Benjamin Poindexter x ex-FBI female!reader/OC
summary: Karen has been arrested and they need all the help they can get. Matt convinces her to do something she doesn’t want to do. And when she does, he leaves something behind for her. Something she won’t forget.
tags/warnings: 3rd person pov (bc that’s just how i do it). Minimal use of "Y/N". Mild tension. Referenced past trauma. Referenced character death.
a/n: Whoever came up with ddba ss2 ep7 needs a raise. This will continue the story line of that same episode. daredevil is just so good, i can’t stop watching it. This will not become a whole fic, I’m just writing OC inserted to the ddba/dd ss3 plot. FBI Flashbacks coming soon!
Previous Part | Masterlist
The rooftop is cold in the early morning light.
She’s been up here for twenty minutes before she hears him. She always hears Matt before she sees him now. The particular quality of his footsteps, the way he moves across a surface like he knows exactly where he’s going.
She hadn’t gone back to the hideout.
She’d walked out of the place, leaving Matt and Dex behind, with nowhere specific to be and her feet had made the decision for her, the way they always did when her brain was too loud to be trusted. She went block after block until she found herself at a bar she didn’t know the name of, dark and half-empty, the kind of place that doesn’t ask questions. She’d ordered something she didn’t taste and then ordered it again.
Then her phone started lighting up.
The news had broken fast. City Hall. A memorial for Vanessa that had curdled into something else entirely, the crowd turning, the riot moving through the streets like a current. She’d watched the first shaky video on her phone screen and was already off her barstool before it finished loading.
Karen had always been like this with Fisk. Her hot-headedness, the forward momentum, the inability to wait. Foggy used to call it her runaway train problem and Karen had told him that trains got things where they were going.
By the time she got to the City Hall, the crowd had already been pushed back and the cars were moving and she’d caught one glimpse through the chaos. Karen, hands behind her back, being guided into the back of a police car with her head down. Her disguise half-gone. Her face on camera, probably, which meant Fisk already had her.
She’d stood on the pavement and watched the car pull away and felt something in her chest go very quiet and very cold.
She hadn’t slept after that.
Matt comes to stand beside her on the rooftop. The silence between them is tense but not uncomfortable.
Jessica Jones arrives the way Jessica Jones always does, like the rooftop had the misfortune of being in her way. She looks at both of them with the specific expression she reserves for people she’s decided to help despite her better judgment and drops onto the ledge without ceremony. Her boots drag as she walks up to them by the edge and leans forward with her forearms resting on the metal railing.
“Fisk is going to kill the Governor,” Jessica begins.
“That’s what Charles said.” She exhales.
“And you believe him?” Matt asks
“This guy was working with Fisk until about a minute ago. I don't believe a word that asshole says, but in this case...” Jessica sighs “Yeah....it does track.”
“If Fisk puts one of his puppets in the Governor’s office, New York is his.” Matt states, his head dips ever-so-slightly.
The city moves underneath them, indifferent and continuous.
“Of course he would,” she whispers under her breath. It doesn’t even surprise her anymore.
“Annnnd…we are on another rooftop,” Jessica says, sarcastically. She turns to look at both of them. Matt seems to always meet her on one of these.
“Yeah.” Matt almost smiles. Almost. “I’m meeting a friend. Jessica, this is Cherry. Cherry, Jessica.”
Cherry, who is already heading towards them, straightens up and extends a hand. “Hey. Big fan of your work.”
Jessica takes his hand, a smug smile crosses her face. “Go on.”
Cherry looks at Matt. “Karen’s at the 15th Precinct.”
Something moves through her chest. Cold and immediate.
“Nice, thank you” Matt starts walking towards the door.
Cherry lifts his hand up to stop him, so she grabs his sleeve, “Hold on, Matt”
He stops and takes a step back.
“They booked her legit,” Cherry continues. “Prints, photo, phone call, the works. They’re fast-tracking her to Vigilante Court. You go in there and bust her out, you are the criminal he says you are.”
“She’s not safe there,” She says. “ The last time they had her in a jail sale they tried to hang her.”
“If he was gonna hurt her, he’d have done it already.” Cherry glances between them. “I’m told he went to the precinct himself. They talked. He left.”
Matt goes very still. “Fisk did?”
“Son of a bitch,” She says, low and certain.
Matt turns around and runs his palm across his face. “He’s making it legal.”
Matt looks at her just for a second. A quick check, the particular way he orients toward her when something lands hard and he wants to know where she is with it. She gives him a small nod. She’s with it. She’s with him. Whatever she’s still carrying from last night, Karen is family and Karen is in a cell and that is the only math that matters right now.
“We have anybody at the 15th?” Matt asks.
“We do,” Cherry says, confident. “Come on, guys. I’m all over this.”
He glances at Jessica. “And you? Sticking around?”
Her head tilts “I haven’t decided yet.”
Jessica makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. “I’ve heard that before.”
“Me too,” Cherry says. He looks at them again and nods. “Matt. Y/N.” Then he leaves without ceremony, which is the only way Cherry ever does anything.
She watches Cherry go, and something in the quiet that follows feels like a held breath.
“So,” Jessica says. “You hitting the 15th?”
“I don’t know.” Matt shakes his head. “There might be another way.”
Jessica’s gaze moves to her briefly. Just long enough to clock the space between her and Matt, the thing that’s sitting in it that hasn’t been addressed and isn’t going to be addressed up here on this rooftop in the cold morning light. Jessica Jones has never been interested in anyone’s unfinished emotional business.
“I can’t help you there,” Jessica says. “I did what I came here to do. I have Danielle. I need to get home.”
“I know,” Matt says. “You don’t have to explain.” Matt’s hands find the railing. He leans into it, head dropping slightly.
Jessica is quiet for a moment. When she speaks again her voice is stripped of everything except the plain truth of it.
“Fisk isn’t going to stop.” She lets her words land. “Unless someone puts him down.”
Jessica’s eyes find hers across the rooftop. Just for a second, just a glance, the kind that doesn’t mean anything except that it does. And somehow in that one second, a name surfaces in her mind, fully formed, unbidden, like it had been sitting just below the surface waiting for someone to look at her the right way.
She almost blames Jessica for it.
Something moves through Matt’s expression that isn’t quite a smile but is the closest he’s gotten to one in days. Tired and genuine and a little helpless, the way you smile at something that would be funny if everything weren’t so broken.
“Forgot how encouraging you were.”
“Don’t get yourself killed.” Jessica looks at him steadily. Then at her. “Both of you.” She walks away without waiting for a response, which is also very Jessica Jones.
The city has gotten louder underneath them. Morning traffic, voices, the world resuming itself at full volume. She watches it and thinks about Karen in a holding cell and Fisk walking in and out of a precinct like it belongs to him because it does, because everything belongs to him right now, because that is the thing they keep running up against and the thing Matt keeps finding another way around and the thing she has to believe there is still another way around even now.
She waits until Jessica’s footsteps have faded completely before she speaks.
Matt doesn’t react. Which means he’d already known it was coming, which means he’d been thinking about it before Jessica even left, which means this conversation has been inevitable since the moment he made the decision to bring Dex to the hideout instead of leaving him there.
“I said no.” She turns to face him fully now. “Whatever you’re about to ask me. The answer is no.”
The words land flat and simple and she hates how much sense they make even as every part of her rejects them. She looks at Matt, at the exhaustion he’s carrying, the particular weight of a man who has been cornered from every direction and is running out of walls to put his back against.
“Fisk has the AVTF,” Matt says. “He has the precinct. He will have the Governor’s office in his pocket by the end of the week if we don’t stop him. We’ve lost almost every angle we had.” He pauses. “Dex knows how Fisk operates from the inside. He has skills we don’t have. And Fisk tried to have him killed, which means right now, his interests and ours are the same.”
“Don’t.” Her voice comes out low and controlled in the way it gets when she’s working very hard to keep it that way. “Don’t make this an option.”
The word hangs between them. She watches it land on him.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he says quietly.
“It sounds exactly like what you’re doing.”
“I know.” He doesn’t look away. “I know how it sounds. And I know what he did. I’m not asking you to forgive him. I’m not asking you to trust him. I’m asking you to let me use every resource we have left to keep Karen alive and stop Fisk from owning this entire city.”
Matt is quiet for a moment in the way he gets when he’s choosing words carefully, not because he’s being dishonest but because he understands the weight of what he’s carrying into the conversation and wants to set it down right.
“He wants to balance the scales,” Matt says. “He told me, back at his apartment. One good deed. For Foggy.”
The name moves through her like a hand closing around something.
She looks at Matt. Tries to find the angle, but she doesn’t find it because this is Matt being Matt. Idealistic, merciful, and so willing to extend a hand to someone who has bitten every hand extended to them.
“Maybe he feels remorse,” Matt continues. “I’m not saying he’s a different person. I’m not saying what he did is something we get past.” He pauses. “But what he feels about Fisk and Vanessa for what they did to him…that’s real. They used him. They hollowed him out and when he stopped being useful they tried to kill him.” His voice is careful, the voice he uses when he’s asking someone to hold something difficult. “He wants Fisk as badly as we do.”
She exhales. Slow and controlled.
“You’re asking me to go back in there,” she says.
“I’m asking you to be the one to talk to him.” Matt reaches into his jacket. “He’ll listen to you.” He holds out the key. Small and plain and heavier than it has any right to be. “More than he ever listened to anyone else.”
She scoffs and shakes her head. “If he ever listened to me, he wouldn’t be what he is right now”
“He’ll listen. Trust me.” Matt says it like a fact.
She looks at the key in his hand for a long moment.
She thinks about Dex in that room, face red, vein pulsing at his temple, choosing to hold still for her. She thinks about that thank you said like a prayer. She thinks about balancing the scales and what it costs a man like Dex to admit that the scales exist, that something in him registers the weight of what he’s done enough to want to account for it.
He has always been a logical man.
She thinks about what Foggy would say. Not the sanitized version, not the he would want us to do the right thing version that she trots out when she needs to justify something. The real version. Foggy Nelson who was pragmatic underneath the warmth, who understood that the law was a tool and tools had to be used, who had looked at impossible situations his entire career and found the angle nobody else had thought of.
She thinks he would hate this.
She thinks he would do it anyway.
She reaches out and takes the key. It’s cold in her palm. She closes her fingers around it.
“If he steps out of line,” she says, pointing a finger up at Matt.
“I mean it, Matt. If he does anything—anything—”
“I know.” His voice is steady. Certain in the way Matt is certain about things when he’s already made peace with the cost of them. “I’ll handle it.”
“We’ll handle it.” She holds his gaze. “I’m not sitting this one out.”
Something moves through his expression. Not quite relief, something quieter than that. The acknowledgment of someone who knows he doesn’t deserve the yes she’s giving him and is going to carry it carefully anyway.
She turns back to the city.
The morning has gotten brighter without her noticing, the pale early light sharpening into something more definite, the skyline going from grey to orange. She looks out at it and breathes deeply.
“Karen’s gonna need a lawyer,” she says.
“I know someone,” Matt says.
She laughs. “Of course you do.”
She bumps his shoulder with hers and pushes off from the ledge. She heads toward the access door, and he falls into step beside her, and they go.
The place is quieter than she left it.
She stands in the doorway for a moment before she goes in. Just long enough to find the version of her that can do this without it becoming something else. The key is cold in her hand. She’s been holding it the whole way here.
Of course he’s awake. She doesn’t know why she’d expected anything different. Dex doesn’t sleep when there’s something unresolved in the room and she supposes she qualifies.
He’s sitting the way she left him — upright and still, that particular quality of stillness that she used to mistake for patience and now understands it’s just how he waits.
His eyes find her the moment she crosses the threshold.
She doesn't uncuff him right away.
She sets the key on the table where he can see it, a deliberate choice, giving him the sight of it without the thing itself, and crosses to the corner where she'd left the medical kit the night before. She can feel him watching her move around the room. She doesn't acknowledge it.
"That needs to be redressed," she says. Flat and clinical. Not a question.
He looks down at the gauze on his stomach. Then back up at her. "I'm fine."
"Vanessa Fisk shot you and you've been cuffed to a bed for over twelve hours" She pulls the kit open. "You're not fine. Lay down"
She pulls that same chair she sat on last time to the edge of the bed and sits. He leans back and the cuffs rattle against the frame as he adjusts to lay down. She watches him ease himself down and sees what it costs him. The catch in his breath, the careful way he distributes his weight, the careful management of his breathing, and the hand that finds the mattress and grips it once before letting go.
The gauze she'd applied the night before has bled through at the edges, gone reddish brown and stiff, and she peels it back carefully, efficiently, the way she does everything when she's concentrating on the task and not the person the task is attached to.
She cleans the wound in silence. The antiseptic catches and she sees his stomach tense up, his composure slips and his face does something honest before he pulls it back.
She keeps her eyes on what she's doing. His skin is warm under her hands and the room is very quiet and she is acutely aware of the proximity in the way she's always been aware of every proximity between them in every situation.
She reaches for the fresh gauze.
"You're better at this than I remembered," he says.
She pauses. Just for a half second.
His voice is even. Careful. Like he's testing the temperature of something before he steps into it.
"Back then you'd just wet your thumb and called it field medicine."
She hadn't been on the transport detail that day. Then the call came in, and by the time she'd gotten to the hotel the chaos had mostly turned into a PR nightmare. She'd found Dex in the lobby, looking like he just did practice at the range, plus a little bit of blood.
She had dragged him to a bench somewhere and gave him a once-over. Licking her thumb on instinct and wiping away at the cut on his brow. She doesn't remember deciding to do it, she just did.
"Still is field medicine"
She presses the fresh gauze into place and he exhales sharply. "You denied the ambulance. You were being difficult," she says, still not looking at him.
"I wasn't being difficult. I didn't need it."
"So you won't need these staples, right?"
She looks up at him then. It's a mistake in the way that looking directly at something you've been carefully avoiding is always a mistake. His face, this close, the expression he's wearing that she remembers from the Presidential Hotel and from a hundred other moments she'd filed away in the years they'd worked together.
Something in his face has gone soft in a way that costs him. Dex doesn't do soft without paying for it somewhere.
"You didn't have to do it then either," he says quietly. "At the hotel"
She looks back down at the gauze. Smooths the edges. Gives herself something to do with her hands.
"Why did I do anything" she mumbles. "Stupid"
The ghost of something moves through his expression. Not quite a smile.
The silence settles between them. Less like a held breath and more like something that used to be familiar. The specific quiet of two people who know how to exist in the same space without filling it unnecessarily. They use to have that once. In the monitor room, in the elevator at the end of a long shift. A comfortable quiet that she'd taken for granted right up until the moment it was gone.
She hadn't expected to find it here.
"We were good partners," he says.
The words land simply, without agenda, which somehow makes them harder to process than if he'd been baiting for something with them. He's not reaching for anything. He's just saying a fact.
They were good partners. That's the complicated part of all of it, the part she'd spent a long time trying to sand down into something simpler, something she could dismiss. They had been good. Not just functional, not just professionally compatible. Good. The kind of partnership that made the work feel less like work, that made the long shifts shorter.
And underneath it, there was the thing that had never been said and now never would be.
"Yeah," she says finally. Her voice comes out quieter than she intended. "We were."
She closes the medical kit. Sets it aside. The wound is dressed. Her hands have run out of things to do and the proximity has nowhere left to hide behind purpose.
She heads back to the table and reaches for the key.
She doesn’t say anything else. She crosses the room, crouches beside the bed, and fits the key into the cuff.
The click is very loud in the quiet.
He rolls his wrist slowly as the cuff comes away. His bones crack, a sound so loud it fills the room, and he exhales once, slow, and then goes still again. Watching her. Waiting to understand what kind of thing this is.
She moves to the other side and releases his wrist. He executes the same motion again. Rolling the wrist, bones cracking. Like a routine.
She straightens up, steps back, and puts the length of the room between them because she needs it. She drags the chair back with her and sits down across from him.
“So,” he says. Low and careful. “What now?”
She looks at him for a long moment. At his face — the bruising has deepened overnight, purpling along his jaw, the staples stark against his skin in the low light. She hadn’t notice them earlier. Too distracted.
“You wanted one good deed, right?” she says. “To balance the scales.”
His eyes don’t leave hers. “Yeah.”
“Alright.” She exhales through her nose. “I got it for you.” She pauses. Let the silence hold for one beat, two. “But first, know this”
“I hate you for Foggy.” The words come out quiet final.
“I hate you for Father Lantom. For our friend Nadeem.” The name brought back another unpleasant memory for her. “For every life you wasted for no reason other than your own twisted soul.”
She holds his gaze. Doesn’t let herself look away. But he does. His eyes look down at her feet, at the ground, his left hand subconsciously massaging his right wrist, as if he’s warming it up.
“Part of me in this room yesterday wanted to pull that trigger. Part of me is still not entirely sure I was wrong for that”
Something moves through his face. She watches it happen and doesn’t look away from that either.
“And part of me,” she says, quieter now, “needs to forgive you.”
The room goes very still.
Dex looks at her — really looks, the way he always looked at her, that complete and consuming attention that used to make her feel seen in a way she hadn’t known she was hungry for. Something behind his eyes shifts. Opens. The thing she’d seen when the gun was at his forehead, that brief unguarded moment, surfaces again and she has to work to hold her ground against it.
“Well,” he says finally. His voice is rougher than usual. Stripped of the careful evenness. He clears his throat. “Thanks.”
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t do that. It’s not for you. It’s for them.” She breathes in. “It’s for me.”
He leans back and swings his legs over the side of the bed slowly, the way someone moves when they’re taking inventory of their own damage. His hand finds the gauze —her gauze— on his stomach, pressing against it once as he gets his bearings.
She catches herself looking at the lines of his back. The muscle, the scarring. Wrecked and stiff. She looks away before he can turn around. Fixes her eyes on the wall. The floor. The table. Anything.
She finds a shirt on the table and throws it to him.
It hits his chest and his hand comes up and catches it without looking, which is so completely and infuriatingly Dex that she almost says something about it. He looks down at the shirt. Then up at her. Something pulls at the corner of his mouth. A smirk.
She crosses her arms and says nothing.
He hasn’t put the shirt on yet.
“Just ask me already,” he says.
“I’m not asking you for anything.” She replies, almost too quick. Like she’s offended that he caught on.
“Yeah, you are.” His voice is low. Not unkind. Just certain. “You want it to mean something. The forgiveness. You want it to change something.” He pauses. “It won’t change what I am.”
“I know damn well what you are.”
“Oh, you wanna go down that road with me?”
The question sits between them. He doesn’t answer it. He knows the truth. He remembers how she witnessed him turn into this person. She even tried to warn him. He knows that if he starts this with her, he won’t win.
“Just go,” she says. “Disappear. Die. I don’t care.” She reaches into her jacket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. The governor’s address and a time. She’d written them on the way over.
She stands up and holds it out. “But if you mean what you said. if you actually want to do one good thing in a life full of shit, that’s it. That’s your one good deed.”
He looks at the paper in her hand for a moment before he takes it. His fingers brush hers in the exchange and neither of them remarks on it and neither of them moves away.
He finally puts the shirt on. It hugs him in all the right places.
“You know I can’t make any promises, right?” he says, looking down at her. She doesn’t like the feeling of having to look up at him. It’s too familiar.
“I wouldn’t believe you if you did.”
Something crosses his face. Something soft. He looks down at the paper. Then back up at her.
“What do you want me to do?”
“The governor ,” she says simply. “Stop Fisk from getting to her. And then we’re done. You walk away and we never have to see each other again and whatever this is—” she gestures between them, a small motion that encompasses everything and nothing, “—we leave it here. In this room.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Long enough that she becomes aware of the distance between them, the specific quality of the silence, the way the light is falling across the damage on his face.
“And if I don’t want to leave it here,” he says quietly.
His words hit low and careful and she feels it land.
She looks at him. At the face she’s known for years, the one she’d built stories around. At the man who’d leaned into a gun barrel and said thank you and meant it, the man who’d held still for her when he didn’t have to, who’d sat next to her while they watched and made fun of Fisk in the CCTV monitor room.
“Then you should have made different choices,” she says.
It isn’t cruel. It’s just true. And he knows it’s true. She can see that he knows it, in the way his eyes go somewhere else for just a moment before coming back.
He’s taller than she always remembers. She feels the lack of distance between them and takes a half step back without entirely meaning to.
He looks down at the paper one more time, folds it, and puts it in his pocket.
Then he looks at her. One last long look, the kind that has a shape to it, the kind she’s going to think about later in a room by herself and not know what to do with. And he steps forward, closing in the distance even more.
“For the record,” he says quietly. “I looked for you.”
“After.” His voice is low. Careful. “When I found out what Fisk had done.”
He holds her gaze and doesn’t look away.
“I looked. You were already gone.”
The room goes quiet. Again.
"I found him, though." A beat. Simple and flat and completely without performance. "The man he sent."
"It wasn't for Fisk." His jaw shifts. "It wasn't an order. It wasn't part of anything." His eyes stay on hers, steady and open in that particular way she's never known what to do with. "It was just me."
She doesn't say anything. She doesn't trust what would come out.
"He's not out there anymore," Dex says. And then, quieter, "That one was for you."
The silence that follows has a different quality than the ones before it. Heavier. More specific.
It doesn't fix anything. She knows that. It doesn't return what was taken or change what happened or make him something other than what he is. But it sits in her chest and she has to breathe through it carefully, has to actively resist what it's doing to this strong image she's trying to put up in front of him.
"Go," she says finally. Her voice is steady. She's proud of that.
He doesn't linger long enough to see her wipe the tear from her eye. He grabs his suit and leaves.
She stands in the empty room for a long time after. The cuffs are still on the floor where she left it. The imprint of the key still in her palm.
Outside the city continues, indifferent and oblivious, and she stands in the quiet of the room and breathes. Takes in the last scent of him in the room. The last time she lets herself miss him.
And she waits for herself to be ready.
Ready to walk back out. Ready to continue her life again.
