Little Monster
Summary : Your first date with Dex turns out to be an unforgettable one.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x Vigilante! reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : Freak4freak, pen pal (?) meet cute, Romcom/dark comedy, Dex and reader being equally insane, task force murdered, stalking, break-ins, stolen clothing, surveillance photos, kidnapping, guns/knives/blood, food, sexual tension (no actual smut), you have a roommate called Mia and she's mentioned to be an arms dealer. (let me know if I missed anything!) Set in DDBA S2!
Word Count : 9.7k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : Y’all I have lots of work this week, so I won't be posting as much. I do have a John Walker kofi request for this Friday, and Bucky and Dex Blurbs scattered throughout the week. The title is inspired by a Royal Blood song of the same name. Enjoy!
You had never actually met Bullseye.
This, unfortunately, had never stopped him from ruining your day.
You picked up the paper, saw BULLSEYE STRIKES AGAIN printed above a body you had stabbed seven times, and nearly spat coffee all over the kitchen counter.
“Oh, fuck off.”
Your roommate, Mia, looked up from the table, where she was eating cereal beside an open ammo case. “Good morning?”
The guns she was disassembling meant there was less room for your food, but hey, you’ve gotten used to living with an arms dealer. Could you really complain? She gives you a friend-exclusive discount, after all.
You slapped the paper down in front of her. “They gave him credit for another one.”
Mia leaned over the headline. “Another another one?”
“Yes, another another one.”
She glanced past you at the fridge.
You didn’t need to look. You knew what was there.
Pinned under a strawberry magnet and a concerning number of takeout menus was the magnetic whiteboard you had made two weeks ago.
At the top, in red marker:
KILLS BULLSEYE STOLE FROM ME: 4
Underneath, in blue:
KILLS I STOLE FROM BULLSEYE: 4
Beneath that, taking up most of the fridge, were the newspaper clippings. Task force murders that were yours but had been attributed to him. Task force murders that were his but had somehow been attributed to you, because apparently every cop in the city had been dropped on the head as a baby.
Mia slowly chewed her cereal. “You’re losing.”
Your head snapped toward her. “We were tied.”
“Were.”
You scowled, tore the article out of the paper with unnecessary violence, grabbed a marker from the junk drawer, and stormed over to the board. You begrudgingly added one angry little tally mark that went under Bullseye’s side.
5.
Mia made a soft, faux-sympathetic noise. “Oof.”
“This is not oof,” you rolled your eyes. “This is fucking police incompetence! What was all that budget increase for, huh?”
“It is kind of oof.” She took another bite of cereal. “But you can catch up. He’s only up by one.”
You stared at the board. Your eye twitched.
Mia lifted her bowl toward you like a toast. “Very exciting season.”
“These stupid cops can’t tell the difference between a stab and a long-distance throw.” You turned back around, waving the paper like evidence in a trial you were fully prepared to win. “Look at the wound. Look at it. That’s clearly close quarters.”
Mia squinted at the grainy crime scene photo, her spoon hovering halfway to her mouth. The image was bad, blurred edges and cheap newspaper ink, but even from across the kitchen she could tell what it was: yours.
“Maybe they thought Bullseye walked up to him,” Mia said.
You stared at her.
“Bullseye doesn’t walk up to people. He has a ricochet fetish.”
Mia choked on a laugh, nearly spilling cereal milk onto the table. “Oh, so now you know him.”
You corrected her. “I know his work.”
“You know his work,” she repeated, deadpan. “You mean you’ve been staring at the leaked photos you saved again?”
You ignored her, because Mia had this very annoying habit of being right in ways that didn’t make you feel good about yourself.
The worst part was that you were angry.
That had been your kill. It was clearly your style. You were a melee specialist, for fuck’s sake!!! You liked the intimacy, the nearness. You like watching the life drain out of your victims’ eyes, being close enough to watch their face change when they finally understood why you were there.
Bullseye was different.
Bullseye liked a little distance. Bullseye was impossible accuracy. He could turn a room into a murder weapon without crossing it, and no, you definitely didn’t admire that.
You just understood skill when you saw it.
That was all.
But under the anger, in the small, horrible place where your dignity went to die, there was a humiliating feeling that curled in your stomach every time you thought about him opening the paper.
Because Bullseye was going to see this.
He was going to read the same headline, look at the same shitty photo, and know it was wrong.
He would know.
Maybe he would be offended. Maybe he would laugh. Maybe he would tilt his head at the paper and think, No. That wasn’t me.
Maybe he would wonder about you, and at this point, you were certain he knew of you. Because some of his knife-related rampages had been attributed to you too. Not often, but enough that sometimes your name got dragged into his mess, enough that you had stared at a clipping once for ten full minutes, heart crawling up your throat, because the paper had called one of his kills yours and you had hated how badly you wanted to know whether he had noticed.
Mia was staring at you again.
You folded the paper too carefully. “What?”
“You’re doing the thing again”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you pretend to be mad,” she said, pointing her spoon at you, “but really you’re hoping your murder crush noticed you.”
You frowned “He’s not my murder crush.”
Mia smiled into her cereal and ignored the denial altogether. “Want me to get you more knives for today?”
You looked down at the headline.
“Yes,” you finally said. “The nice ones.”
Mia’s grin got wider. “You dressing up, too? Just in case you run into him?”
“I’m hunting,” you corrected.
“Sure.”
“I am.”
“Wear something slutty and stab-proof!”
You threw the newspaper at her.
—
Later that night, you went out in the jacket Mia called your “bad decision jacket” (it had extra knife sheaths) which was rich coming from a woman who kept grenades in a biscuit tin.
You were definitely not hoping to run into Bullseye. You were working.
There was a difference, even if Mia would have said hahhaha, sure.
The AVTF agents were exactly where your source said they would be, inside a half-empty municipal building wearing the kind of confidence that came from believing the badge still meant something. They had files they should not have had, names they should not have known, and enough blood on their hands to make your little visit feel almost civic-minded.
You made it quick.
Messy, but quick.
You handled most of it the way you liked best: Close, direct, personal enough that nobody could pretend it was an accident. But halfway through, because you were still one point behind on the stupid fridge-board and your pride had apparently become an emergency, you tried to make it look like Bullseye.
Just a little. Just enough to even the score.
You threw a knife. It hit a filing cabinet and dropped to the floor with the saddest little clatter you had ever heard.
One of the AVTF men stared at it like what the fuck was that?
“Shut up,” you said, before he could say anything.
Then you threw a smaller knife, in the hopes that it was easier to control.
It bounced off a desk lamp, went nowhere useful, and spun under a chair.
Fine.
Whatever.
Throwing stuff was harder than it looked, which was annoying because he made it look like flirting with physics. You were not built for distance. So you gave up and did it properly.
By the time you left, the crime scene was mostly yours, with two deeply humiliating attempts at his signature scattered around like evidence of a mental breakdown. You lingered on the fire escape for a few seconds longer than necessary, checking the neighbouring rooftops.
Nothing.
No figure in black. No little glint of movement across the street.
Which was fine.
Obviously.
You were not disappointed.
—
When you got home, Mia was out. Work, she had said, which meant she was probably meeting Turk in the back of some terrible bar and calling an arms deal “networking”.
The apartment was dark when you unlocked the door.
Not unusual.
You stepped in, a takeout bag hanging from one hand, the other already sliding toward the knife under your jacket. The kitchen was empty. Mia’s cereal bowl was still in the sink. Mia’s boots were next to your sneakers.
Everything seemed normal until you saw the fridge.
Huh.
Your magnetic board had been straightened.
Not cleaned or erased. It was fixed.
The crooked newspaper clippings had been lined up into neat rows. The takeout menus had been stacked by alphabetic order, it seemed. The strawberry magnet sat dead centre at the top, no longer holding up three different things at once. Even the tallies had been corrected into clearer, cleaner marks.
And below your personal Bullseye vs Me board, in new black marker, someone had written:
I’ve been looking for you too.
Your gaze snapped to the wide-open window, and realised, oh my god.
He had been here.
—
Dex came back to his studio apartment with a smile on his face.
He locked the door behind him, slid the chain into place, and reached into his jacket for the shirt he had taken from your apartment.
Your shirt. It was a plain white shirt he’d seen you wear before, and you looked pretty in it. I mean, Dex thought you looked pretty all the time, but still.
The fabric was soft in his hands. In his head, it still felt warm, even though it had just been hanging over the back of a chair when he found it. You had been careless and made it easy for him, really. You basically left it out like you had no idea someone could come in through your window and take a piece of you home with him.
Dex knew better now.
He knew how your apartment sounded in the dark. He knew which floorboard creaked near the kitchen. He knew your roommate left dishes in the sink. He knew your takeout menus were a mess, your knives were hidden well but not well enough, and your window lock was insultingly easy to pick.
He knew how you smelled now.
Dex sat on the edge of his bed and brought the shirt to his face, breathing in like he was trying to memorise your scent: Detergent, metal, and city smoke.
He closed his eyes.
He had stalked people before. Julie. Matt. Vanessa. Targets. Problems. People he wanted. People he needed to understand. But this was different.
This was not surveillance, or a job, or a petty attempt to become a good person, whatever that meant anymore.
This was you.
Dex had been infatuated with you since the first time he saw one of your kills credited to him.
From there, he found a photo of you in the database: grainy, badly angled, and almost useless for the cops. You had silver reflective paint smeared around your eyes to ruin facial recognition, strange under the flash, but Dex knew enough to know what he was looking at.
Before long, he figured out who you were.
And now, he had been watching your window for almost a month.
Tonight was just the first time you and Mia were both gone long enough for him to finally climb inside.
And then, he found that you had made a board.
The thought should have made him happy, and it had, at first. For one perfect second in your dark kitchen, Dex had stood in front of that fridge and realised, you had noticed him, too.
You had clipped the articles. You had tracked the kills. You had written his name in red marker and stood there thinking about him long enough to make tallies.
Then he read the rest.
KILLS BULLSEYE STOLE FROM ME.
His smile had died so fast it almost broke his heart.
Stole.
You thought this was a competition.
Dex stared down at your shirt in his lap, fingers tightening in the fabric.
That was wrong.
That was so wrong it made his skin feel too tight for his body. He had not stolen anything from you. He had never thought of it that way. Every time the papers confused you for him or him for you, every time your names bled into each other in some stupid journalist’s mouth, Dex had felt it like a sign that you belonged together.
The mistaken murders were just evidence that you were close to him without even trying. Your work was intertwined, cosmically, with his. Your violence answered his. His name kept finding yours in the paper, in police files, like the whole city already understood a fact you were denying.
You and Dex were linked.
Obviously.
So why had you made sides?
Why had you put a line down the middle and placed him across from you like he was just another person to beat?
Dex swallowed, still holding your shirt to his mouth and frowned.
He thought you liked him.
He thought you understood. He thought, maybe, when you saw his kills printed under your name, you felt the same obsessive pull he did. The same recognition.
Instead, you were mad. You were keeping score. You had written him down like a rival.
His jaw tightened.
That was okay.
It really was.
You were confused, that’s all. You had misunderstood. People did that all the time.
You would understand eventually.
He had fixed the board for you, so maybe you’d realise there was no ill intent. He had straightened the clippings. Alphabetised the menus. Corrected the tallies. Left the message underneath because you needed help getting to the obvious conclusion that you belonged together:
I’ve been looking for you too.
In his head, it didn’t look threatening. It was merely a correction. Perhaps a little nudge in the right direction.
Dex lay back on the bed, dragging your shirt with him until it was pressed beneath his cheek. He breathed you in again, slower this time, and the hurt in his chest eased.
You thought it was a game.
Fine.
He could play.
He could let you have your angry little board and your angry little tally marks. He could let you pretend you were chasing him, fighting him, competing with him.
But eventually, Dex would fix that, too.
Eventually, you’d want him as much as he wanted you.
—
You wiped the note off before Mia got home, even though you didn’t really want to.
You stood there for an embarrassingly long time first, staring at the neat black marker beneath your board while your stomach did a stupid flip.
Then you remembered Mia was weird about outside people being in the apartment.
Fair. You were also weird about outside people being in the apartment, usually. Usually, if someone broke in, you handled it with a knife and made Mia bleach the floor while you tied a brick to the body and sunk it in the Hudson.
But this was Bullseye.
So you erased it, like an idiot getting rid of DNA evidence.
You wiped the board twice, fixed the strawberry magnet, and tried to look normal when Mia came home carrying a bag that clinked against her hip.
She stopped in the kitchen doorway and squinted. “Did you redo the murder board?”
You didn’t look up from your hot chocolate. “No.”
Mia stared at the fridge.
The whole thing looked less like a breakdown and more like a very well-done administrative system. “Why is it nicer?”
You took a sip. “I got bored.”
Mia looked at you. You looked at her.
Then she shrugged. “Whatever. It was ugly before.”
Totally clueless, Thank fuck.
By the next morning, you had bought reinforced locks, and not because you were scared of him getting into your apartment again. If anything, the memory of the open window had been sitting in your mind all night. You kept thinking about him standing in your kitchen. Touching your board. Straightening your things. Writing to you like he already knew you would read it and think about it all night.
So no, the new locks were not there out of fear. They were a message.
You installed them yourself, one after another, until all the windows looked almost impossible to open from the outside.
Then you stood back, smiled despite yourself, and imagined him finding it.
He’d know the message then:
If you want to get in again, earn it.
—
Three nights later, the paper was waiting on the kitchen table.
Mia had left it there under her empty coffee cup, either as a warning or because she had run out of coasters. You found it while the kettle boiled, still barefoot, still half-asleep, and then very suddenly awake.
AVTF INFORMANT FOUND DEAD.
You stared at the headline.
Then the photograph.
Then the headline again, and then the subtitle, crediting the kill to you,
But that kill wasn’t yours.
You knew it before you read the article. You knew it from the angle of the body, the precision of the knife in a fatal artery. He had not been stabbed. He had been aimed at by distance, by calculation.
Bullseye.
And the papers had given it to you.
For a second, all you could do was stand there while the kettle clicked off behind you.
Then you smiled a small, helpless twitch of your mouth before you walked across the kitchen, uncapped the blue marker, and added one clean tally to your side of the board.
5-5.
Yay! Level again!
You leaned back on your heels and looked at it.
Perfect.
Almost.
You picked up the paper again, meaning to cut out the article, when something in the crime scene photo caught your eye. It was half-hidden behind the dead man’s shoulder, smeared on the wall, small enough that most readers would miss it.
Not a threat or a boast, but a question, written in blood.
why the locks?
Your hand tightened around the paper.
Oh.
He’d left you a message.
You could almost feel him in your kitchen again, standing in the dark in front of your board, touching the magnets, straightening the clippings, noticing what had changed. Of course he had noticed the locks.
You stood there for too long, long enough that the tea went bitter in the mug you forgot to drink.
When Mia came in later, tying her hair back and looking for her keys, you had already finished cutting the article out with careful hands.
She glanced at the board.
“Even again?”
“Mhm.”
“Congrats.”
She took her keys off the hook and left without noticing the way your fingers hovered over the little blood-written question in the photograph.
Good.
You did not need an audience for whatever this was becoming.
—
You answered him three nights later, when you eventually found Benjamin Poindexter’s apartment building.
It took patience, two evenings of watching, a borrowed set of binoculars. One very stupid moment where you almost slipped on a drainpipe and decided not to think about how humiliating it would be to die before the flirting even got interesting.
But eventually, you found his window. Child’s play, really. As if going under a stupid fake name like “Tony” would ever hide him from you.
That night, you waited until the light in his apartment went off.
Then you left a brand new lock on his fire escape.
The same brand as the ones you had put on your windows. Heavy, reinforced, and annoyingly expensive. It was still sealed in its packaging, with the little paper instructions tucked under the shackle.
You added a note:
Jealous?
Then you left.
—
Dex found it before sunrise.
He hadn’t slept much. He had your shirt twisted between his fingers, the fabric pressed into his palm until his knuckles ached. He had been sitting across the window for hours the night before, looking across at your apartment, at the little row of reinforced locks catching the streetlight like tiny silver insults.
You were keeping him out.
On purpose.
He kept telling himself not to be hurt by it, which was useless, because he was hurt. He was so fucking hurt it made his chest feel crushed, like an anvil had been dropped on his ribs and left there. You had changed the windows because of him. You had looked at the place where he got in, thought about him standing in your kitchen, touching your things, breathing your air, and your first instinct had been to shut him out.
Dex hated that.
Dex hated that so much he almost hated you for half a second.
Then, that morning, he opened his window and saw the lock waiting on his fire escape.
He went still.
It sat there perfectly placed, right where his hand would find it. Same brand as yours, same little shine in the dark.
For a moment, he didn’t touch it.
Then he picked up the note.
Dex read it once.
And then, he smiled.
Because now he knew you hadn’t locked him out because you wanted him gone.
You had wanted him to notice.
You had wanted him to see the effort. You had wanted him to look at your windows and understand that you had been thinking about him too. You had not made a wall. You had made a challenge. You had left him the same lock like a matching star, like a little joke only the two of you were deranged enough to understand.
Dex sat on the fire escape with the lock in his hand until the sky began to lighten.
The note went into his wallet.
The lock went on his window.
—
The next mistake came no less than a week later.
You had gone out the night before. You had driven the knives into the agents and controlled the room, kept the distance intimate enough that any half-competent investigator should have known better.
Unfortunately, half-competent was not what New York had.
By morning, the headline said it was Bullseye.
You stared at the paper in silence. Ugh. You were losing again.
That was irritating, up until you realised he would see it.
He would know the city had handed him something that belonged to you again, and you hated how badly you wanted to know whether that would make him smile.
It did.
Dex smiled so hard it almost hurt.
He read the article at the counter of a diner, coffee untouched, thumb pressed lightly over the blurred photograph like he could feel the shape of your work through the cheap ink.
Obviously yours.
They had called it his, but it was yours. Anyone who understood you would know that.
I understand you.
The thought sat inside him like a lit match.
He folded the article with almost painful care and took it home.
That night, when you came back to your apartment, nothing was out of place.
The windows were shut. The door was bolted. Every lock you had installed still sat exactly where it was supposed to, heavy and unpicked.
For one stupid second, you were disappointed.
Then you saw the kitchen window. Outside the glass, taped neatly to the pane where you could not miss it, was the newest clipping.
Oh. So he had climbed all the way up to your window, pressed flat against the glass like an offering.
At the bottom of the clipping, in small black marker, Dex had written:
they got it wrong again.
Your heart climbed into your throat.
You stepped closer until your reflection overlapped the words. It looked strange like that, his handwriting across your chest in the dark glass.
It was as if it was the two of you against everyone else’s incompetence.
You didn’t leave it there. Mia would see it in the morning. Mia would ask why Bullseye was leaving notes on your window like some homicidal pen pal, and you had no answer that didn’t sound insane. That, and Mia just ordered in a bunch of assault rifles. The last thing you needed was your roommate pointing it at Dex when he visited.
So you opened the window just enough to reach out, peeled the clipping carefully off the glass, and tore away the strip with Dex’s writing.
You didn’t throw it out. Instead, you folded that little scrap of paper twice and tucked it into your jacket pocket, right over your heart like an idiot.
Then you pinned the clipping to the fridge yourself, neat and straight beneath the strawberry magnet, just the way Dex would like it.
You updated the score, still a bit annoyed.
6-5
And somewhere outside, across the dark gap between buildings, you hoped he had seen you keep it.
—
The next one made it even again.
You knew it the second you saw the headline, before you even got to the photograph. There was a kind of cleanliness to Dex’s violence that the papers never understood. They called it brutality because they didn’t have better words, but you did.
TASK FORCE OFFICER FOUND DEAD IN ALLEY.
Attributed to you.
You stood in front of the bodega newspaper rack for so long the man behind the counter asked if you were buying it or grieving it.
By the time you got home, the board was waiting for you.
You added the blue tally slowly, smiling despite yourself.
6-6.
They had given you his kill, and you should have been pleased because that was the game. That was the whole stupid point. But instead, your eyes kept drifting back to the photograph, to the blurred dark shape on the floor beside the victim’s hand.
It was a knife.
His, you thought.
Maybe the police had missed it in the chaos of the shot, or maybe the photographer had caught it before evidence got bagged. Either way, once you noticed it, you couldn’t stop looking.
He had left something behind, but he wasn’t careless
Which meant he had either wanted it found, or he had been interrupted.
So you went to the scene of the crime.
You waited until the scene thinned out, until the uniforms got bored and the detectives started making the kind of mistakes tired people made. You kept to the edges: fire escapes, alleys, rooflines, with the courtesy of a little patience.
To your surprise, the knife was still there, half-hidden beneath a radiator, dark with day-old blood, beautiful even like that.
You took it.
At home, you cleaned it carefully, until it gleamed again under the kitchen light. You sharpened the edge until it caught against your thumb, cutting a little bit of your skin to check.
A little blood trickled off. Yep. Sharp enough.
Then, you wrapped it in a strip of clean white cloth and waited until night.
You climbed the rooftop up until you got to Dex’s apartment building. His window was closed when you reached his fire escape.
The lock you had given him sat there now, installed properly, bright on the frame. For one second, the sight of it made your heart warm.
He had actually used it.
You crouched outside the glass and placed the knife carefully on the sill where he would find it.
Then you tucked the note beneath it.
they keep getting us wrong :(
You stared at the little sad face for a second. Then you almost snatched the note back because, Jesus Christ, that was humiliating.
But the light in his apartment flicked on.Through the thin curtain, you saw his shadow move.
So you left it and climbed away before he reached the window, heart kicking hard against your ribs like you had done something worse than trespassing on a known assassin’s fire escape.
Behind you, Dex opened the window.
His hand appeared, picking up the knife first.
Then he found the note.
Dex read it and chuckled.
He sat down on the edge of the fire escape with your note in one hand and his knife in the other. You had cleaned it. Sharpened it. Brought it home to him like it mattered.
Like his things were worth taking care of.
Like he was.
As this all happened in the background, the score climbed.
7-6.
Your kill, his credit.
Then finally, after one long, ugly night that left half an AVTF unit dead and every paper in the city contradicting itself, the board settled again.
Then 7-7.
His kill, your credit.
Perfectly even.
After that, the messages got cuter, which somehow made them worse.
The first note Dex left was taped to the outside of your kitchen window with a polished bullet casing tied beneath it in red thread.
there’s an us now?
You stared at it for so long your tea went cold.
Your answer came two nights later, left on his windowsill beside an AVTF badge you put there like an offering
don’t get sentimental. but yes.
After that, it became ridiculous. A loose knife sheath returned with a note that said you left this behind. be careful. A newspaper clipping from you with wrong again :( scribbled in the margin. A black marker from him, because he could tell from your last note that yours was running out. A little evidence tag folded into a paper heart, which you immediately flattened, put under your pillow, and thought about all day like an idiot.
That night, somewhere across the street, a shadow moved on the opposite rooftop.
You didn’t wave or smile, but you left the window unlocked when you went to bed.
—
The next morning, there was black fabric at the foot of your bed.
For one confused, half-asleep second, you stared at it like your brain hadn’t finished loading. Then you sat up, hair a mess, blanket sliding down your shoulder, and realised it was a black shirt.
It was folded very neatly, sleeves tucked in, collar smoothed flat, like whoever had left it there had taken his time.
Underneath it was a note:
I took one of yours. It’s only fair.
Your mouth parted. Then, you smiled.
“Oh,” you whispered.
That was where your white shirt had gone.
Of fucking course he had taken it, likely on the first night he broke in. And last night, he had climbed through your unlocked window like a nightmare with good manners, walked into your room while you were sleeping, stood close enough to see the rise and fall of your chest, and decided the polite thing to do was leave you one of his in return.
You picked up the shirt and brought it to your face before dignity could stop you. So this was he smelled like: gun oil, soap, cold air, and a metallic tang underneath that made your eyelids flutter for one horrible second.
Fuck.
You were actually smelling his shirt. Worse, you were smiling about it.
You pressed the fabric harder against your mouth, grinning into it like an idiot, because the thought of Dex standing at the foot of your bed while you slept should have made you afraid. It should have made you check the locks, grab a knife, call Mia, do literally anything normal.
Instead, all you could think was: he was here.
He saw you asleep and he didn’t hurt you. He saw you vulnerable and all he did was give something back.
Then, from the hallway, Mia’s voice floated through the apartment. “What the fuck?”
You froze, lowering the shirt from your face. “What?” you called out.
“WHAT THE FUCK?”
You scrambled out of bed, still clutching Dex’s shirt in one hand, and padded into the hall.
Mia stood at the entrance to the living room in yesterday’s shorts and a tank top, hair sticking up in six different directions, one hand wrapped around a pistol and the other holding a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST CRIMINAL.
You followed her stare. Then you saw what Dex had done.
There was a man tied to one of your dining chairs in the middle of the living room.
Alive. Barely conscious, but alive.
His ankles were zip-tied to the chair legs. His wrists were bound behind him. His mouth was taped shut. A neat little bow made of red ribbon had been tied around his chest like Dex had either found gift-wrapping funny or had no idea how gifts worked.
For a moment, neither of you said anything. Then Mia turned her head very slowly and looked at you with the exhausted expression of a woman who had been through a lot with you and was still somehow finding new reasons to be disappointed.
“I didn’t do that,” you said immediately, which was technically true and therefore the best kind of lie. You lowered the shirt slightly behind your thigh and hoped she was too busy processing the tied-up man to notice you were holding another assassin’s laundry.
Mia blinked at you. “There is a task force rat in our living room with a bow on him.”
“I can see that,” you said, stepping closer like you were being practical about it and not fighting the urge to smile. The man, when he finally opened his eyes, made a muffled sound through the tape, eyes wide and wet with panic, and you ignored him because the coffee table was more interesting.
Dex had laid out everything the man had been carrying in neat rows: A burner phone, a badge, a small recorder, a folded surveillance schedule, and four photographs of your building sat arranged with almost romantic precision.
One was of you, from your bedroom window, wrapped in your towel after a shower. Two photographs were of your living room window: one of you enjoying the sunset from the fire escape, and the other was of you and Mia drinking beers and sitting on the counters by the kitchen last week. One was of your window last night, zoomed in close enough to show the lock you had left undone.
Your stomach dropped and warmed at the same time, which was deeply inconvenient. You reached for the note pinned to the red thread across the man’s chest before Mia could get there first.
Underneath, in smaller writing:
I didn’t like that. You should be more careful.
You stared at the note for too long, long enough for Mia to notice exactly how not-horrified you were. That was the problem with Mia; she was nosy, armed, and unfortunately not stupid.
“What is that?” she asked, taking half a step toward you. You folded the note before she could read it properly and tucked it into your waistband like it was nothing.
“Evidence,” you said, because again, technically true.
Mia’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you holding a shirt?”
You looked down as if you had only just noticed the black fabric in your hand. “Laundry.”
“That’s not your shirt,” Mia said, huffing. “That is very obviously not your shirt.”
You forced yourself to shrug and moved past her into the living room, putting your body between her and the note on the hostage’s chest like that would somehow fix everything. “Maybe he brought it,” you said, nodding at the informant, which was such a stupid lie that even the tied-up man looked offended.
Mia stared at you. Then she stared at the man. Then she stared at the shirt again, and you could practically see her connecting dots you were trying to kick under the sofa.
“You’re being weird,” she said.
“I woke up to a federal informant in our living room, Mia. I think weird is allowed,” you said, and crouched in front of the man before she could keep interrogating you. His eyes fixed on you with desperate relief, like you were the reasonable person in the room, which was honestly insulting.
He had not killed the man. He had found him, hurt him, wrapped him up, and left him breathing in your living room because he knew you would want the choice.
That wasn’t sane. That wasn’t normal. That was not something you could explain to Mia without her opening the biscuit tin full of grenades and declaring a turf war in your apartment.
So you just tilted your head, and Mia watched the movement with open suspicion, her pistol still raised but her attention now split between the hostage and whatever the hell was happening to your face.
Instead of giving her a second of your time, you crouched in front of the informant and smiled like this was business as usual. Behind you, Mia muttered something about needing stronger coffee, and you tried not to think about Dex standing in your bedroom while you slept, leaving you something comforting before placing something violent in the next room.
“Morning,” you said.
The informant whimpered again. You softened your voice, and smiled just enough to make him regret being awake.
“Where shall we start?”
The man made a desperate noise behind the tape, eyes blown wide his whole body jerking against the zip ties like panic had gotten under his skin. You watched him for a second longer than necessary, Dex’s black shirt still clutched in one hand and hidden half-uselessly against your thigh.
You reached forward and pinched the edge of the duct tape.
The man started shaking his head before you even pulled it free, frantic little sounds building in his throat, but you only smiled at him and said, “Relax. I’m helping.”
Then you tore it off.
The second his mouth was free, he gasped so hard it sounded painful. “Bullseye sent me!”
You froze.
Mia’s confusion manifested in a little huh? behind you, but you barely registered it. The man was already blabbing, words falling out of him too fast to be clean. “Please, please, I swear, I swear to God, that’s all this is. He told me to deliver a message. That’s it. I’m just the messenger. I didn’t ask to come here. He grabbed me, he tied me up, he said if I didn’t tell you exactly what he said, he’d come back and cut my hands off, and I believe him, I really, really believe him.”
You crouched a little closer. Your heartbeat had gone quick under your skin. “What message?”
The informant swallowed. His eyes flicked to Mia’s gun, then back to you, and whatever he saw on your face made him more terrified. “He said it’s a date. He said that specifically. A date. He told me to say date, not meeting, not job, not negotiation. Date. He said if the city keeps putting your names together, maybe you should stop letting everyone else have all the fun. He said you should meet him tonight at eleven-thirty at The Black Rabbit on 46th. The back booth. He said you’d know which one because. He said you’d know it because you cut through the alley behind it last Thursday after the task force thing, and he said you ordered fries there once and didn’t finish them because the oil tasted old, and— and I don’t know what that means, I swear I don’t know what that means.”
Oh.
Oh, that absolute freak.
Your mouth parted before you could stop it. You knew The Black Rabbit. It was small, low-lit, always half-empty after ten. You had used the alley behind it twice. Of course he had picked somewhere cute in the most deranged possible way.
The man saw your expression and started crying harder. “Please. That’s all. That’s all he told me. back booth, I told you. I delivered it. Please let me go. I won’t say anything. I won’t tell the task force. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll leave the city. I swear, I swear, I swear—”
You were not listening anymore.
A date.
Dex had called it a date.
The thought landed low in your stomach, warm enough to be embarrassing. You looked down at his shirt in your hand, at the black fabric bunched between your fingers, and your thumb dragged over the seam before you could stop yourself.
You would’ve gotten lost in your own head if Mia did not shoot the informant in the head, and the man slumped on the floor so suddenly the ribbon went crooked across his chest.
You flinched, blinking yourself back into the room. “Mia.”
“What?” she said, lowering the gun with the exhausted irritation of someone who had just turned off a very loud alarm. “He’s a messenger. He delivered the message.”
You looked at the body, then back at her.
Mia stared at you for a long second. Her eyes dropped to the shirt in your hand, then to the dead man, then to your face, which was doing a terrible job of pretending it had not just been lit from the inside. Her mouth flattened when she connected the dots.
“Oh,” she said. “So you’ve been in contact with Bullseye and didn’t tell me.”
You opened your mouth.
Mia lifted a hand before you could say anything. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool. It’s not like I’m your best friend or anything.”
“It’s not like that,” you said, which was stupid, because there was a corpse in your living room wearing a bow and you were holding another man’s shirt like a keepsake.
Mia looked at the body again. Then at you. Then at the note still pinned under the ribbon. “Right. Not like that. Obviously. Men are always sending women hostage invitations to bars for completely normal reasons.”
You tucked Dex’s shirt closer to your side, as if that helped. “It’s complicated.”
“I bet.”
“Mia—”
“No, you know what?” she said, rubbing at her forehead with the heel of her free hand. “Fine. Go on your date.”
You had no answer for that, which was irritating, because you usually had an answer for everything.
Mia sighed so deeply, because this concern had come from years of friendship, unpaid rent, and every bad decision she had ever watched you make. She stepped around the dead informant, pistol still loose in her hand, then paused in the hallway and looked back at you with total, bone-deep exhaustion.
“Couldn’t he just send a singing telegram like a normal psychopath?” she muttered. Then, before you could smile too hard, she pointed the gun vaguely at your face. “Whatever. I’ll get you a gun. Just in case.”
You looked after her, trying and failing not to grin.
“And you’re telling me everything afterwards,” Mia called back.
—
You walked into The Black Rabbit at eleven twenty-seven wearing a skirt, a jacket, and Dex’s oversized black shirt tucked messily into your waistband.
It was a mistake.
You knew it the second he saw you.
Dex was in the back booth under the cracked mirror, one hand around a beer he hadn’t touched. He looked up when the door opened, and whatever expression he had prepared for you died instantly.
His eyes dropped to the shirt. Then to your skirt. Then back to your face.
For a second, Bullseye looked like he had forgotten how breathing worked.
You stopped at the edge of the booth. “Hi.”
Dex stood up too fast, almost hitting his knee on the table. “Hi.”
It was so stupidly endearing, you almost forgot your combined body count.
You looked him over, trying to be smug and failing because he was staring at you like you had walked in wearing his heart instead of his laundry.
“You picked a bar,” you said.
“I wanted it to be normal.”
“You sent a dying man to ask me out.”
Dex swallowed. “I wanted you to know I was serious.”
Your stomach flipped.
God. He was insane. Why did you think he was being cute about it?
His gaze dropped again, helplessly, to the shirt hanging loose off your shoulders. “You… wore what I gave to you.”
“You broke into my bedroom.”
“I gave it to you,” he repeated, like that was the important part. Like he had not stood at the foot of your bed in the dark and watched you sleep. Like that wasn’t the most frighteningly intimate thing anyone had ever done to you.
You should have been angry. Instead, you smiled.
Dex saw it and looked like he was about to explode.
Oh.
Your heartbeat kicked hard.
The bar noise blurred for a second: the jukebox skipping in the corner, the bartender moving glasses around, someone laughing too loudly near the door. Dex didn’t seem to hear any of it. He was looking at you with frightening, naked concentration, his hands flexing once at his sides like he wanted to touch you and was using every violent part of himself not to.
You slid into the booth across from him.
Dex sat after you did, still watching, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.
“If you want to talk,” you leaned back, trying to play it cool, “then talk.”
“I… I know you hate being miscredited,” he said. “I know you check rooftops when you leave a scene. I know you keep your knives cleaner than your kitchen. I know you pretend you’re angry when you’re interested. I know you left the window unlocked for me.”
Your mouth went dry.
Dex’s voice dropped. “And I know you wore my shirt because you wanted me to see it.”
You stared at him.
For one long second, neither of you moved.
Then you reached across the table, picked up his untouched beer, and took a sip.
It was awful. Bitter and poured badly and exactly the kind of thing he would order because he had no idea what people were supposed to enjoy.
You set it down and smiled. “You’re very confident for a man who had to kidnap someone to ask me out.”
Dex’s mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed ruined. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”
“You look surprised that I did,” you tilted your head with a genuine smile.
“I’m not surprised.” His gaze dragged over you again, softer this time, worse. “I’m trying not to do something stupid.”
Your heart climbed into your throat. “Like what?”
Dex looked at your mouth.
There it was.
The whole ridiculous game of notes and locks and knives suddenly collapsed into one fact sitting between you in the booth.
Dex wanted you.
Not abstractly or poetically. Not as some distant counterpart in a newspaper headline.
He wanted you right here, in his shirt, across the table, smiling like you knew exactly what you were doing to him.
You should have made a joke. You should have leaned away. You should have reminded him that this was public, that he was dangerous, that you were dangerous, that Mia had told you to report back and would absolutely ask invasive questions.
Instead, you leaned in.
“Careful,” you murmured. “It’s only the first date.”
His eyes darkened. Very slowly, he smiled. “Then I’ll be good.”
Fuck.
You were in trouble.
—
Talking was easy after that.
Annoyingly easy, actually. Once the first charged silence broke, once Dex stopped looking at you like the sight of you, awake and talking, had rewired everything essential in him, the conversation settled into normal. Well, almost. If normal could mean two killers sharing beer in the back booth of a shitty Hell’s Kitchen bar, talking about murder like it was music theory.
It started with the board, obviously. You accused him of taking your credit. He genuinely seemed upset, not because of the murders themselves, but because you put each other on opposite sides.
You should have laughed at him.
Instead, you understood it.
See, under all the insanity, he made a horrible kind of sense. His violence was clean where yours was intimate. Yours got close. His made distance feel personal. You said as much, lightly at first, and watched the words hit him harder than any knife could have.
Dex went quiet after that, as if he was moved by your observation. You’re starting to get it, he said.
He talked like nobody had ever looked at the ugliest part of him and called it skill without feeling afraid. Like nobody had ever understood the difference between chaos and control before you. He sat across from you with his beer untouched for too long, staring like he wanted to crawl inside into your lap and live there.
The two of you kept talking for hours. Murder one-to-one. Technique, preferences, mistakes other people made when they tried to imitate either of you. Bad police work. Worse journalism. The insult of being misunderstood by people too stupid to deserve the blatant fucking evidence left in front of them. It should have been ridiculous, and it was. But Dex listened like every petty complaint mattered, like your irritation was holy because it matched in the one in him.
He had never felt so understood before.
You could see it on his face, which was embarrassing for both of you. Every time you leaned forward, every time the collar of his shirt shifted against your shoulder, his focus narrowed so intensely it made the air feel thin.
You could’ve continued talking there for hours if your phone didn't buzz.
You glanced down, expecting Mia to be demanding details or threatening you if you died before telling her everything. Instead, your informant had sent you an address. Then another, along with a list of names. AVTF agents moving together, not far from the bar, practically gift-wrapped by circumstance.
You looked at the message for a second.
Then you smiled.
You slid the phone across the table, and Dex read the text.
You leaned forward, his shirt slipping loose at your shoulder, and smiled sweetly. “Wanna go hunting?”
—
By the time you reached the rooftop across from the location, you were only starting to realize how intimate this was, even though it should feel like mostly work.
From your crouch near the ledge, you could see the building your informant had sent. It had everything a vigilante could ever dream of: rooftop access, bad perimeter awareness, two lit windows on the upper floor, a side entrance that might as well have had an invitation nailed to it.
Dex, meanwhile, looked exactly as he had in the bar, which was to say unfairly good. He had that same wound-too-tight stillness, only now it had somewhere to go. Neither of you really needed to change because this was who you were. The bar hadn’t been the disguise. If anything, the bar had just been two vigilantes forced briefly into civilian setting, and now the city had handed you both an excuse to slip back into yourselves.
His hand disappeared into his jacket pocket, and when it came back out, there was the mask. He looked down at it for only a second before starting to pull it on like it was muscle memory, like it belonged to the shape of his body as naturally as breath.
Your fingers closed around his wrist, before you thought too hard about it.
Dex stopped, startled, his mask half-unfolded in his hand.
Then you took it from him.
For one long second, he just stared. Not suspicious or annoyed. He just looked completely thrown off, all his composure knocked sideways by the fact that you had interrupted him so casually, like this was your right.
You should have said something then. Instead, you just pulled the mask over your own face.
Oh.
The fabric settled over your features, and you felt Dex go catastrophically still.
His shirt was still hanging off your frame beneath your jacket, the hem tucked into your skirt carelessly in a way that had already ruined him once tonight. The skirt itself was too short to qualify as practical, which had been part of the fun. And now, on top of all that, you were wearing his mask?
It was not subtle, what it did to him.
Dex looked at you like something inside his brain had simply stopped functioning, overloaded so completely there was nothing left for him to do but stand there and take it.
You could practically see the short circuit happen.
His mouth parted uselessly. His eyes dragged over you, and you could've sworn you had never seen anyone look so gone while still technically upright.
You smiled under the mask.
“Hold still,” you murmured, reaching into your little bag, the one you never left home without, fingers finding the small tin by touch alone. It was silver reflective paint.
You flipped open the tin and stepped closer.
The silver caught the rooftop light as you dipped your fingers into it. You reached up and touched him beneath the eye first, dragging one clean line of paint over the sharp plane of his cheekbone, right above his scar. Then another, across the bridge of his nose, your hand steady, his breathing not.
Dex didn’t move. He was holding himself together just to let you do this. The city noise carried below you, distant traffic and sirens and the hum of night, but up there on the rooftop it felt strangely intimate in a way that had nothing to do with proximity.
You painted the silver around his eyes the way you did your own, ruining cameras, distorting the face, making him look stranger and somehow even more himself. When you were done, you leaned back just enough to look at him properly.
“Pretty,” you said.
Dex’s throat worked. His gaze pierced your eyes. If he had looked overwhelmed before, now he looked outright haunted. Like being handed pieces of you had already been bad enough, but having your paint on his skin, his disguise on your face, the two of you standing there in each other’s signatures… it was something else entirely.
And for one absurd, breathless second, on a rooftop above a building full of men you were both about to kill, it felt less like getting ready for a job and more like the strangest, sweetest kind of undressing.
For a second, neither of you moved. Below you, through dirty windows and bad blinds, Task Force agents moved around inside the building like they had no idea the night had already chosen death for them.
Then someone inside laughed too loudly, and the moment snapped.
Right, work.
Or something like a work-date.
You laughed sweetly and dropped first, down the fire escape and through the service entrance, Dex behind you without needing a word. There was no need to gesture twice or whisper instructions. He moved like he already understood where you would go, which side you preferred, you wanted distance cleared and when you wanted a body left close enough for your knife.
It should have unnerved you. Instead, it made you giddy.
You had known he was good. You had studied the clippings, the photos, the evidence left behind. But watching Dex work beside you was something else entirely.
Every throw made space for you. Every little movement answered one of yours. He never crowded you, never interrupted, never treated the room like it belonged to him alone.
He made room for your violence like he had been waiting to see it up close.
And you gave him a show.
You moved through the agents with your style, close and quick and pulsing with adrenaline. Dex stayed in the shadows until he didn’t, a small knife flashing from his hand, then an agent behind you dropped before you even turned.
You couldn’t help but laugh.
It bubbled out of you, delighted though completely inappropriate, and Dex heard it through everything. His eyes found you across the room, stunned.
Like he had never heard anything lovelier.
Fuck, it was wonderful how well you worked together.
You ducked when he needed you to duck. He shifted when you needed space. You slid under his arm once, close enough that your shoulder brushed his chest. It was like dancing, if dancing was a criminal offence and everyone else in the room had arrived mortally underprepared.
Where the hell have you been all my life?
You thought it so clearly it almost became speech.
You only chuckled again, and Dex looked at you like he might never recover.
By the end of the bloodbath, twenty dead agents later, the building had gone quiet.
The euphoric, ringing kind of quiet. Broken glass glittered under the lights. A chair had been knocked onto its side and papers had been scattered across the floor. The agents were ruined, and the two of you stood in the middle of it like the last two people left after the world ended.
You were breathing hard, and so was he.
Dex had silver paint smudged beneath one eye now, a little messier than when you had put it there. His jacket was open. His hands were flexing at his sides, not because he needed a weapon, but because he didn’t know what to do with all the wanting still left in him.
You knew the feeling.
So you walked across the room before either of you could make a joke and ruin it.
Dex did not move away.
He watched you come closer with that open hunger on his face.
You grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down.
The kiss landed through the mask, a frustrating thin piece of fabric between your mouth and his.
Dex froze for half a second, and then the restraint in him cracked just enough for you to feel it. His hands lifted, stopped, hovered near your waist like touching you might be another line he needed permission to cross. You smiled against the mask, and that was somehow worse, because he made a low, wrecked sound into the almost-kiss like you had done an unforgivable sin.
You pulled back, and he followed.
Only an inch, maybe less. But enough.
Enough to tell you exactly how badly he wanted the real thing.
His eyes were dark now, fixed on the place where your lips hid beneath his mask. He looked almost hurt, almost betrayed by the fabric, almost desperate enough to forget every wall he had built for your benefit.
“Take it off,” he said, rough, almost a plea. “Do that again.”
Your heart picked up a beat.
You stepped back just far enough to make him feel the loss.
You smiled beneath his mask.
“Earn it.”
And as Dex stared at your mouth through his mask, silver still wet beneath his eyes and twenty bodies cooling around you, you wondered, almost fondly, who the cops would blame for this one.
—end.
NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5. That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation. If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else. Please remember I run this blog for free, so any support means a lot, only if you’re able to give it! Love y’all and thank you for reading!!! <3
buy me a ko-fi here!
Dex taglist:: @itsdynotdaddy @diabolicallydownbad @doesanyonereadthis @meicore @pixie2k5 @bibiishin @starlitflora @pearlstiare @glorybeat @stardustworlds @castawaybarnes @supervampireflame @not-the-teen-witch @billybonesxx @ultimatewolverine @treetrees-world-of-imagiation @bitch-spaghetti-o @lostinthes4uce @cotton-eee @weallhaveadestiny @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @moonbug333 @yujyujj @mattdexx @lostfallenangelsblog @bloomsberryfairy @flimsysquid @abbotfan @leonetta2014 @ficcharsimpsblog @odairtrqsh @ugh-whytho @noonenuts @akiyhara @genya1617 @itzrachel04 @avidreader73 @quicksilver21 @lmg-stilinski24 @magnificentlymoltenpatron @natalia42069 @eaumyth @hxdxs @cemeterystardust @alligatortears87 @outpostsworld @scarlet48 @lunarbandwidth
Please send an ask or message if you want to be added to the dex general taglist! It gets lost in the comments sometimes!
Let me know if I missed anyone!
I enjoy all your works but you know what? This one tops them as my favorite. Mia is definitely my favorite side character.
Well done, Darlin. Well done.
Also, thank you for the Ko-Fi reminder.🤍
