“You called me your fuck buddy,” he said.

You winced. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought...” You swallowed. “I thought making it casual would make it safer.”

He tilted his head. “For who?”

You didn't answer fast enough.

Dex’s expression softened in the smallest, most devastating way. He understood that too. You had not called him casual because he meant nothing. You had called him casual because he had started meaning too much.

Your hand tightened around his.

“I’m sorry,” you said.

Dex looked like he didn't know what to do with that. So you shifted closer, blanket rustling around both of you, and pressed your forehead against his shoulder.

For a moment, he stayed rigid. Then, his arm came around you properly.

“You’re not Bucky,” you said against him.

Dex made a faint, bitter sound. “Yeah, I got that.”

You lifted your head and looked at him. “I don’t want you to be.”

His face, when he looked back at you, was vulnerable the way you had never seen before

“I want you,” you said.

His eyes searched yours, suspicious of mercy, suspicious of happiness. Instead you gave him the truth plainly. “I love you, Dex.”

The words were not loud, but the church heard them anyway.

For a second, he looked almost frightened. Not of you, but of the fact that he now had something to lose.

Your thumb brushed over his knuckles. “Dex.”

His eyes closed, just for a moment

When he opened them again, he leaned in slowly, giving you all the time in the world to pull away, and rested his forehead against yours.