His eyes crinkled at the corners as he stared down at you, his obsessive internal self completing a massive, definitive calculation. He was keeping you. How could he not? You were a beautiful, bulletproof thing that had literally shot its way through his worst nightmares just to drag him back to the light.
In which you're hired to kill Bullseye, you steal his mask and his heart instead.
CW: Sugar spice and everything nice, minor charater deaths, no use of y/n, implied age difference, size difference, reader is very hyper sexual, inspired by "Dex needs a crazy psycho girlfriend" and "when are they gonna put Dex in the Thunderbolts", basically my rewrite of the movie.
WC: 17.k (Full Story!)
The silence around you was an intrusive, grating entity. A presence with the kind of suffocating quietude that did not soothe, but rather amplified the discordant chorus of voices whispering within the recesses of your mind. Your brain, frantic as it is, tried desperately to hold onto anything it could. The hum of electricity in the air, the faint ringing in your ear that was always there, sometimes drowned out but never truly gone. But nothing anchored you, not in the way motion did. The present threatened to bore you to the point of violent madness. Until you actively resisted the urge to shatter your own skull against the unforgiving concrete. Muscles in your body ached to move now.
You had never possessed an affinity for the calm.
To you, tranquility was not sanctuary; it was a profound, treacherous lie whispered by the world before the inevitable storm tore it apart. Calm was the agonizing static prelude that rendered you restless. Inciting a bloodlust that could only be quieted by the frantic tempo of survival.
You understood the concept of fear, yet not through the visceral, heart-hammering literal sense. The torrent of adrenaline coursing through your veins was always far too potent, far too intoxicatingly absolute, for your consciousness to register anything as mundane as hesitation or terror. You had inhabited this bloody existence for far too long to be swayed by the moral gravity of what you do. Instead, you conceptualized fear intellectually, recognizing it in the way a freezing silent atmosphere sharpens the human instrument. Heightening the somatic senses until the air itself feels heavy with malice. Fear was that creeping phantom sensation that you were not entirely alone when you should be.
Yet, within your internal landscape, fear had been reduced to a voice that rarely spoke. A subtle, fleeting inkling that your hyper-vigilant brain acknowledged with cold clinical precision, but refused to welcome. And you weren't about to step aside and invite it in now.
The desert vault loomed before you, a brutalist monument of uncompromising concrete. Impenetrable and cold-rolled steel in its hulking form. Though that didn’t deter your body away, but rather flicked a match as your posture squared and your heart felt heavier, faster, excited. You knew a thing or two about being impenetrable.
Your gait was deliberate, almost lazy. Chunky platformed heels striking the floor with a rhythmic, resonant echo that refused to hurry as you traversed the narrow corridor. Downward you stared, your gaze flickering to the digital tracking device cradled in palm framed by impeccably manicured pink nails. On the small screen, a solitary, blood-red dot pulsed with patterned malice, mapping a trajectory deeper into the belly of the facility.
With effortless practiced grace, you adjusted the weight of your customized, high-caliber submachine gun, letting the cold metal rest familiarly against your bare shoulder. Stepping into the waiting elevator, you slid the tracker into your black leather utility belt that dangled loosely across your hips. A belt that served absolutely no structural or modest purpose, existing solely as a morbid, high-fashion harness for a dozen gleaming daggers and three heavily modified handguns. All custom-made with sterling metal and pink marble enamel, decorated with a bit of lace, just because. Though the black, razor-pleated mini skirt that swirled about your thighs was far more dangerous than your arsenal.
You sighed, a soft, melodious sound of utter exasperation. Heel taping impatiently as you waited. Jesus, how many floors did this place have?
Taking advantage of the elevator’s sluggish descent, you reached up to adjust the straps of your baby-pink bikini top. It was a preposterous thing a for a black-ops infiltration, but that was the entire, intoxicating point: another day, another kill, and another absolute refusal to hide behind the heavy, suffocating cowardice of Kevlar.
You told yourself, not for the first time, that this was your last pro-bono contract. You desperately needed to stop giving charity to the intelligence community. Executing high-risk liquidations with little to no recompense. Yet, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine had been extraordinarily, almost hysterically eager to scrub this particular name from the ledger.
Benjamin Poindexter. Or "Dex," as his dossier indicated he preferred to be called.
Now, you had always favored a more intimate, psychological approach to your hunts. Finding no joy in the sterile, detached efficiency of one-and-done bounties. So before arriving, you had briefly, almost cursorily, familiarized yourself with the legend of the man known as Bullseye. You didn't study him with the meticulous rigor you usually reserved for your targets, but you had gathered enough fragments to paint a deeply disturbing, yet strangely inviting, portrait.
The man was unequivocally sick in the head. But hey, weren’t we all? He, as you categorized, was a fractured soul bound by an agonizing obsessive need for perfection and external validation. And, according to every rumor whispered from Hell's Kitchen to Madripoor, he never missed a shot.
You smiled, plotting as the elevator neared the bottom, your glossed lips curling into a sharp, beautiful sneer. It was a pity for him then, that you never get hit.
As the elevator doors groaned open to reveal the freezing expanse of the subterranean vault, your kinetic awareness bloomed. The bootleg Super Serum in your blood didn't grant you the roaring, tank-flipping strength of a super-soldier. But it did elevated your central nervous system to a state of terrifyingly efficient. You could feel the microscopic shifts in the air density; you could hear the subtle, metallic click of a firing pin before the hammer even dropped. And right now, your ears heard the song of gunfire like a gavel brought down by a judge demanding order. A ceremonial hum left your lips in anticipation.
You stepped out into the dark, your pink platforms clicking softly against the concrete, ready to find out what happened when an unstoppable trajectory collided with a mystery.
The heavy vacuum of the Vault didn't contain the violence. It incubated it, transforming the chamber into a claustrophobic amphitheater of slaughter. Inside the cavernous expanse, the air was thick with the ozone stench of discharge and the bitter, metallic tang of panic. Somewhere in the room, John Walker and Yelena Belova were already locked in a grueling, graceless battle of mutual survival. Their movements are a frantic testament to tactical desperation. Yet, your entry into this brutal performance was characterized by an almost sacrilegious levity. Your heightened cortex parsed the symphony of chaos with clinical detachment, filtering out the desperate grunts of exertion until your focus narrowed entirely upon him.
Benjamin Poindexter.
He was a monument to terrifying, rigid efficiency, his silhouette cutting through the dimness as he hurled a barrage of lethal projectiles towards Taskmaster, whose vibranium shield was preoccupied with deflecting Walker’s unhinged, heavy-handed strikes.
Your ears twitched, catching the faint, bewildered cadence of Yelena’s voice as she muttered a fractured question to the empty air: “What is happening?”
You didn’t know, nor did you possess the luxury of a singular damn to give.
“More extra credit,” you hummed to yourself, a soft, melodic purr of pure delight vibrating in your throat as your hands instinctively adjusted the weight of your submachine gun. Your eyes locked onto the broad plains of Poindexter’s back, your finger tightening against the cold trigger with the intent to paint the concrete in a single, devastating burst.
The trajectory was immaculate. The execution would have been flawless.
But the universe, in its infinite, irritating wisdom, chose that exact second to intervene.
A heavy, tactical boot collided with your flank. A jarring disruption that failed to compromise the dense, serum-enhanced architecture of your musculature. But the kick succeeded enough in rattling your pristine stance.
The sudden shift was enough to draw Bullseye’s hyper-fixated attention. His gaze snapped toward the source of the anomaly, his calculating eyes widening imperceptibly as they mapped the sheer, theatrical absurdity of your presence.
“Who invited the hooker?” Walker bellowed, his voice a crude, grating rasp that immediately sealed his fate.
Before the final syllable could fully leave his lips, your arm snapped forward with whiplash velocity. A pink-coated dagger, gleaming with deceptive cosmetic brilliance, whistled through the air. Aimed squarely and mercilessly for the center of his forehead. Walker flinched, the blade grazing the air close enough to leave a phantom sting.
Dex, however, remained momentarily paralyzed by the sheer, unadulterated picture of you. Enough for his brows to pull and head to tilt. His mind, traditionally bound to the rigid structures of military pragmatism, worked to process the data. The meticulously styled hair that defied the humidity of a warzone; the absurdly skimpy, pastel bikini top that offered an arrogant, naked invitation to death; the ridiculously chunky platform heels that should have rendered motion impossible; and the low-slung leather belt cradling a dozen lethal instruments like a macabre harness.
You were a vision meant for a beauty pageant, packaged in a lethal, hyper-feminine veneer. Yet, Bullseye’s obsessive mind could only linger on the aesthetic incongruity for a millisecond. Before the deep-seated compulsion of his programming yanked his eyes back to his designated target.
Your brows pulled together in a profound, agitated scowl as you turned toward your instigator. It was the phasing woman, The Ghost, as the intelligence dossiers labeled her. Flickering in and out of the physical plane like a dying television set. Your customized firearms swung toward the disappearing specter, but before you could waste the ammunition, Yelena materialized through the smoke, discharging a crackling, blue-white ĺelectrical pulse that temporarily anchored Ava to the floor in a state of paralysis.
With the nuisance sidelined, you were back on him. And he, inevitably, was back on you. The over-six-foot assassin found his pristine, orderly universe utterly upended by a barely five-foot-two asteroid. The man was forced into an immediate, breathless defense. His large, calloused hands coming up to block a succession of blindingly fast, fluid punches that carried the deceptive, bone-snapping density of you. It was a grotesque, beautiful dance; Dex was urgently trying to parry your incoming strikes while simultaneously attempting to calculate the trajectory of a knife intended for a shield-wielding target across the room.
For LoveShot, the lack of exclusivity in his attention was a profound insult. You grew rapidly, violently tired of vying for a man’s focus while his eyes remained stubbornly fixed on another. Worse still, there was the irritating, persistent peck of the phasing woman biting at your back, threatening to disrupt the polished rhythm of your game.
Without tearing your gaze away from the unsettling blue of Dex’s eyes, your perfectly painted pink nails dipped toward your belt. Your arm extended outward, not toward the man standing mere inches from you, but blind across the room, mapping the space entirely through the exquisite, hyper-acoustic map in your brain.
Bang.
The single, deafening report echoed through the vault. For a fraction of a second, Dex caught himself mid-dodge, his body tensing as his instinct prepared for the bullet to rip through his own flesh.
Instead, the slug traveled a perfectly calculated, cross-facility arc. It bypassed the chaos entirely, tearing with absolute, clinical precision straight into the skull of Antonia.
The Taskmaster’s body dropped to the concrete like a sack of unceremonious meat. The room stilled. The energy of the battle evaporated in an instant, replaced by a suffocating, bewildered paralysis. Everyone froze in their tracks. Yelena remained pinned beneath Walker; Ava hunched mid stand on the floor; and Dex blinked
Once, twice, an imperceptible glitch of his eyelids. His mind, a perfect organic computer, literally could not calculate the variable that had just rewritten the rules of the room. He hadn't missed. She hadn't missed. But she had stolen his kill with an indifferent, blind throwaway shot.
“Pay attention to me!” you yelled at him, the melodious quality of your voice twisting into a sharp, petulant demand as you stomped your chunky pink platform against the blood-flecked concrete.
Before he could articulate a response, your heightened ears picked up an entirely different unglamorous sound: a wet, violent gagging. Your brows pulled together in deep disgust as your eyes drifted to an unfamiliar, disheveled man stumbling into the periphery, his stomach violently rejecting the reality of the room. Your gun began to rise instinctively to silence the noise, but Yelena’s hand abruptly intervened. Pushing your forearm down with a firm warning pressure as she raised her own gun. Yelena knew you were messy, and the worst part of it all was that you liked it.
“Uh, okay, eww,” you muttered, your blush powdered nose wrinkling in revulsion as you eyed the puking intruder.
The distraction lasted for a single, fleeting second before your gaze snapped back to Dex. He was already staring at you, his pupils dilated with a dangerous curiosity, still high off of adrenaline as his built chest rose and fell. That prolonged eye contact was all the invitation you needed. Your painted fingers slipped to your belt, drawing a fresh, gleaming blade to finally finish the job you were here for.
“Is she actually dead—”
A voice broke the tension, and you bristled instantly. You felt the sudden, hot flash of a genuine tantrum fury, thrown completely off your game like a child whose favorite toy had been snatched away. The orchestrated, seductive atmosphere of your game was entirely spoiled now by this bumbling idiot, who immediately turned and ran straight for the primary exit. Only for the heavy security doors to slam shut with a definitive, hydraulic groan, sealing you all inside the tomb.
Your perfect brows raised at the minor inconvenience of the lockdown, but the logistical nightmare of escape was irrelevant to you. Your world has narrowed to a singular path. With a slow deliberate stomp, you began to stalk toward Ex-Special Agent Poindexter.
Dex slipped a knife of his own into his palm, his entire posture dropping into a coiled, predatory stance as he assessed the hyper-feminine nightmare advancing upon him. He didn’t know your name. He didn’t know what artificial poison touched your bloodstream to grant you that terrifying, supernatural latency. But as he watched you step closer, his mind fixated on a single, impossible detail that defied every law of order he worshiped: he had seen the stray bullets from the crossfire strike your exposed, bare skin. And instead of ripping through flesh, they flattened, dropping to the floor like harmless, discarded coins.
The sudden, jarring hiss of the vault’s primary seals locking into place did little to disrupt the highly venomous orbit established between yourself and Poindexter. But the rest of the room devolved into a predictable, tactical flurry as the disheveled man, Bob, stumbled backward. His presence is an unrefined blemish against your playground.
"Will you stand down," Yelena muttered, her tone lacking the sharp, militaristic edge she usually reserved for combatants. Instead, it possessed a weary, heavy cadence that suggested an undeniable familiarity.
More importantly, she said your name.
The syllable hung in the freezing, stagnant air of the vault like a tangible, glittering thing. To Dex, it was a sudden, seismic revelation; the nameless killer that had just systematically dismantled his carefully crafted inner workings finally had a designation. A name to pair with the feminine blood-splattered face. His eyes, cold and hazardous analytical, narrowed as he watched the subtle shift in your posture.
Everyone’s attention had inevitably drifted toward the trembling, figure of Bob, whose very existence screamed of some bureaucratic absurdity. Yet, yours remained entirely anchored to Dex. You were swaying, a slow, hypnotic rocking of your weight across the square platforms of your pink heels. An explicit, non-verbal manifestation of how desperately you were itching for the violence to resume. You were a coiled spring decorated in lace and pink marble enamel.
Yet, you didn’t advance. You didn't move to complete the contract Valentina had so eagerly requested. No; you listened to Yelena. You allowed her brief intervention to stay your hand.
To a mind as violently compulsive as Poindexter’s, that single, uncharacteristic display of restraint was a puzzle piece that refused to fit into the established picture. It suggested deference. It suggested respect. But why? his internal monologue parsed, the gears of his hyper-vigilant mind grinding with a sudden, localized agitation. Yelena Belova was a broken, disgraced operative. Systemic loss and currently amounted to no real, formidable title within the intelligence community. She possessed no leverage over a lethal creature like you. But you listened. And Dex had decided that you didn't seem like the type to listen.
So the deduction arrived with certainty: you knew each other personally. You shared a history that existed entirely in the peripheral shadows, away from the sterile text of official governments. And then there was John Walker. The disgraced Captain America was currently nursing his bruised ego and a near-miss from your dagger, his jaw tight as he glared across the room. He hadn't merely thrown a generic insult when you breached the perimeter; he hadn't called you a hooker. He had explicitly called you the hooker.
The definite article was damning. It implied a recurring character in a sordid, violent history. A known variable in a world Dex had thought he fully planned out. A subtle, subcutaneous itch of possessive annoyance began to dig beneath Bullseye's skin. An irritating, foreign friction born from the realization that this beautiful, bullet-flattening psycho already belonged to a narrative he wasn't a part of. Not yet.
"The doors are dead," Ava's voice cut through the tension, her form flickering violently as she leaned against a console, her breathing shallow as the heat in the room rises.
"The main terminal is completely unresponsive. This isn't a containment protocol. We're locked in an incinerator!" She declared as red floodlights filled the room, painting the walls in danger and peril. The ominous warning partnered by a loud urging siren that made you cringe at the volume.
"She's right," Yelena said, her eyes shifting from you to the reinforced steel barrier, her expression darkening with a cold, retrospective clarity. “Two minutes and Valentina’s slate is wiped clean."
Walker let out a harsh, mocking laugh, though his hand remained close to his sidearms, his eyes darting warily toward your pink-belted arsenal. "You're telling me Val put us in a box? Why? We secured the asset." He gestured aggressively toward the dead body he raided on the floor.
Ummm no, you, secured the asset. They did nothing.
"Because we're fuck ups," you chimed, your voice a sweet hum that completely contrasted the grim reality of the realization. You stopped swaying on your heels, your painted fingernails tracing the delicate lace wrapping the grip of your submachine gun. "We're on clean up duty. She didn't send us here to retrieve anything. She sent us here to be deleted. Why'd you think we were all trying to kill each other?"
"A sterilization protocol," Dex summarized, his voice flat, devoid of fear, but entirely focused on you as he balanced his own blade in his palm. His mind skipped over the betrayal of his handler entirely, far more captured by the way your lips curved at the prospect of a trap.
"Well," you sneered, a beautifully wicked expression taking hold as your eyes locked back into his, completely ignoring the frantic tactical chatter of the others as the ceiling vents began to hiss with a heavy, pressurized gas. "It would be a terrible shame to disappoint her. Don't you think, Dex?"
Yelena’s voice sliced through the ambient dread once more, explicitly uttering your name in a sharp chastise. You whirled on her, your pink platform heel stomping against the concrete with the indignity of a slighted princess.
"What!? I shot the bullet, I got the kill!" you yelled, your voice a beautiful, discordant screech of entitlement that utterly refused to acknowledge the impending lethality of the scarlet room.
Ava, her form flickering with an erratic, painful instability against the backdrop, let out a harsh, breathless rasp. "You can't win anything if we're all fucking dead."
"What a perfect world that would be," you countered, blinking with a serene lack of self-preservation.
Across the space, Dex slowly crossed his arms. His analytical gaze was entirely rapt, his mind meticulously cataloging every erratic variable of your demeanor. He wasn't looking at the locking mechanisms or the gas vents, or listening to the warning sounds and the panic in the room; he was studying the strange woman who treated an execution chamber like another day at work. You caught his look and leaned into it.
Your chest rose proudly beneath the baby-pink bikini top as you declared. "And I can't die," the statement dripped with an absolute, delusional certainty. Your eyes locked onto Ava, a wicked, knowing smirk pulling at your glossed lips. "You were given a suicide mission the moment you got my name."
"We need to get out of here!" Yelena bellowed, her pragmatic instincts overriding the absurdity of your tantrum. She snapped her gaze toward the phasing operative. "Ava, can you walk through the door and open it from the outside?"
You let out a loud sigh, rolling your eyes so hard it practically hurt as you bypassed the frantic huddle entirely. With an air of boredom, you sauntered over to a nearby crate and sat down, crossing one bare, unarmored leg over the other, utterly indifferent to the collective weight of the eyes tracking your movement. It was a stupid idea, you decided within the confines of your mind Ghost was an unstable element; given the opportunity to slip the noose, she would simply leave them all to rot.
You watched the digital countdown on the security console bleed away. Death was a profound, terrifying conceptualization for the rest of them, a looming existential finality that made their hearts hammer and their movements frantic. But in your beautifully deranged mind, the concept simply did not apply. You were a creature meticulously designed to survive. The universe had provided ample, physical proof of your permanence with every flattened bullet that had ever dared to touch your skin.
And, as if to prove the accuracy of your intuition, the universe intervened again. Ava appeared back through the opening barrier, her expression frantic as she signaled the breach.
Before you could offer a sarcastic commentary on her return, Yelena’s calloused hand gripped your bare shoulder, violently hoisting you up from your perch and dragging your dense, heavy-laden frame toward the exit corridor just as the secondary demolition system triggered.
The ensuing explosion was a catastrophic, blinding wall of fire. The force was massive, a roaring wave of heat and displaced air that completely defied your augmented center of gravity, sending your body flying through the smoke-choked air like a mannequin.
You hit the ground with a heavy, unceremonious thud, landing squarely on top of a broad torso. A sharp, breathless groan escaped your lips as your vision cleared through the haze. You blinked down, realizing your dense weight was currently pinning Dex directly to the debris-strewn floor. He was staring up at you from behind his tactical mask, his breathing labored but his pupils still violently fixed on your face.
"Dammit, you're still alive," you huffed, your face mere inches from his as you frowned in profound disappointment.
"Unfortunately," he groaned back, the single word a rough, scraping cadence of dry amusement and physical strain.
With a look of exasperation, you pushed yourself off his chest, your perfectly manicured pink nails digging briefly into his tactical gear for leverage as you rose back onto your chunky platforms, dusting off your black pleated mini skirt as if the demolition was nothing more than an inconvenient gust of wind.
The vertical chasm of the elevator shaft stretched upward into a daunting infinity, a hollow concrete throat that seemed to swallow their collective, muttered fucks.
"So none of us fly?" Yelena questioned, her voice dripping with flat exhaustion as she stared into the dark expanse above. "What, we all just punch and shoot...?"
You pursed your lips to the side, your acute mind evaluating the sheer impossibility of the obstacle before you. "Okay, John, today's your lucky day," you announced with a flourish of condescending benevolence, nodding decisively. "I'm letting you throw me."
The knock-off Captain America let out a harsh, incredulous scoff, but the survival instinct overrode his ego. He unfastened his heavy shield, positioning the vibranium surface as a crude, metallic launch pad.
Taking a head start, or as much as the claustrophobic perimeter would allow, your platform heels struck the cold metal surface with a resonant clang. John braced and shoved, sending your body hurtling upward into the gloom.
The ascent lasted for a single, fleeting breath before gravity reasserted its absolute authority. Your trajectory stalled, and you plummeted straight down, collapsing back onto John Walker’s chest with an unceremonious, bone-jarring impact. You immediately let out a whine, a vocalization far too theatrical, far too perfectly curated to indicate actual physical pain, as your head shook no against his tactical vest, your styled hair spilling across his shoulders.
Across the narrow shaft, Poindexter’s jaw tightened. A sudden, uncalculated spike of visceral distaste rippled through his chest, a foreign friction that rubbed beneath his skin like coarse sand. He didn't like the sight of you draped across Walker's frame, and his fixated mind, usually so immaculate with its internal algorithms, failed to deduce why.
"Okay... new idea..." you wobbled up, smoothing down the edges of your razor-pleated mini skirt with a huff.
What followed was, by every metric of black-ops pragmatism, the single most ridiculous logistical solution ever conceived.
"I can't believe you all actually listened to me!" you gleamed in pure, unadulterated disbelief, your melodious voice echoing off the concrete as the six of you engaged in a grueling, synchronized army stomp up the narrow walls of the elevator shaft.
It was a claustrophobic, friction-locked nightmare. Backs pressed against one another, boots wedged against the wall, the group moved in a stuttering climb born of sheer desperation.
"Somebody has a hard butt," Dex groaned out, his low, gravelly cadence vibrating with irritation as he struggled to maintain his own gravity-defying weight.
He didn't do this. He didn't participate in collaborative, touchy-feely teamwork. It would have been infinitely preferable if the facility had simply collapsed, or if they had each discovered an independent method of escape. Rather than enduring this ridiculous, feet-up, back-to-back transit toward liberation. Yet, by some cruel twist of fate, he found himself intimately sandwiched between John Walker and the trembling, unrefined bulk of Bob.
"That's not my butt, it's my suit!" you argued petulantly from your position around the chain, nestled tightly between the defensive boundaries of Yelena and Ava.
"What suit? You're half naked!" Walker scoffed from the left, his voice strained under the immense physical exertion of the climb.
"Ummm, you weren't complaining when you saw an eyeful up my skirt!" you snapped back, attempting to twist your neck to glare at the disgraced soldier.
Then a sudden, erratic disruption broke the fragile, rhythm of the collective. The entire human chain staggered, slipping violently down the concrete shaft for twelve agonizing inches before everyone’s boots bit back into the wall, catching the descent with a unison gasp of panic.
"Sorry. Slipped," Dex huffed out. His cold, blue eyes remained locked onto the concrete wall directly in front of him, staring at the structure as if it had personally offended him. Though as he said it, there was no actual apology in his words.
Eventually, against every probability, the group breached the surface, dragging their bruised and thoroughly degraded frames out into the blinding, oppressive glare of the entrance room. But there was no sanctuary awaiting them. A heavily armed greeting of Valentina’s clean-up crew stood entrenched across the dunes, weapons drawn to finish the sterilization protocol that the vault’s demolition had failed to achieve.
Your augmented nervous system immediately mapped the exit trajectories. You knew you should run now. You should ignore everyone’s frantic attempts at a coordinated escape, shut down their stupid, collaborative plan, and save your own skin. It was what you always did. Yet, for some entirely foreign, almost lonely reason, you hesitated. It was... kinda nice being around people, you thought with a strange, fleeting twinge of sentimentality. So, you stayed, and you played your part.
With a burst of velocity and vigor, the five of you ambushed the perimeter, hijacking one of the heavy tactical vehicles in a flurry of synchronized violence. You scrambled into the back of the transport, completely elated that you had all actually made it out alive.
Well, most of you.
Before a single tire could kick up dust, the mundane reality of the fight was shattered. Bob, the shivering asset they had dragged from the depths, suddenly ignited awake. A decisive, terrifying stillness bled from his skin, and then he was flying. He was fucking flying.
The five of you sat frozen in the cramped cabin of the hijacked vehicle, your faces pressed against the reinforced glass, watching in absolute, deadpan silence as he launched himself into the stratosphere. He vanished into the horizon like a runaway god, leaving the entire battlefield in a state of stunned silence.
"You all fucking saw that right!?" you asked into the quiet cabin, your finger still hovering over the trigger of your pink gun.
Nobody answered. The sheer absurdity of the spectacle was still processing when the shockwave of Bob’s sonic boom hit the vehicle. The concussive blast rolled across the dunes, catching the side of the transport and violently tipping it over. With a metallic crunch, the car flipped, rolling once before landing heavily on its side, leaving the wheels spinning uselessly against the empty air.
By the time you managed to kick the shattered doors open and crawl out of the wreckage, the blistering sun had completely dipped below the horizon, plunging the desert into a freezing, deceptive night.
The remaining five of you turned your backs on the smoking overturned vehicle. With no functioning transport, no definitive plan, no backup, and absolutely no remaining allegiances, the long, silent march began.
The endless expanse of the desert night was vast and unfeeling. It was a bizarre, slow-moving parade of tactical pragmatism: Walker nursing his bruised pride, Yelena trudging forward with a low, muttered string of Russian curses, Ava treading sporadically to save her energy, and Dex walking with a rigid, calculated stride.
Yet, the entire bleak landscape remained anchored by a single, defiant flash of baby-pink lace moving through the dark, your chunky platform heels sinking into the cold sand with every lazy, deliberate step. The temperature in the desert dropped rapidly, the freezing night air cutting through the vast emptiness as the five of you trudged onward. The silence was broken only by the rustle of the paper Yelena had managed to salvage from the wreckage.
"She did that to him. To test on someone like that, it's inhuman," Yelena declared, her eyes fixated on the stark black ink on the document in her hand.
"Project Sentry," you nodded, your voice taking on a slightly higher pitch in confirmation.
"You know what that thing was?" Dex asked. The question cut through the dark, perhaps a bit harsher and more immediate than he had originally intended.
"Well, yeah. I know that many doctors have been trying to recreate whatever happened with me, but I didn't know they'd go to that extent," you mused, thinking back to the staggering, impenetrable density Bob had displayed before ascending. Your lips pouted slightly as a brand-new, thoroughly superficial grievance crossed your mind. "Why does he get to fly and I don't!?"
Dex completely ignored your slight jealousy, his mind already jumping to the next piece of the puzzle. "That woman back there. Did you know her?" he asked suddenly.
You blinked, pausing for a moment before it registered exactly who he was talking about, the masked woman, Taskmaster, whom you had carelessly executed across the room.
"No," you shrugged indifferently, eyeing whatever fruit Walker had managed to scavenge and deciding you wanted some of it, so you took it. The man could only grimace in exhaustion.
"I knew her," Yelena nodded, her voice heavy with the grim reality of their shared past. "She had a tough life. She killed a lot of people and got killed. Same as us someday."
“That's a shit life.” Ava commented.
Dex remained half a step behind, his devoid eyes studying the absolute vacancy of guilt or remorse in your demeanor. Your long, dark lashes merely blinked, your face remaining entirely neutral. You had shown far more genuine, visceral emotion when you grew tired of vying for his attention and shot Antonia out of pure pettiness. By all accounts of his rigid, obsessive-compulsive programming, he should have been violently irritated that you had stolen his kill. The contracts Valentina had given them were entirely irrelevant now, yet the theft remained.
But instead of anger, Dex found himself experiencing a strange, foreign sensation: amusement.
His fingers clutched his tactical mask a bit tighter against his palm as he actively forced down a smirk in the dark. Was he flattered? Excited? Drastically drawn to the sheer chaos of your presence? He couldn't entirely formulate the answer, but he knew he liked whatever the feeling was.
It wasn't the same predictable gravity he felt when he used to search for a north star, a moral anchor like Julie or Fisk to dictate his actions. His compass didn't feel guided toward the concept of 'good' when he looked at you; it felt perplexed and challenged. It was challenged in a unique, exhilarating way that made a small voice in his fucked up head whisper, "This isn't right," at whatever bullshit you pulled. Dex had spent a long time reigning in his desperate need to seek out external validation to show him what was acceptable. He had finally made peace with the stark reality that there was no pure good or absolute evil in their bloody line of work. There were only actions, and the positive or negative outcomes they generated.
And this LoveShot Killer balanced directly on the precipice just right. You were human enough to exhibit raw emotion, yet completely desensitized to the gravity of a body dropping. And you possessed an accurate terrifying shot that rivaled his own.
He watched your gait through the shadows of the dunes. He cataloged the hypnotic sway of your hips as you walked, moving through the sand as though you were following a melody playing exclusively inside your head. There was a distinct, unbothered pep to your step, a radiant, terrifying air of genuine happiness in your isolated world, despite the utterly miserable situation you all found yourselves in.
A situation that somehow managed to get more miserable. The confines of Alexei Shostakov’s dilapidated limousine were, without a doubt, the true zenith of psychological torture. The air inside the cabin was a stagnant cocktail of cheap upholstery, stale sweat, and the distinct, alarming odor of whatever concoction resided within the questionable cup.
"Do not drink out of the Big Gulp," Alexei warned with a boisterous, entirely unbothered wave of his hand.
Your face pulled into an immediate, violent grimace of disgust. You pointedly tuned out the ensuing emotional debris as Yelena and her father launched into a thoroughly depressing, sentimentally hijacked conversation regarding her childhood pee-wee soccer team. The sheer absurdity of the moment was only exacerbated by John, who offered a half-hearted cheer of, "Go Thunderbolts!"
This was a disaster. Dex sat rigidly in his seat, his internal monologue cataloging the sheer, unrefined ridiculousness of the environment with a dangerous venom. They were not a team. They were a collection of weaponized criminals who simply needed to escape the perimeter of this hellscape. So that they could disappear and never lay eyes on each other ever again. Dex didn't do teams. His historical record with structural alliances was a pristine ledger of catastrophe. His tenure within the bureau had been an entirely different situation, he possessed a script then, a rigid hierarchy, and explicit directives dictating precisely who to neutralize and when. But in this lawless team, Alexei was currently dangling the treacherous, highly volatile promise of redemption and camaraderie. Dex knew better. He was a fractured soul; he would never fit into the equation.
"Ah! Bullseye, the man that never miss!" Alexei’s thick, aggressively boozy Russian accent suddenly boomed across the cabin, slicing through the assessment. Dex didn't even bother to verify if the genetic relic was entirely sober.
The heavy, bearded man then turned his attention toward your corner of the leather seating. "And LoveShot Killer! I heard you never get hit, eh?"
For all your hyper-sexual, bullet-flattening bravado, you merely offered a brief, uncharacteristically awkward nod. You possessed an absolute deficiency when it came to navigating parental figures, so your eyes instinctively darted across the cabin, searching for a familiar target. They found Dex.
He was already side-eyeing you from the shadows of the vehicle, his mask cradled loosely in his large hand.
Under the intrusive, blinding shafts of sunlight cutting through the limousine’s grimy windows, the intricate network of creases around his eyes became starkly prominent. A large, jaggedly healed scar traced an uneven trajectory across his cheekbone, mirroring another violent marker just above his eyebrow. Like someone had driven a knife across his face in an attempt to dishonor. Yet, the physical disfigurement did not render him grotesque; it didn't project the unrefined aura of a convict that might make a person feel unsafe. It suited the sharp symphony of his features. He looked beautifully wild, dangerous, thoroughly rough around the edges, with a faint, predatory gleam vibrating in the blue of his irises.
"You're older than I thought you'd be," your mouth moved, the observation slipping past your glossed lips before your filter could actively suppress it.
Dex’s head tilted slightly, his voice dropping into a low, testing register. "Is that a problem?"
"No," you answered instantly, the syllable clipping short as your trained vision caught a sudden flash of polished metal in the rear-view.
The heavy, armored silhouettes of approaching pursuit vehicles were rapidly closing the distance through the dust.
"Someone do something about that!" you alerted the cabin, your arms crossing defensively over the scant, baby-pink lace of your bikini top.
Dex’s gaze dipped, his pupils tracing the sudden movement of your arms before snapping forward toward the windshield. The limousine barely reached an acceleration, the engine groaning in deep agony. And Bullseye let out a harsh, impatient exhale that vibrated through his chest like a low growl.
"Activating defensive measures!" Alexei yelled with a triumphant madman’s grin.
Instead of a localized smoke screen or an oil slick, the vehicle’s sound system violently detonated to life, blaring aggressive, bass-heavy stripper music through the cracked speakers. The sheer, unadulterated absurdity of the countermeasure struck your core so perfectly that a massive, unbridled laugh broke free from your throat. Dex watched the transformation of your features, his obsessive mind immediately deciding that he liked the addictive sound of your amusement.
Then, the rear window violently disintegrated into a shower of lethal glass shards. The bubble was popped. Dex was on his feet in an instant, his heavy frame shifting as he helped Walker anchor his massive vibranium shield against the incoming rain of high-caliber military fire.
"What happened to bulletproof!?" Dex yelled over the deafening music and gunfire.
"Bulletproof-ish! Everyone is a critic today!" Alexei bellowed from the driver's seat, spinning the wheel with manic indifference.
Ava attempted to intercept the threat, her form flickering wildly as she phased through the trunk of the limousine. But the pursuing vehicles were equipped with high-frequency sonic countermeasures; the moment the soundwaves blared across the sand, her kinetic matrix crumbled, and she collapsed onto the metal chassis in a state of agony. Dex and Walker immediately reached out, their combined physical leverage yanking her back into the relative safety of the cabin.
You decided you had endured enough of this. Squeezing your dense, serum-enhanced frame through the crack of the window, you hoisted yourself onto the exterior of the speeding vehicle. A fraction of a second later, Yelena materialized opposite behind you in the passenger side, her movements mirroring yours with practiced efficiency. The two of you raised your respective weapons, your acrylic pink fingers tightening against the trigger of your submachine gun as you prepared to paint the dunes red.
But before either of you could discharge a single round, the lead pursuing truck violently detonated.
The chassis flipped into the air in a spectacular arc of fire and displaced metal. You and Yelena paused mid-aim, your eyes locking onto one another for a single, bewildered millisecond through the smoke before the two of you slithered back down into the cramped interior of the limousine.
"It's Bucky!" Walker yelled, his voice carrying a sudden, triumphant inflection as he watched the dark, unmistakable silhouette of the Winter Soldier systematically clearing the remaining threats with clinical, heavy-handed precision from his own bike.
You let out a loud, elated cheer at the sight of the metallic arm cutting through the chaos.
But the celebration was violently short-lived. Through the smoke, Bucky’s focus remained utterly fixed on the rogue assets inside the limousine. With a fluid, unblinking aim, he deployed a magnetic explosive. The projectile whistled through the air, latching onto the undercarriage of the limousine with a definitive, metallic clack. Detonation was immediate. The under-blast tore through the axle, lifting the massive, rusted luxury vehicle entirely off the desert floor and sending it flipping violently through the air.
Fuck.
The constraints of the cold iron links wrapping around your torso were a suffocating, uninvited weight, yet your posture remained entirely fluid, entirely unbothered by the sudden, aggressive containment.
"You always did like it tight," you purred into the stagnant, dusty air of the abandoned gas station, your voice a wicked drop that cut straight through the tense atmosphere.
The so-called team immediately bristled. John Walker let out a sharp, uncomfortable cough, and Yelena simply closed her eyes as if praying for a sudden aneurysm to take her from the room. Across the concrete floor, Poindexter’s brows furrowed into a tight, menacing knot where he sat bound in his own heavy restraints. His calculating eyes flicked between your unbothered smirk and the broad, stoic shoulders of the man who had just neutralized them. A violent, possessive irritation flared beneath Dex’s skin, a friction he could neither calculate nor suppress. He didn’t like that comment. He didn’t like the inherent, unvarnished history bleeding out of your mouth.
"You look disappointed, James," you pouted, your lower lip jutting out in a display of mock grievance.
James?
The name echoed within the dark chambers of Dex’s mind like a jarring, misaligned gear. He questioned the syllable with a silent, hyper-vigilant intensity, trying desperately to work the answers of the situation as the six of you sat marooned inside the rotting carcass of the gas station. You didn't use titles. You didn't call him the Winter Soldier, nor did you use the sterile, bureaucratic designations of global intelligence. You called him James. It was an intimacy that suggested a deep history, a shared landscape of shadows that Dex was entirely excluded from.
"And you're still dressing like that," Bucky muttered, his deep, gravelly cadence devoid of amusement as his gaze flicked momentarily over the bikini top before settling back onto the collective group. "Look, save it. You're all evidence in the impeachment trial against Valentina."
"We don't even work for Valentina," Ava rolled her eyes, her form hunched with fatigue.
"I get it— she has some threat named Bob, and you're all heroes ready to save the day. Am I supposed to believe that?" Bucky said, his posture unyielding, entirely unswayed by the sheer absurdity of your group’s narrative.
"Yes!" you yelled petulantly, stomping a heel against the floor.
"We weren't going after her together," Walker gruffed out, his jaw tight.
"We're not a team," Dex stated at the exact same moment, his voice flat, mechanical, and entirely focused on separating his identity from the collective meat on display for the butcher.
"We were just trying to get home alive, actually," Yelena clarified, her tone heavy with the exhausting realism of their failure.
"That's even more pathetic," Bucky countered, his voice rising with a hard, uncompromising edge as he stepped away to answer a vibrating phone.
Your perfect brows raised as Bucky spoke into the receiver, his hushed, low-register tones seemingly deciding the ultimate fate of your company. To be truthfully honest, you had tuned out the vast majority of the reality surrounding you, the geopolitical nuances of impeachment trials and intelligence ledgers entirely failing to capture your interest. It wasn't until the heavy, clanking weight of the chains around your body suddenly dropped to the floor that you snapped back into the sharp, immediate present.
"Bucky. You have the wrong people," Yelena said, her voice sounding entirely defeated as she rubbed her wrists.
Bucky stood before the group, his cybernetic arm gleaming faintly under the dying fluorescent tubes, his eyes carrying the heavy, ancient weight of a man who had survived his own trail. "Look, I've been where you are," he began, the words slow, deliberate, and thick with a grim, universal truth. "You can run, but it doesn't go away. You can either do something about it now, or live with it forever."
The words hung in the freezing air, and for a rare, terrifying moment, the frantic tempo of your internal landscape ground to a sudden, agonizing halt.
Live with it forever.
The phrase dug deep into your chest, forcing your mind to retreat into the one place you spent every waking second trying to escape: the quiet. It was the exact reason you possessed such a violent, subcutaneous evasion to calmness. The silence was an intrusive entity that amplified the voices, the memories of the labs, the phantom scent of ozone and blood, the realization that you were an anomaly designed solely for the execution of others. You felt the sudden, terrifying weight of why you constantly had to keep killing, why you actively sought out the choice of survival. The bloodlust wasn't just a preference; it was a shield. If the guns stopped barking, if the bodies stopped dropping, the noise of your own fractured existence would finally catch up to you. You had to keep moving, keep fighting, because the alternative was drowning in the static of a normal, quiet world that had no place for a creature like you.
Beside you, Dex sat entirely motionless, Bucky’s heavy words striking a resonant chord within his own psychology. He stared down at his large, calloused hands, his mind turning inward in a rare, sentimental display of self-examination.
Redemption.
It was a beautiful, entirely treacherous concept that he had spent years convincing himself he didn't need. He had made peace with the stark reality that he was a monster, an instrument of pure murder who had caused an infinity of unvarnished pain from Hell's Kitchen to the dark corners of the globe. He had told himself that there was no pure good or absolute evil, only actions and outcomes. But as he looked at the others, broken side characters standing in the ruins of this gas station, a small, stubborn voice in his head began to reshape itself. He wanted to mean something. He wanted to prove, if only to the architecture of his own brain, that his life wasn't entirely fixed on destruction. He didn't want to be a weapon discarded in a sterilization protocol; he wanted to dictate his own outcome. He wanted validation that didn't come from a script or a handler like Fisk or Valentina.
And then his eyes drifted back to you. You were standing there, a defiant flash of baby-pink lace amidst the grimy concrete, looking just as beautifully damaged as he felt. He didn't want to live with the darkness forever. He wanted to challenge it. He wanted to see what happened when two broken stars decided to rewrite their own orbit.
"Stop Val and save Bob," Yelena sighed, the concession heavy but definitive as she looked around the room.
"Fine. Yeah," Walker agreed, stepping forward with a reluctant nod.
"Alright," Dex found himself nodding, his voice low, his gaze locked entirely onto your face as he committed.
"Sure," you shrugged indifferently, a beautiful, wicked little smile returning to your features as you smoothed down your pleated skirt, the weight of the silence instantly evaporating the moment a new target was established.
"Go on then," Ava nodded out as Alexei’s loud, boisterous, yelling suddenly filled the air, shattering the lingering sentimentality of the room as he heralded the official birth of their ridiculous, lawless crusade.
It was a wonderful morning in New York, clear skies and busy streets awaiting for some action. The vibrating cargo of the unmarked delivery truck hummed with a strange, domestic sort of friction. Bucky was somewhere up front, steering them directly into the jaws of a corporate hellscape with a tactical plan that amounted to “crash the doors and improvise,” while Alexei occupied the passenger seat, likely muttering to himself. But back here, isolated from the political gravity of the situation, the atmosphere had devolved into something bordering on a high-stakes pajama party.
Your laugh was a bright sound as Yelena and Ava offered deadpan nods to whatever military theory John was currently spinning. This show-and-tell was your group’s third attempt at artificial entertainment during the seemingly endless transit back into the city. It had been a necessary pivot, following a highly volatile round of "Put a finger down: Never have I ever" and a deeply questionable game of "Take a shot if," fueled by the single bottle of Smirnoff Ice you successfully smuggled away in your utility belt from Alexei’s limousine.
"What about you, huh?" Ava asked, her chin jerking toward Bullseye, who sat with one long leg extended completely across the metal floor, the other casually crossed over the other.
"Yeah. Why is your gun holster brown? Wouldn't it have made more sense if it was black or blue?" Yelena questioned through the haze of severe sleep deprivation, her Russian accent thick and sluggish.
Dex’s expression rendered itself thoroughly, genuinely amused at the sheer absurdity of the interrogation. His sharp brows raised, and he forced down an instinctual eye-roll with a slight, unconscious tick of his head.
"Forget the color, why do you only carry one gun?" you chimed in, your own perfect brows furrowing as you gestured toward his sparse, rigid arsenal.
"I didn't know color coordination was such a big deal," Dex replied, his gravelly voice cool and thoroughly unserious. It wasn't the sterile, calculated performance of feigning human emotion he had so meticulously rehearsed during his days observing Julie; this was entirely unrehearsed, unburdened, and light.
You watched, entirely rapt, as his large hand slipped inward, pulling the solitary firearm from the tactical strap secured across his broad chest.
"And I only carry one because I only need one shot," he stated flatly with absolute certainty, his gaze locking onto yours as he turned the weapon slightly. "Also, because I have favorites."
He held the gun up, a subtle, deliberate alignment aimed loosely in your direction, and for some entirely wrong reason, the gesture caused a strange, intoxicating sensation to dance directly in the pit of your stomach.
"Okay, my turn. I have my baby here—" you announced proudly, hoisting your customized submachine gun into the dim light, the white lace wrapped around the grip looking considerably more grimy and blood-flecked now than when you had initiated the contract. "Oh, and we have my honey— and sweetie— oh, oh—and I can't forget my girls!" You pointed in rapid succession to the two secondary handguns nestled against your hips and the dozen gleaming, pink-enameled knives tracing your waistline.
"That's cute," Ava nodded, though the flat cadence of her voice made it abundantly clear that she didn’t mean it.
Yelena seamlessly took the floor next, launching into a granular breakdown of her own specialized gear, while Walker nodded along with an air of grim, nostalgic recognition, loudly voicing that he vividly remembered the devastating efficacy of Yelena’s high-voltage electrical shockers.
At some point during the chatter, your roaming gaze found the discarded, dark blue pile of fabric tucked away in the shadows of the corner. Without a second thought, your grip snatched the material, pulling it over your head in a single, fluid motion before peeking out through the cut-outs.
Dex’s head turned, his internal algorithms instantly grinding to a halt as he caught you mid-motion.
You were sitting there on the vibrating metal floor, peering out from beneath the iconic, stark label of the Bullseye mask. It smelled entirely of him, a heavy intoxicating mix of expensive cologne and dried violent copper.
Fucking hell.
Dex stared, his jaw freezing as a sudden heat surged beneath his skin. He liked that sight. He liked it with a terrifying intensity that threatened to rewrite every piece of discipline he possessed. The very mask he had worn to commit an infinity of horrific, calculated atrocities, the symbol of his deepest damnation, was currently being worn by this tiny half-naked creature. Your massive, doe-like eyes stared up at him from behind the target emblem, and the image struck his brain with the force of a grenade. Sitting there in your pink lace and his dark hood, you looked, for all intents and purposes, entirely branded as his.
His mind raced, a hundred different dark, possessive thoughts colliding within his skull, only to be made violently worse when you playfully raised your own customized gun at him, closing one eye and pretending to shoot him dead center. His jaw clenched so hard the muscle twitched beneath his scarred cheek, his large fists tightening into white-knuckled blocks against his knees as he actively, desperately restrained himself from reaching across the short distance and pulling you into his lap.
"Are we there yet!?"
The roaring torrent of his internal monologue was violently severed by Yelena’s sudden, exhausted screech toward the front cabin. A fraction of a second later, you joined in, your voice echoing her petulant cadence as you yelled the exact same thing, completely unbothered by the fact that you were still wearing his identity over your face.
The terrifying portrait of a god completely dismantling your capacity without blinking was a deeply irritating check to your ego. The sheer absurdity of the violence left a bitter spike of pure envy in your chest. Why did the shivering, untrained asset get the cosmic, reality-warping powers while you were left with the pedestrian reality of invincibility and pretty guns?
You had watched from the debris-strewn floor as John’s vibranium shield was folded like a cheap piece of tin, Ava and Yelena dropped like discarded marionettes, and Dex was forced into a dance of parrying his own bounced-back projectiles. But Bucky had sustained the most visceral, uncompromising trauma. The heavy, metallic thud of his severed cybernetic arm hitting the concrete was the ultimate, unvarnished signal that the script was entirely dead.
Your little group weren't the Avengers. You possessed no grand, selfless illusions of martyrdom or moral nobility; you were weaponized threats, and you knew exactly when the situation demanded retreat.
Clutching Bucky’s severed limb to your bare chest like a trophy, you scrambled into the relative, groaning sanctuary of the elevator with the others. Once outside the building and into the stinging New York air, the seven of you attempted to process the absolute, reality-shattering failure that mission was. You handed the heavy, metallic arm back to its owner. Taking an uninvited familiar liberty in aggressively locking the cybernetic joint back into its socket for him.
Dex’s calloused fingers brushed lightly over the fresh, blooming cut on his bottom lip, his dark blue eyes fixated entirely on the display. His jaw tensed as he watched you tend to another man’s anatomy, all while his own iconic Bullseye mask remained perched casually on the crown of your head like a ridiculous beanie.
"Okay, we need a new plan," Alexei tried to nod, his massive, boozy body thoroughly beaten and leaking blood into the dirt.
"Nah—no new plans. That thing's too powerful," Walker sighed, his large hands clutching the pathetic ruin of his tactical shield.
"We just need to regroup and think—" Alexei tried again, his stubborn, Soviet-era optimism entirely unaligned with the reality of the crater behind them.
"This isn't regrouping. We're not even a team," Dex cut in sharply. His voice was a flat rasp as he slid his solitary firearm back into its chest harness, his aching, bruised musculature dropping into a rigid, defensive stance. All hope he was foolish enough to have in the gas station was gone.
"Of course we're a team! We're the Thunderbolts!" Alexei yelled, the delusion so thick it forced a loud, unbridled scoff from your throat.
"I don't know what that means," Bucky exclaimed, his expression darkening with a deep, historical exhaustion.
"It's her pee-wee soccer team-thing," Ava tried to explain, her voice flickering with a fatigued, erratic latency.
The argument that followed instantly degenerated into a frantic, overlapping chorus of panic. Everyone was yelling over the other with no apology until the sheer volume of the yelling finally snapped your remaining patience.
"There's no regrouping! He turned John's shield into a taco! And look at my gun!" you shrieked, hoisting your disfigured, custom submachine gun into the light. The sterling metal permanently warped with the deep, violent imprints of Bob's physical superiority.
"Oh my god, stop! There is no us, there is no we!" Yelena suddenly exploded, her voice carrying the absolute, suffocating weight of a defeat that reached back into her very childhood. "Bob changed into that thing, and there's nothing any of you can do about it!"
"And what did you do, exactly!?" you countered instantly, your painted pink fingernail pointing directly at her face. "Because I seem to remember you getting your ass beat way worse than mine!"
"Yeah! I suck! I'm terrible! We're all shit!" Yelena screamed back, her face flushing with a raw, unvarnished venom bathed in exhaustion. "You're not a hero! You're not even a good person!"
You grimaced, your features pulling into a genuinely offended scowl at the blunt, unglamorous evaluation.
"Alright, go easy on her," John Walker intervened, his hands lifting in a half-hearted attempt to dispel the sudden volatility of the Russian's anger.
"Oh, so what, you're nice now!?" she bit back, her eyes flashing with a terrifying malice.
John slowly turned his head, his wide eyes landing on Dex, the closest variable to him in the immediate space. Silently signaling a bewildered disbelief at the scale of the emotional outburst. Dex merely allowed an uncontrollable, sinister smirk to tug at the corner of his bleeding lip, his entire posture explicitly projecting that he wanted absolutely no legal or physical part in this.
“So it's my turn now?” John asked.
"No, you know you're a piece of trash, Walker. So does your family," Yelena delivered the final, crushing blow.
"Jesus," Dex muttered under his breath, his brows lifted imperceptibly and your jaw dropping in offense for John.
"We're all losers. And we lost."
With that grim, definitive finality, Yelena turned and walked away into the urban sprawl. You didn't hesitate; pivoting sharply on your chunky heels, you began to trudge in the exact opposite direction, your pleated mini skirt swirling with the momentum of your own tantrum.
"Where to now?"
Dex’s tall, imposing frame appeared seamlessly at your flank, his long legs instantly matching the lazy, deliberate rhythm of your stride. He didn't frame the words like a question; it was a flat, possessive statement of fact. It carried the certainty that whatever destination your brain decided on, his body would follow.
"Well, I need a new gun. And I want a taco," you shrugged indifferently. Dex offered a single, understanding nod.
Two blocks away, you both found yourselves in the vinyl-wrapped interior of a greasy, fluorescent-lit diner. It wasn't a taco establishment, but the fading neon sign in the window had promised a good milkshake, which was good enough for you. Ignoring the overt, lingering stares of civilian patrons, who were understandably alarmed by a six-foot scarred assassin sitting next to a half-naked woman in a pink bikini, you slid onto a chrome bar stool. Dex claimed the seat immediately beside you, his large hands settling on the counter.
"Are you okay?" he asked. The syllables were stiff, delivered with the awkward, hesitant cadence of a man who possessed absolutely no blueprint for treading on sensitive emotional terrain. The hesitation wasn't born from an uncertainty regarding your physical state. He knew you were fine, he simply just didn't ask people if they were okay. In his universe, targets either lived or died. But looking at the tight line of your shoulders, his fractured mind had deduced that this was the correct, human protocol to initiate, even if the underlying sentiment felt entirely foreign beneath his skin.
"Yeah. Yelena's right. I'm not even a good person," you shrugged it off with a lazy indifference, wrapping your fingers around the cold glass and taking a slow, rhythmic sip of your vanilla milkshake. "And I'm okay with that," you added, your doe eyes tracking the condensation down the glass.
Dex went quiet, his analytical brain turning the statement over like a complex equation. "Why?"
"I can't handle being America's sweetheart," you confessed, the words carrying a rare, unpolished truth. The mere conceptualization of it, being anchored to a rigid, moral team where you had to behave, follow a script, and act with selfless restraint. It was a suffocating, unbearable prospect.
"We are who we are," Dex nodded. The statement was absolute, a cold comfort born from a man who had finally stopped trying to force his broken pieces into a normal template.
"And I'm not sorry I took your kill," you chimed in, your tone instantly shifting back to its signature, provocative sweetness.
A genuine, slow-burning smile spread across Dex's scarred face, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he looked down at his own drink. "No... I didn't think you were."
"I would've gotten you too, if none of this shit fucking happened," you hummed.
Having thoroughly finished the contents of your own glass, your roaming gaze landed on his milkshake. Without a single shred of respect for personal space, your manicured fingers plucked your red straw out of your empty glass and slid it directly into his, leaning in close enough for the scent of your perfume to collide with the metallic edge of his cologne as you began to drink.
Dex didn't flinch. He didn't pull away. Instead, his large, calloused hand reached up, his fingers sliding against your hair as he wrapped his palm around the dark blue fabric of his mask, lifting it off your head like a hat.
"Nothing's stopping you now, angel," he hummed, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that sent a sudden, dangerous spark straight down your spine.
"Hey!? I liked that!" you protested, reaching for the hood as he twirled it around his fingers. "And you're wrong."
His sharp brows furrowed, the system of his mind slightly disrupted by the contradiction. "How?"
"There's this annoying feeling now... like, like I can't just end it that way. That you shouldn't go out that way," You expressed, your voice tight with a genuine, thoroughly frustrating confusion at the uninvited moral latency currently taking root in your brain.
A dark, mocking glint danced in Bullseye’s eyes. "What? Does it ache right here, Love?" he mocked softly.
Before you could dodge, his large, heavy palm slid across the exposed skin of your midriff, settling flat and warm over your bare stomach. The sudden, intense proximity of his touch sent a visceral jolt through your nervous system, and your thighs subconsciously pressed tightly together against the chrome base of the stool.
Your mouth opened to deliver a sharp, defensive retort, but the words were violently severed as a sudden, concussive rumble of chaos began to stir outside the diner windows. The civilian patrons let out a synchronized gasp, scrambling toward the glass as the distant sound of detonations and screaming echoed down the asphalt.
"Trouble in paradise," you calculated down to, your eyes tracking the plumes of dark smoke rising toward the neon skyline.
"I can think of ten other bad things we can do instead of that..." Dex murmured, his gaze shifting from the window back to your face. He nodded toward the back exit, his mind instantly mapping a path that involved leaving the city to burn while the two of you discovered exactly what happened when two monsters stopped pretending to be soldiers. A slow, sinister smile flashed across his scarred face, an unsettling predatory expression that should have terrified you, but instead it felt entirely beautifully fitting.
The temptation was immense. God knows every subcutaneous instinct in your blood desired nothing more than to slip into the dark with a man who looked at you like you were his entire universe. But as you stared into the fractured blue of his eyes, that small, stubborn voice in the back of your head, the one that had felt a fleeting, lonely warmth while army-stomping up a concrete shaft with a group of rejects, spoke up. And somehow, against every law of your selfish, bulletproof physics, it completely overpowered the rest of the noise.
"We can't leave the team hanging," you sighed begrudgingly, letting out a heavy, dramatic breath of utter exasperation.
Sliding off the bar stool, your small, perfectly painted hand slid into his large, calloused palm, your fingers locking tightly around his as you began to physically drag the massive, muscular assassin toward the front doors of the diner. And Dex, with a slow, resigned exhale that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, simply let you.
The bell above the diner door jingled a useless, cheerful note as you burst through the threshold, the neon-lit sanctuary instantly dissolving into a gray, suffocating landscape of dust and screams. Your scuffed heels skidded over loose gravel just in time for your acute vision to map the immediate layout of the street.
Across the avenue, the rest of the team was violently strained against a massive, shearing wall of concrete that had sheared off an office building, currently teetering at a devastating angle above a trapped, weeping civilian woman.
"Move!" you shrieked, playfulness vanishing in a fraction of a second as the bootleg serum in your veins surged, elevating your central nervous system to a state of roaring, singular focus.
You and Dex arrived at the structural ruin simultaneously, a synchronized strike of absolute physical momentum. Your small, unarmored hands slammed flat against the freezing, jagged stone right alongside John Walker’s straining shoulder, your hyper-dense musculature locking into place as Dex wedged his broad frame directly beside yours. His large, scarred forearms flexed, veins bulging against his tactical gear as he poured every ounce of his mortal strength into the vertical plane. Together, a group of rejects and assassins heaved against the dead weight of the world. With a deafening, grinding screech, the massive slab shifted, toppling backward away from the civilian and shattering into harmless, billowing plumes of white powder on the asphalt.
Instantly, the atmosphere shifted. The trapped woman scrambled to her feet, her face streaked with tears as she looked at the bizarre, mismatched group.
"Thank you! Oh my god, thank you!" she sobbed, and a small, scattered chorus of surviving onlookers joined in, cheering openly for the monsters who had just played the part of saviors.
Slowly, you lowered your hands, turning your head in absolute, unvarnished confusion toward Dex. He looked equally, profoundly perplexed. The white target emblem on his mask sat static as his empty eyes darted across the appreciative crowd. Neither of you had ever received positive feedback so openly, so unprompted, without a script or a handler validating the kill. It was a completely foreign, intoxicating frequency.
But the celebratory high was violently short-lived.
The air temperature plunged into an impossible, sub-zero freeze. Several sharp gasps and panicked screams cut through the dust, and ahead, a towering, absolute darkness began to bleed over the high-rises. A void of crushing anti-matter that defied the afternoon sky. The sheer, existential weight of it pressed down on your chest, and for the first time in your bulletproof existence, a visceral, heart-hammering panic rippled through your core.
You took a staggered step backward, your heels clicking weakly against the debris. Instantly, Dex’s heavy, solid arm snapped out, anchoring you firmly against his side. You looked up at him through the gloom, your doe eyes pleading, silently begging the one man who never missed a shot to never, ever let that abyssal thing consume you, as a far more troubled vulnerability awakened deep within your mind.
You looked back up at the hovering, empty silhouette at the center of the dark.
"I think Bob's not playing nice anymore..." you whispered, an uncharacteristic, terrifying edge of genuine fear slipping into your melodic voice.
The street erupted into instantaneous tactical pandemonium. Walker and Bucky were already yelling, their voices booming over the din as they commanded the civilian crowd to get inside the nearest shelter before the growing void could swallow the block. But amidst the sweeping panic, your gaze drifted to the center of the avenue.
Yelena was standing there, her unmoving figure a monument of shock against the oncoming blackness. Then in the next microsecond, a distortion rippled through the air, her solid form was there, and then she was simply gone, sucked violently forward into the unknown of the dark.
Your brain barely registered Alexei's distant, heartbroken roaring before your body acted on pure, human instinct. You tore away from the perimeter, sprinting directly toward the mouth of the void after the fallen widow. And Dex, without a single syllable of hesitation, was running right beside you.
As the threshold of the dark swallowed his physical frame, Benjamin Poindexter’s internal universe fractured entirely. He didn't fully comprehend the reason why he had been compelled to move, why he had abandoned a perfectly viable exit vector to sprint into a cosmic meat-grinder. But his body had long since decided its primary directive: it would follow you into the dark, regardless of the chances of survival.
His mind twisted under the sudden manipulation of Bob's influence, the reality around him bending as his thoughts turned violently inward. He was deeply, agonizingly confused by these new moral tugs. He had spent his entire life operating as a perfect organic machine, requiring a rigid script, a Julie, a Fisk, a bureau manual, to dictate what was acceptable. He didn't like people. He didn't form attachments to the meat he was assigned to clean.
Yet, your chaotic, hyper-feminine frequency had dug so deep beneath his skin that the song of your pink heels had become his new operational baseline. He liked you with a terrifying, possessive intensity because you didn't ask him to be a hero, nor did you look at his scars and see a monster. You saw an equal. You were just as beautifully broken, just as desensitized to the slaughter, yet you moved through the world with an unbothered, radiant happiness that he had never been permitted to possess.
And that cheering... the sound of the civilian woman thanking him... it had sparked a dangerous, volatile wildfire within his compulsive brain. For a man who had spent his existence begging external forces for a sign that he was doing a 'good deed,' that unscripted, organic praise was the ultimate narcotic. He realized, with a sudden surge of adrenaline, that he would do absolutely anything, he would dismantle a god, he would march through hell itself, to receive that kind of unvarnished validation again. To be worth something.
But the void didn't offer redemption; it offered psychological execution.
The gray dust of the street suddenly dissolved, and Dex found himself violently wrenched out of the present, waking up with a gasping lurch on the floor of his old, sterile apartment in Hell's Kitchen. He was entirely alone. The air smelled of stale rain and old paper.
Through the dim, unfeeling light, he watched in horror as a familiar silhouette began to systematically destroy the room. It was him. A younger, unscarred version of himself, still clad in the rigid, pristine tailoring of his FBI tactical uniform. The younger Dex was unhinged, his eyes wide with a manic, obsessive-compulsive desperation as he smashed furniture, searching for an order that didn't exist in the world.
Suddenly, the younger iteration stopped. He drew his standard-issue sidearm, his large hand trembling with a pathetic, agonizing instability as he aimed the barrel directly at the framed photograph of Julie affixed to the wall.
The sight struck the current Dex like a physical blow to the sternum, transforming the space into a theater of pure torture. He hated this exact point in his timeline. He loathed every single second of that stifling, rigid era, the suffocating loneliness, the terrifying mental instability. The pathetic dependency on a woman who was nothing more than a temporary bandage on a bleeding psychic wound. He watched his younger self weep in the dark, a visual manifestation of how desperately unstable and unloved he had felt before the world had finally broken him completely. He wanted to scream, to reach out and shatter the mirage, to pull his identity out of the pathetic trap of his own history.
The younger himself stood frozen in the center of the decaying room, his knuckle whitening against the trigger as the barrel of the service weapon migrated from the wall, finding a jagged home directly beneath his own chin. His fractured, inexperienced mind had seemingly calculated a final, desperate answer to the static noise. The current Dex explicitly looked away, his jaw clenching as he refused to witness the pathetic, unvarnished depth of his past misery. Even though he knew that he had never possessed the nerve to pull the trigger.
"Dex!"
The heavy wood of the apartment door violently bursted open, splintering against the drywall as you crashed through the threshold.
More importantly, you were bleeding. LoveShot Killer never bled. The universe simply didn't permit the ballistic physics of flesh-ripping trauma to apply to your augmented skin. Yet, here you stood, looking entirely worse than he had ever seen you. Your meticulously styled hair was completely disheveled, your glossed lip split open, and deep, blooming cuts traced the exposed skin of your thighs. Worst of all, a dark, smoking bullet wound marred the toned surface of your stomach, the left strap of your top torn and dangling loosely off your bare shoulder.
The visual layout of your desecration struck Dex with a sudden, roaring wave of overwhelming anger. It wasn't an offense born from your sudden indecency; it was a found protective fury directed at whatever psychological entity had dared to lay a hand on you.
You ran straight past the current Dex, your awareness entirely blinded by the illusion of the void as you scrambled toward his younger, uniform-clad self.
"Hey— what're you doing?" you asked, your frantic gait halting as a pained gasp escaped your throat. "Stop being silly, okay?" Your sweet voice broke under the weight of the exhaustion, your painted fingers desperately reaching out to pry the cold metal of the service weapon from his stiff fingers.
"I-I'm here now, s-so we can go and find Yelena, okay?" you whispered urgently, your chest heaving beneath the ruined lace as you pleaded with the ghost.
"Who are you," the younger Dex spoke. The syllables were flat, dead, and entirely devoid of the predatory heat you had grown accustomed to.
You took a staggered step backward, your perfect brows pulling together in a grimace of profound distaste. You hated that look in his eyes, the hollow, mechanical emptiness that mirrored a clinical ledger. Those weren't the same electric, obsessive blue irises you had looked into across the diner counter merely twenty minutes ago.
"What?..." you muttered, unsure.
"Who are you!?" the younger Dex yelled, his posture dropping into an aggressive, unrefined sprint as he approached you with a manic malice.
He didn't waste a single second evaluating the outcome. His choice was instantaneous, a reflex born of his need for your safety. His solitary firearm raised, aligning perfectly with the space of the room, and he fired a single, deafening shot.
Bang.
You flinched violently as a hot spray of crimson landed across your cheek. Downward you stared, your wide, terrified eyes tracking the heavy thud of his body hitting the linoleum, your brain temporarily freezing as you tried to register the paradoxical sight of Dex killing himself to keep you unblemished.
Dex stepped forward through the smoke, his large, rough hand reaching out with a rare, uncharacteristic gentleness to guide your chin upward, forcing your gaze away from the corpse until your eyes finally locked onto his current, scarred face.
"That version of me died a long time ago, okay?" Dex muttered softly, his large thumb brushing against your cheekbone to smear the wet blood away from your skin. It was the only clumsy, unscripted statement of reassurance his damaged psychology could offer.
You let out a ragged breath, your chest heaving as the sheer horror of the void threatened to pull you under. But looking at him, really looking at the rigid intensity in his irises, the terror in your veins suddenly mutated into something else entirely. A sharp, intoxicating surge of adrenaline. You didn't want comfort; you wanted to feel alive, to feel the brutal, grounding heat of the only person who understood the dark as deeply as you did.
Your fingers curled into the fabric of his tactical shirt, aggressively yanking him down to your level. The collision of your lips was instant and unrefined, a heated, desperate crash of friction that tasted faintly of copper and vanilla. Dex let out a low, guttural growl in his throat, his restraint snapping like brittle glass. His large hands instantly abandoned their gentleness, trapping the sides of your face and sliding into your disheveled hair to tilt your head back, burying his mouth into yours with a fiercely hungry desperation.
It was intoxicating. The world around completely dissolved as he dragged your body flush against his broad chest, his heavy grip sliding down to clamp around your waist, lifting you slightly off your platforms. Every subconscious barrier you both possessed collapsed. You whimpered into the kiss, your mouth parting to invite the suffocating, dark heat of him, your hands moving frantically up his neck to anchor him closer, needing to consume him just as badly.
The heat turned dangerous, spiraling rapidly out of control as Dex backed you into the nearest wall. The thud of your spine hitting the plaster didn't even register. His hand slid beneath the torn bikini, his calloused palms searing against the bare skin of your breast, his thumb digging into your hip with a bruising, desperate possessiveness that signaled he was ready to completely lose his mind right here in the ruins of his past. The kiss grew deeper, heavier, a breathless, bruising dance that went entirely too far, blurring the line between survival and volatile ruin.
A sharp, concussive rumble from the hallway outside rattled the floorboards, the reality of the collapsing void violently bleeding through the threshold.
The sudden vibration forced Dex to tear his mouth away from yours with a sharp, ragged gasp. His forehead dropped heavily against yours, both of you breathing the same hot, frantic air as his chest heaved against your ruined lace. His pupils were completely dilated, dark and wild with an unadulterated, dangerous desire that took every ounce of his remaining physical leverage to actively restrain. Your breathing increased to a frantic, erratic tempo, lungs hitching as you stared up at his flushed, scarred face, your heart hammering a relentless rhythm against your ribs.
"What happened, hm... Love?" Both hands cradled your face again, softer now.
"It was so awful...... I was in the lab and I had to watch myself get locked in the room and it was dark—then I started attacking myself!?" you heaved out in a sudden, panicked rush of words, your knees buckling slightly under the weight of the memory.
Dex muttered a succession of soft, low-register shhs into your disheveled hair, his broad chest anchoring your trembling frame against the concrete reality of his presence. His blue eyes darted across the ruined apartment, instantly finding a discarded, oversized button-down shirt draped carelessly over a baseball trophy in the corner. The fabric was stained with old, dried patches of his own blood, an atrocity in his historical world back then, but a thoroughly familiar, comforting sight in his current line of work.
Carefully, his large hands gathered the heavy shirt. He wrapped the oversized cotton around your bare, bruised shoulders, his fingers meticulously helping your small hands slip through the wide sleeves before he began to work the plastic buttons up to your collar, concealing the ruined pink lace beneath his own dark history.
"Let's go find the others, okay?" he nodded, the directive surprising his own internal computer the moment the words left his lips. He wasn't a team player. He didn't care about the meat. But as he looked down at you, swaddled in his clothes and breathing against his chest, he knew he couldn't leave the puzzle unfinished.
The illusionary walls of Dex’s old apartment didn’t shatter so much as they bled away, dissolving back into the shifting, unstable architecture of Bob’s fractured psyche. Navigating the void was like wading through a fever dream, but together, the two of you managed to anchor the crumbling pieces of the others.
Ava was discovered first, trapped in a terrifying, perpetual loop of high-frequency phasing, her form screaming as she rapidly disintegrated and rematerialized. It wasn't until you stepped into her space, your voice cutting through the static to explicitly remind her that she was no longer trapped in the clean-room labs of her childhood, that her molecular matrix finally stabilized. Bucky was worse. He was marooned in a desolate, frozen play of his own past atrocities, surrounded by the bleeding ghosts of the Winter Soldier program. The heavy weight of his historic damnation was palpable, but your presence offered an uncharacteristic, grounding sanctuary. You reminded him, with a blunt, unvarnished simplicity, that he had no choice that they made him do it. The ancient tension in his shoulders finally fractured just as Alexei and John stumbled into the perimeter, their own psychological hazes clearing in the wake of Bucky’s dissipating nightmares.
But finding Yelena required traversing the deepest, most concentrated gravity of the anti-matter.
She was entrenched at the absolute epicenter of the darkness, standing guard over the trembling figure of Bob. The real Bob. He was slumped on the floor of his own mental prison, his eyes wide and leaking brilliant, terrifying tears as he looked up at the mismatched, bruised assembly. He literally could not believe you had all descended into the abyss for him.
"We're a team, right?" you said, the sentiment delivered with a half-hearted, beautifully cynical shrug as you adjusted the oversized sleeves of Dex’s button-down shirt. The sentimental beat was violently cut short by your own impatience. "Now do that god-thing and break us out of here!"
"It's not that easy—they just get worse and worse, and I—" Bob’s voice cracked, a devastating thunder vibrating in his throat.
"We'll go through it together," Yelena nodded, her voice a solid, unyielding anchor as she stepped directly into his collapsing perimeter.
The space violently rejected the intrusion. The wall's physical form convulsed into visual manifestation of his internal monster, the Void itself. Shadows with the density of collapsing stars erupted around, lashing out with whiplash velocity to tear the room apart. The transition from a quiet mental prison to a raging internal warzone was instantaneous and brutal. As You anchored yourself in Bob’s collapsing perimeter, the darkness didn't just lash out, it organized itself. From the bleeding shadows surrounding the real, trembling Bob, a towering silhouette materialized. It was the absolute presence of his devil: a faceless, undulating mass of pure anti-matter. The shift in the architecture was instantaneous and violent, the metaphorical walls of the mind hardening into an industrial, sterile labyrinth.
The illusionary sky vanished, replaced by low-slung, humming fluorescent lights that flickered erratically as the fabric of the facility began to fold in on itself.
Bob didn't possess the roaring, cosmic majesty of a god here; he was stripped entirely of his radiant luminescence, reduced back to a trembling, frantic man trapped in a plain cotton shirt. He was locked in a brutal, desperate grapple with a towering, shifting silhouette of pure anti-matter, his own shadow,. Bob was flailing, his pained, unrefined punches cutting through the air as he desperately tried to beat back a psychological parasite that was physically suffocating him.
"He's killing himself!" You yelled over the rising, mechanical screech of the collapsing room.
The rest of the team was instantly pinned down by the sheer atmospheric pressure of the failing reality. The floorboards buckled upward, and gravity wells erupted across the laboratory floor, anchoring Dex's heavy frame and dragging Ava down as her phasing matrix flared out. Heavy steel support beams groaned and snapped overhead, dropping a cascade of sparks and debris that threatened to bury Walker and Alexei entirely.
But the restraint didn't hold. Not after what you all had just crawled through to get here. With a collective, roaring surge of adrenaline, you broke free from the spatial gravity. John shoved a falling concrete pillar aside with his bare shoulder; Bucky and Alexei used their combined physical leverage to clear a path through the warping space, and Dex moved with flawless, unblinking precision, using a discarded piece of rebar to block oncoming threats.
You and Yelena spearheaded, rushing headlong into the heart of the epicenter where Bob was violently collapsing under the weight of his own shadow.
"Stop! Bob, stop!" Yelena commanded, her voice an desperate, unyielding anchor as her arms wrapped securely around his right shoulder, using her entire body weight to stall his frantic, self-destructive momentum.
You slid across the cracked tile floor, your platforms skidding through the white dust as you threw yourself onto his left side. Your solid arms locked around his trembling forearm, your fingernails digging into the fabric of his sleeve as you forcefully halted another pained, desperate punch aimed at the empty, suffocating air.
"We've got you! Just hold on!" you shrieked over the roar of the void, your face flushed with sheer physical exertion as Dex materialized directly behind you, his large, steady hands slamming onto your shoulders to add his massive, stabilizing weight to the human anchor.
Bucky and Walker dove into the huddle next, their massive hands locking onto Bob’s chest and legs, physically pinning the man to the floor to separate him from the dark entity feeding on his panic. Alexei, the father and guardian that he was, hunched over the mess you all were, serving and protecting in the way that he knew how. The eight of you became a single, solid monument of support. Broken pieces whole by each other.
"Look at us!" Yelena ordered, her eyes burning into his leaking, terrified gaze. "We're leaving!"
The declaration was the final, critical and promising in a way the void could not assimilate. A collection of selfish, discarded assassins putting their bodies on the line for a man they barely knew. The towering shadow let out a final, deafening screech of frustration, its form fading into a harmless, dissipating thread of dark smoke as Bob’s chest heaved in a massive, ragged breath.
Gravity snapped. And it was like waking up from a dream. The heavy, real-world atmosphere of New York rushed back into your lungs with a vengeance. The eight of you collapsed in a tangled, bruised heap onto the freezing, unpolished floor, gasping for air as the cold starlight of reality finally washed over your faces. The velocity with which the universe could pivot from an apocalyptic nightmare into a complete, bureaucratic farce was a testament to the joke of their existence.
With Dex’s steady, calloused hand anchoring your weight, you rose from the cold concrete floor of the real world. Your knees were still a little weak from the phantom trauma of the void, but the mocking cadence of your voice returned the exact millisecond reality solidified around you.
"Dammit, you're still alive," you joked, a soft, melodic huff escaping your lips as you looked up at him through your disheveled hair.
"Unfortunately," he shot back, the gravelly register of his voice carrying an uncharacteristic fondness. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he stared down at you, his obsessive internal self completing a massive, definitive calculation. He was keeping you. How could he not? You were a beautiful, bulletproof thing that had literally shot its way through his worst nightmares just to drag him back to the light.
His analytical gaze wandered downward, mapping the damage. The blood-stained shirt he had buttoned around you in the dream was gone, vanished back into the confines of Bob's mind. Your own baby-pink top remained violently torn, the strap dangling loosely over your bare shoulder in an explicit invitation to indecency. Without a single word of hesitation, Dex stepped intimately behind you, his large, scarred forearms wrapping securely around your chest to serve as a firm, protective barrier against the elements. He would have to find you a completely new, meticulously styled uniform later, but for now, his body was your defense and he already liked the way you fit into him.
Your eyes instantly locked onto the distant, unmistakable silhouette of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine barking orders across the plaza, and a sudden, subcutaneous heat flared in your veins. You began to stalk forward, Dex seamlessly moving with you, his muscular form still securely wrapped around your short body as the rest of the broken team rallied into a tight, unified formation alongside a confused but conscious Bob.
"I'm going to kill that person," you nodded, your voice taking on a dangerously sweet edge.
"We stick together from now on," Yelena declared, her hand firmly pulling Bob along as she assumed the baseline orientation of a leader.
"We can't kill her. We have to take her in," Bucky countered, his cybernetic arm gleaming under the city lights as his moral programming reasserted its heavy, unyielding authority.
"Maybe we break a few bones," Alexei offered with a boisterous, entirely unbothered grin, cracking his massive knuckles in anticipation.
"I'd like to kill her," Ava nodded flatly, her form stabilizing as desperately tried to bend his taco-shaped vibranium shield back into a practical shape, failing miserably with a quiet grunt of frustration.
Valentina, sensing the immense threat marching down the avenue, scrambled backward into the false, temporary safety of a haphazardly strung perimeter of construction tarps. The team surged forward, preparing to execute a thoroughly unglamorous, heavy-handed arrest, only to be violently ambushed by a blinding, deafening wall of flash photography and shouting members of the press.
You felt Dex freeze instantly behind you, his large chest tensing against your back as the intrusive media lights washed over his scarred face. Your small hand subtly reached behind his hip, your small hands sliding into his low-slung utility belt to wrap around the grip of one of his blades. You weren't above a televised murder. In fact, you thought it would look rather spectacular on the evening news.
"For years, I've been secretly developing a new age of protection," Valentina’s voice boomed through a microphone, her performative, corporate-politician smile turning radiant as she completely hijacked the narrative in front of the rolling cameras. "Today, the citizens of the United States needed that protection, and thanks to my hard work, they got it. Ladies and gentlemen, meet... The New Avengers."
The sudden, sheer absurdity of the announcement hit your brain with the force of a physical blow. The blade slipped from your fingers, dropping toward the pavement before Dex’s secondary hand snapped out with whiplash velocity, catching the steel mid-air while his other arm remained firmly across your chest to keep you modest in front of the flashing lenses.
Your perfect brows raised to the clouds as you looked around at the mismatched, bruised assembly of rejects standing in the glare. Everyone was equally, profoundly confused.
A silent, completely bewildered laugh broke free from your throat, your shoulders shaking against Dex's chest. An Avenger? You? A hyper-sexual, bulletproof liquidator who wore lace to a black-ops infiltration? It was a hilarious, beautiful joke. Dex tried desperately to suppress the amused, sinister smirk tugging at his mouth, quickly deflecting by looking over at Walker, whose face was frozen in a comical state unvarnished cognitive dissonance next to Ava’s utterly stunned, wide-eyed expression.
As the media circus swarmed around Valentina, the chaotic, bright energy of the plaza seemed to soften into something entirely different, something uniquely quiet and grounding.
You leaned back into the heavy, solid density of Dex’s torso, your laughter fading into a soft, genuine breath of contentment. For the first time in your life, the silence that usually amplified the terrifying static in your brain didn't arrive. The frantic, subcutaneous urge to keep killing, to keep hunting just to survive the noise, simply wasn't there. The static had been entirely replaced by the steady, rhythmic thump of Dex’s heart against your shoulder blades and the unpolished, exhausting warmth of the people standing beside you.
You looked over at Yelena, who was currently nursing a bruised jaw but looking back at you with a faint, weary smirk of mutual understanding. Bucky stood half a step away, his cybernetic arm catching the starlight, his posture no longer carrying the crushing, solitary weight of his past atrocities. They were all pieces of trash, as Yelena had so eloquently put it, discarded side characters, losers who had been marked for deletion by the very system that created them.
But as Dex’s grip tightened just a fraction more around your waist, a possessive, silent promise cementing itself between the two of you, you realized that being a loser didn't feel so bad when you were surrounded by your own specific brand of freaks. You weren't America's sweethearts. You were never going to be good people who followed a script or sought the sterile validation of a heroic title. You were the Thunderbolts. You were broken, desensitized, and thoroughly unhinged, but as the eight of you stood under the flashing lights, whole by each other, you knew the universe was finally going to have to make room for the supernova unleashing.
Bonus :)
The heavy, reinforced doors of the infamous Midtown high-rise groaned as they were forced open, the pristine, high-tech sanctuary of the former Avengers Tower completely vacant and swaddled in dust sheets.
"Are we even supposed to be here?" Ava asked, her voice flickering with latency as she stepped tentatively into the cavernous, sleek lounge space.
"You heard what they called us earlier- The New Avengers. Why wouldn't the Avengers live in the Avengers Tower!?" you justified, offering a brilliant, entirely unbothered grin that completely brushed past the legal definition of breaking and entering.
"Seems perfectly reasonable," Bucky nodded, his eyes gleaming under the ambient security lights as he casually tossed his tactical duffel onto a multi-million dollar sofa.
"Where are you going," Dex’s low voice cuts through the spatial geometry of the room. His large, calloused hand snapped out with precision, his fingers catching the bare skin of your upper arm the exact second you attempted to slip away into the shadows of the corridor.
"Exploring!" you chirped, turning your head to pout at him.
"I'm coming with you," he stated flatly. It wasn't an offer; it was a baseline directive. He wasn't letting his bulletproof girl out of his sightline.
Behind you, the team seamlessly dissolved into their own pockets of the tower. Alexei and John immediately migrated toward the industrial kitchen, the super-soldiers already bickering over the expiration dates of the high-end rations left in the sub-zero refrigerator. Ava collapsed onto the expansive couch with a long sigh, her form finally resting against the cushions, while Bob quietly located the remote, turning on the massive television screen with the wide-eyed wonder of a man re-learning how to be human. Near the primary terminal, Yelena and Bucky were already huddled over the control panels, their heads together as they systematically began rewriting the building's security codes to ensure Valentina’s cleanup crew could never breach their perimeter again.
The transition into this bizarre, unauthorized new life was characterized by an unglamorous peace. When the bureaucratic handlers eventually attempted to deliver the official, standardized "New Avengers" uniforms. Stiff, unyielding suits of muted Kevlar and patriotic insignias, you had rejected the garment with a tantrum that nearly resulted in the delivery agent getting a pink dagger thrown through his shoe. You absolutely refused to hide behind the heavy, suffocating cowardice of standard armor.
Instead, a compromise was meticulously engineered in the privacy of the tower's lower levels, drafted entirely between yourself and Benjamin Poindexter.
The resulting uniform was a magnificent, feminine middle finger to military pragmatism: a baby-pink, high-collared crop top with form-fitting long sleeves, constructed from a dense, blast-resistant weave that left your midriff entirely exposed. Emblazoned directly across the center of your chest was a stark, stylized symbol, a pristine target, mathematically perfect in its form, but curved beautifully into the distinct shape of a heart.
Dex loved it. His obsessive mind was completely captured by the design; it was a flawless, physical synthesis of his rigid, ordered universe and your chaotic, beautiful self. It was a literal bulls-eye, a love invitation to the world to try their absolute best to hit you.
The eight of you were undeniably fucked up. There were no grand illusions of moral nobility or pristine redemption within the walls of the tower; you were a ragtag parade of weaponized rejects, side characters who had survived the cleaning house. Dex still spent hours silently realigning the silverware in the kitchen to achieve perfection, and the static in your own brain still whispered of the dark labs.
But as you sat on the edge of the polished mahogany bar, swinging your new platform heels while Dex meticulously strapped a fresh dozen of your custom enameled knives around your low-slung belt, you realized the noise didn't matter anymore. It was nice to finally be around a group of people who looked at your broken pieces, looked at the wild, predatory gleam in Dex's blue eyes, and didn't ask a single damn question. The team didn't blink at whatever it was that was happening between you and Dex. There were no juvenile jokes from Alexei, no mocking smirks from Yelena, and John Walker never offered a single, unsolicited piece of advice about workplace decorum. Nobody taunted you when Dex spent forty-five minutes straight meticulously sharpening your throwing knives at the kitchen island, his eyes tracking your movement across the room with a laser-focused, protective intensity. Nobody commented when you casually lay across his lap on the massive plush sofa while Bucky and Ava argued over what to watch on the monitor.
It simply made sense. In a world that had spent years trying to break, script, or eliminate every single one of you, you had found an equal who looked at your unhinged, bulletproof nature and saw an absolute certainty. The rest of the Thunderbolts understood what it meant to be an anomaly; they weren't about to interrogate the physics of the only two people who could look into Sentry's void and find a way to make it hotter.
The New Avengers and Bob will be back?
=========================================
A/N: So that was long as hell, anways! I hope you all enjoyed it! Depending on how busy I am with fashion school I may continue this story some more bc I really wanted to write some smut but I left like it just didn't blend into the setting. Let me know what you think and I'll see yall in the next one! Which may or may not be a Clark Kent story because I'm working on a Supergirl corset irl for the new movie! Also I didn't proof read anything so if a few italic points are missing my bad gang.
i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it like…impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.
Not only is it important so you don't get taken advantage of by terrible people wielding their oppressions as weapons, but also your convictions against oppression should not be contingent on the morality of the people suffering. Shitty people don't deserve to be oppressed either. Human rights are one of those things you only really understand and believe in if you see them as universal, not conditional.
Happy pride month specifically to folks on the asexual and aromantic spectrum who oftentimes feel isolated and left out of the conversation. You belong here as much as the rest of us and I hope that you are all loved in a way that is comforting to you.
SYNOPSIS: Vi never imagined attending her first Pride parade would leave such a mark on her.
WC: 2k | CW: no use of y/n, this is just pure fluff
a/n: this sickly sweet fic is part of the pride & bloom collection! requests are open if you want to hop in and show our girlies some love during this month.
Bass thumps through the pavement beneath your shoes, mixing with bursts of laughter, whistles, and the occasional shout from somewhere up ahead. Rainbow flags flutter between buildings, bright against the summer sky, while crowds pour through the streets in every direction.
Vi shoves her hands in her pockets as she takes in the sight in front of her. She had never been to Pride before. Not because she didn’t want to, but because life kept getting in the way. She was too busy surviving, and that left little room for any sort of celebration, let alone a parade crowded with unapologetically happy people.
Her gaze drifts over the sea of color stretching down the avenue. Couple walking hand in hand, friends dancing to music spilling from speakers, people waving giant rainbow flags and others cheering loudly.
It’s an unfamiliar sight, not because she’d never seen queer people or loved another woman before. But seeing others existing without any fear, without the need to hide or look over their shoulders? It hits deep in her chest.
“It’s pretty impressive, right?”
Your voice finally pulls her back to the present. Vi glances over at you, finding you already watching her instead of the parade.
“Yeah,” a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. “S’cool.”
“You nervous?”
She scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Please. I’ve survived prison fights.”
The words come easily, the same way they always do whenever she’s trying to brush something off. But you don’t look convinced, not even for one second. Vi fights the urge to fidget under your gaze, really hoping you’ll let it go before you manage to see through her.
The thing is, she is nervous, and she feels ridiculous about it. She’s fought people twice her size, faced down armed enforcers, survived years she never should have survived at all. A crowder parade shouldn’t make her stomach twist itself into knots. Yet, she can’t shake the strange feeling sitting heavy in her chest.
Her eyes drift back to the crowd. To the women holding hands without hesitation, the couples wrapped in pride flags, the older woman laughing just as her wife pulls her into a dance in the middle of the street.
The sight makes her chest ache in a way she doesn’t understand. Not because they’re together or because they look head over heels in love, but because they’re older. Grey hairs, smile lines, years written across their faces.
For so long, Vi had never allowed herself to think that far ahead— life had taught her not to. She’d worried about tomorrow when tomorrow arrived. Anything beyond that felt dangerous, like tempting fate. So, she got used to focus on the next day, the next fight, the next problem around the corner. Thinking about the future had always felt like a luxury meant for somebody else.
But all around her are people who look like they’ve made it. People who found someone and got to keep them to build a life together. The realization settles beneath her ribs, because for the first time, she finds herself wondering what growing old with someone would be like, to stop surviving long enough to actually live.
Before she can dwell on it for too long, you reach for her hand.
“Hey,” your voice is gentler now, thumb brushing against her knuckles. She didn’t even notice how tightly she was clenching her fist. “You okay?”
Vi glances down and stares at your joined hands for a moment. She allows herself to just enjoy the warmth of your fingers wrapped around hers.
She squeezes your hand back. “I’m okay.”
You take a small step closer, your free hand rummaging through bag. A few seconds later, you pull your hand back out, something wrapped around your fingers.
“Here.”
Your fingers brush against her skin as you carefully fasten a bracelet around her wrist. Small beads in shades of orange, white and pink catch the sunlight when you pull back. There’s a tiny charm hanging from it, and Vi lifts her hand to inspect it more closely. Her heart skips a bit as she takes a good look at it— it’s your initial.
“I made ‘em last night,” a shy smile spreads across your face as you lift your own hand. “We’re matching.”
An identical bracelet sits there, except for the small golden V dangling from it.
The matching bands aren’t even fancy, the beads aren’t perfectly aligned, hell— one of them even looks slightly crooked. And somehow, that only makes it better, because you made it for her.
Warmth settles in her chest, pushing against the strange ache that had been living there since you arrived at the parade. Her thumb brushed over the tiny charm, your initial, and a grin spreads across her face before she can stop it.
“It’s the prettiest bracelet I’ve ever owned,” she starts, and there’s a mischievous glint in her eyes when she looks back at you again. “Pretty cheesy, though.”
Your jaw drops. “Cheesy?”
“Very.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” you point accusingly at her wrist. “Take it off then.”
Vi immediately wraps her hand around the bracelet, taking a small step back as she looks at you with an offended expression.
“I’m never taking it off.”
The grin that spreads across your face is impossible to miss.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of color, music, and laughter.
You drag her from booth to booth, stopping to admire handmade crafts, sample food from street vendors, and buy enough stickers to cover an entire wall. At some point, a volunteer paints a tiny rainbow on Vi’s cheek. She pretends to hate it, but the dozen photos she let you take of her suggest otherwise.
The parade is louder than she expected. Cheers erupt from every corner of the street, music spills from passing floats, strangers dance together as if they’ve known each other their whole lives. Normally, crowds like this would put her on edge and she’d be scanning every exit, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s in those overwhelming moments when her fingers drift to the bracelet wrapped around her wrist. Her thumb brushes over your initial in a small, absentminded gesture. Every time she touches it, the warmth in her chest returns.
For the first time in a long time, Vi finds herself enjoying the moment without worrying about what might go wrong or wondering when it will end. She laughs when you pull her into a dance she swears she doesn’t know, steals bites from your food when you aren’t looking, and lets you take picture after picture, even when she complains about every single one.
And every time she catches the sight of the grin on your face, she finds herself smiling right back.
By the time the sun begins to sink lower in the sky, painting the streets gold, the crowds have started to thin. You walk side by side, your hands brushing occasionally as you make your way away from the parade route.
The day settles comfortably between you with that kind of silence that only exists when you’re with the right person. Vi’s thumb catches on the bracelet again, and you notice. A soft smile takes over your lips as you bump against her shoulder lightly.
“You’ve been playing with that thing all day.”
“It’s my favorite thing in the world,” Vi glances down at the bracelet, smiling with such tenderness it makes your heart ache.
You chuckle at her statement, and the sound makes her heart skip a bit. She looks over her shoulder, watching the last of the festival-goers pass by. The families, the friends, the couples…
She exhales quietly. “I think I get it now.”
You glance at her, eyes slightly furrowed with confusion.
“Get what?”
Vi hesitates because she’s not used to being vulnerable out loud. At least, not in the middle of the street. But she looks back once again, toward the flags still waving in the distance and the people who had spent the entire day celebrating who they were without apology.
A lump forms unexpectedly in her throat.
“Pride.”
Your expression softens, fingers curling around hers as you listen intently.
“I always thought it was just…” She gestures vaguely. “Y’know, music, big party, lots of hot people on the street.”
“And now?” you prompt, eyes never leaving her face.
Vi swallows as she tries to turn her overwhelming train of thought into a coherent sentence. Now she thinks about the older couple dancing in the street, about the countless hands she’d seen intertwined throughout the day, about the future, about belonging… about you.
“Now I see is people getting to be happy,” her grip on your hand tightens softly. “People getting to love who they love and not have to hide it.”
She pauses for a second. Then, a small smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.
“And maybe it is about realizing there’s a place for us, too.”
Your eyes fill with so much affection it nearly knocks the breath from her lungs. Before she can mutter anything else, you step closer. Close enough that she can catch the faint scent of sunscreen lingering on your skin, mixed with whatever sweet drink you’d been carrying around all afternoon.
Your hand rises to her cheek, and the rest of the world begins to blur. The tiny rainbow has started to fade, but she still feels your thumb brush across it.
You lean in, your lips finding hers with such tenderness it makes her knees weak. The kiss is slow enough for Vi to feel every part of it— the warmth of your mouth, the way your fingers curl against her jaw, the quiet sigh you let out when she leans back into you.
All day she’d been watching people celebrate love without fear, and now she finally gets it. She’s certain that she doesn’t have to earn her place beside you, she doesn’t have to fight for it, she’s allowed to be loved.
You pull back first, only far enough to rest your forehead against hers. Her hands find your automatically, fingers intertwining as the bracelets on your wrist shift with the movement.
Vi opens her eyes and finds you smiling at her, a smile so full of love it makes her chest ache all over again.
“I love you,” you whisper, thumb tracing over her cheek.
The lump returns to her throat, but she doesn’t try to swallow it down now. Instead, she squeezes your hand.
“I love you,” and she means it.
For the first time, the future doesn’t feel frightening. It feels worth looking forward to.
“…you’re a big sap.”
Vi groans immediately, hands grabbing your waist as she lets her head drop backwards. “Oh, c’mon.”
“You got emotional and it almost made me cry,” you grin, pulling her closer. When she glances back at you, she notices your teary eyes.
“I did not get emotional.”
“You should totally do next year’s Pride speech.”
Her face immediately drains of color. “There’s no fucking way.”
You laugh, the sound bright and carefree as you begin pulling her down the street.
“Please! You’d be great.”
“No.”
“You could talk about belonging.”
“No.”
“The future? Or at least give the girls some lesbian sex tips?”
Vi nearly trips over her own feet. “Okay, that’s enough.”
Your laughter only grows louder. She rolls her eyes, but smiles despite herself and lets you guide her down the street. Vi’s fingers brush against the bracelet wrapped around her wrist one last time, your initial catching against her thumb. It’s a small, simple detail, yet it somehow feels like everything.
Maybe Pride is about celebration. Maybe it’s about community. Or maybe it’s about love. But as she looks at you, chuckling beside her with your matching bracelet glinting in the sunlight, Vi thinks it’s also about finding your people, about finding your place.
And finally realizing you were never outside of it. You were just waiting for someone to take your hand and lead you home.
i block ppl all the time so my blocklist ranges from "actual fucking asshole fascist" n "post that mildly annoyed me because im petty" and if i went thru my blocklist rn i probably would have no idea why i blocked each of them but whatever
You’ve mercilessly teased Clark and Scott for how identical they are. Now they’ve turned it around on you and you need to learn to tell who's who.
▸ PAIRING & WC: Scott Miller x F!Reader x Clark Kent — 2.8K
▸ WARNINGS: NSFW 18+, filthy filthy filthy pwp, edging?, mean!scott but that's nothing new, double creampie, oral (m!receiving), taking turns fucking you basically
▸ A/N: brainrot started two weeks ago (half written in the home depot parking lot) and finally completed. this is for @theworstwolvie for always encouraging my messed up ideas, @thceseus for being on the same wavelength of cock guessing, and @kryptidfiles for always triggering me with your david corenswet reblogs <3
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You never intended for it to go this far. You’ve always teased the two of them for being practically twins — best friends separated at birth. Clark is all broad shoulders, thick arms with veins running along his biceps like winding rivers, and sweet, shy smiles. Scott is marginally leaner, but you’ve seen the taut muscles of his forearms when he’s at the gym, and he’s got the sharp tongue and mean mouth to make up for it.
Somehow, the two of them have made their friendship work — and you were lucky enough to be brought into the loop.
It started with a comment about how they looked so much alike. Scott adamantly denies this and Clark only gets flustered when you insist that they’re both equally handsome. For some reason, it ends up with your face pressed against the bed and your hips raised to meet them.
Scott pushes you down into the sheets, your face mushed into his mattress, where you’re suddenly breathing in his scent. It’s a heady, masculine cologne that engulfs your senses, intoxicating in a way that only Scott could be. Your heart nearly beats out of your ribcage because you can’t see them. The only way you know that it’s Scott’s hands on your hips, positioning you in front of him, is because Clark is whispering in mild irritation, “This isn’t right, Scott. This is so disrespectful to her.”
“You gonna stop me, Kent? You’re telling me you haven’t been imagining what this pretty pussy looks like all this time?” Scott chuckles, tracing a finger up your bare thighs beneath your skirt. He flips the flimsy fabric up over your ass. “And a thong too — Christ, you’re such a slut, sweetheart.”
“Scott,” Clark chides again and you can imagine the disappointed frown marring his face.
Scott chooses to ignore him, instead focusing on how your pussy’s started leaking already. You can feel your slick folds, even more so when Scott digs his thumb in, pushing the thin string into your moist cunt. “She’s so wet already,” he groans, “you’ve been waiting for this, you little minx. Always fucking pushing our buttons when all you wanted was our cocks, is that it?”
Your denial is muffled even as you turn your face to catch a glimpse of them, a peek at Clark’s guilty face tainted with the greedy way he drinks in your pussy, a look at Scott licking his lips as he pushes his thumb just slightly deeper.
“Why don’t we play a little game?” Scott hums, hooking his finger on your panties as he drags it down your thighs. He doesn’t even bother removing it completely, lets it hang off your right ankle as if to say, you asked for this by wearing this.
“W-what game?” You manage to rasp.
“We’re going to have you figure out who’s who.” Scott murmurs, brushing your hair away from your shoulder as he presses his palm between your shoulder blades again. “We’re both going to fuck you, take turns sinking our cocks into this pretty pussy of yours, and you have to guess whose cock it is.”
Your heart lurches into your throat.
“And if you can get it right five times in a row, you’ll get to cum. How does that sound?”
Like heaven, you traitorous pussy says. Your brain and heart are in a losing battle when you can feel the warm pulse between your legs.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Scott chuckles. “You ready?”
You quickly learn that their similarities extend to the length between their legs. The first time one of them pushes their cock inside, all you can focus on is the burn. They’re big, bigger than anyone else you’ve ever had. This person doesn’t do shallow thrusts, they bury themselves completely inside you until you can feel their hips against your ass.
“I don’t—” you choke when they pull out and thrust back in, hard. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never been with either of you,” you whine pathetically, words crumbling into moans as your pussy stretches around the girth.
“You know us, should know our cocks too.” Scott’s voice is a little breathless.
“Fuck, this is Scott. You’re fucking me,” you whimper.
“Good girl, but I made it too easy for you. That one doesn’t count.”
“But I guessed correctly!”
The cock slips out of you with a lewd pop, your own juices leaking down the back of your thighs as you shakily prop yourself up on all fours. You try to turn but the squeezing hand on your hip stops you.
Then you feel them — two fingers tentatively dragging up the slick down your legs, a subtle little moan, as they spread the sticky mess back up to your pussy. The fingers trace your pussy lips, the carefulness in the movements signal awe, as if you’re being observed like a specimen.
The fingers ease into you, thick, wiggling until you feel their knuckles against your folds.
“Now whose fingers are these, sweetheart?”
Long, long fingers. They brush up against that spongy part deep inside you that has you twitching. A shudder wracks through your body as they spread said fingers, stretching you out to see inside of your pussy.
“Scott…?” You guess meekly. This has to be a trick question.
Smack! You jolt forward, more so from the shock of the slap on your ass. The area where the hand landed throbs dully with the sting. “Wrong.”
God, fuck. Tears prick your eyes. Whether it’s from the intensity of the situation or the fact that the people pleaser in you has failed, you can’t tell.
“Clark,” you moan as he slowly pushes his fingers in and out of you.
“Good girl,” Clark coos sweetly, “doing so good for me, honey. You’re dripping all over my fingers. Making such a mess, it’s going down to my wrist.”
Your heart beats against your ribs, guilt gnawing at your bones. “‘M sorry, didn’t mean to.”
Clark shushes you with another deep push of his fingers into your quivering cunt. “It’s okay, no need to be sorry. You’re so pretty for us, leaking all over like this. Just means you like us too much.”
“I do, I do,” you agree numbly.
“We’re going to, um, put—”
“We’re going to fuck you again now,” Scott interrupts, you imagine the roll of his eyes at Clark who would just press his lips together. “Try and focus.”
The cock that slides into you next… feels exactly the same. Same length, same girth, same fucking burn. Your frustration builds in your chest into a vexed whine that slips past your lips.
Another slap on your ass that catches you off guard. “Focus,” Scott barks, but you can hear the smirk in his voice.
You do, you’re trying. The cock fucks deep inside you moved in a slow, steady rhythm to the beat of your heart. All you can think about is the delicious stretch that fuels the spark that’s been lit between your legs.
It feels damn good. Whoever this is knows how to find those little spots inside of you, your trigger points that hurtle you forward into a delirium of pleasure. Every thrust feels intentional. Every thrust is specially made for you.
“C-Clark,” you breathlessly whimper.
The cock stutters inside you, an interruption to the tempo. Your heart drops to your gut with fear.
“There you go,” Scott grunts, “see, you’re getting the good hang of it. Now we’re really ready to play.”
Ready to play— “Haven’t you been counting?” You snap, a little more irritated than you intended.
“You have to get it right five times in a row. If you mess up, we’re restarting the count.”
We. Scott’s twisted little game and he’s dragging poor, sweet Clark into this.
They take turns soaking their cocks with your cunt. Every time one of them enters you, the burn starts all over again. You’re stretching around their cocks, pussy molding to the shape of them, loosening slowly until you’re moaning with each dip into your little hole. You have bruises in the size of their fingertips on your hips, rough grips on you every time they fuck deep inside of you.
But Scott doesn’t relent on his game, no matter how close you get. They drive into you like men starved, moans bouncing off the walls like a symphony. The pleasure builds and nearly crests, each time you even come close to guessing five, you always somehow manage to get the last one wrong.
“A-are you doing this on purpose?” You pant, hair a tangled sweaty mess on your face.
“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Scott says coolly.
A gasp wrenches out of your throat. “Have you just been telling me I’ve been getting it wrong to keep going?”
“You calling us liars, sweetheart?” Scott slaps your ass again, his handprint tingling in the spots he’s been hitting you. “You cum when we want you to cum.”
“M-maybe we should let her, Scott,” Clark groans and you know it’s his cock pushing deep inside you again. He’s gentler between the two of them, but you can feel his self-control faltering when he fucks you a little deeper, a little harder each time. “This isn’t right. She doesn’t want this.”
“Your mouth’s been saying no, Clark, but god, sweetheart, you should see him right now. He’s enjoying this premium pussy if yours. Trying so hard not to moan. Doesn’t she feel so nice and tight? Perfect little toy.”
A moan climbs out of Clark’s chest, deep and guttural. “Perfect. Perfect toy,” he echoes dumbly. Your cunt clenches around him and he whimpers. “You’re squeezing me so tight, honey. Feels so good. You’re so good to me.”
“And you—” Scott starts with a pinch of your ass, “you want this as much as we do. Pussy’s gaping now, ready for our cocks. We stretched you out so good, didn’t we? Tighten up that cunt for us. I want to feel it squeeze around my cock when I fuck you next.”
You’re nothing if not obedient, ready to please him — them — because Clark’s fingers sink deeper into your waist as he feels you clamp down around him.
“You’re so tight,” Clark rasps, “she feels so good.”
“‘Course she feels good,” Scott huffs as he circles you and lifts you to prop up on all fours. He taps the head of his cock, leaking with both his and your arousal, against your lips. “She was made for us.”
Your jaw instinctively drops open and Scott slides him along your tongue.
“Just like that,” he hisses, “you taste us, sweetheart?” You can only groan in response.
Scott uses your throat for a while, fucking your mouth by grabbing your head. Your tongue drags along the underside of his cock, eliciting a shudder out of him before he yanks you off again.
“Too close,” he gasps, “I want to cum inside your cunt instead.”
You don’t know how long you stay there, game nearly long forgotten if it weren’t for Scott taunting you over again, laughing when you get it “wrong.” At this point you don’t know the difference, answers tumbling from your lips in a garbled mess.
Every time you get close, whoever it is drags their cock out of you. They bring you to the edge, so close to the peak, only to drag you under again. You’re crying and babbling, begging them to put you out of this misery.
It’s like being trapped in a maze with no exit, each dead end another point of pleasure that you can’t seem to reach.
Scott shows no mercy, only coos, “Come on, sweetheart, whose cock is in you right now? Why don’t you use that pretty little head of yours to guess?”
You sputter incoherently, thighs shaking with the weight of your desire. You’re so close, the burning between your legs intensifying to a point where you can practically taste your orgasm. But it may just be delirium — it’s like your climax now feels unfamiliar on your tongue.
“Let me finish her, Scott, she's crying. I can finish her,” Clark tries to plea on your behalf.
The cock that’s driving hard and fast abusing your pussy abruptly disappears as Clark stumbles backward, Scott pushing him out of the way. “No, pretty baby can't use her head to figure out who's fucking her, she needs to learn her lesson. We’re gonna keep testing her until she gets it right.”
“Scott, please.”
“Use your head, you can do it.”
Through your cockdrunk haze, you only begin to decipher the difference.
It’s not the shape, nor the size, because they’re too close. Too similar. But the way they move, how hard they’re holding you.
Scott is quick and dirty, chasing quick satisfaction for himself in a way that bullies your cunt into submission. Each thrust of his hips is about pace and a test of self-control for him.
But Clark listens to how you whine and moan, drives himself deep in a slow burn that drags out the pleasure in your core. His hands on your body are firm, but not enough to harm.
Scott guides the game and gets you close, but it’s Clark who delivers the final blow.
“Clark. It’s Clark!”
“Fuck, she got it right, Kent. She can finally cum now, do you want her to cum?”
Clark’s face is flushed a deep red, veins on his neck pulsing with his resistance. His jaw is clenched tight, teeth kissing as he hisses when you squeeze around him to Scott’s words.
“Yes, please, gosh — feels so good. Wanna cum. Wanna see her cum.”
“Flip her over.”
He doesn’t miss a beat, pulling out of you for barely a second only to turn you on your back and plunge his cock back inside you. He folds your knees into your body as he fucks into you with another needy moan.
“Feels even better like this,” Clark rasps, “I can see everything. You look so pretty, honey.”
“Clark’s so sweet on you, isn’t he?” Scott chuckles, his fist finding his cock. “Pretty girl deserves some pretty treats. Why don’t you give it to her, Clark? Cream inside her. Look at her, she wants it.”
Clark’s eyes find yours but you can barely keep them open. Not with how good Clark’s giving it to you, his fat cock stretching out every inch of your pussy as he leans down and presses you in deeper into the mattress. You can see the vein on his forehead pulse, control fighting against his need to devour.
“Can I, honey? Can I cum inside you?” He asks you. So soft, so sweet. So desperate to give you what you need that it makes you whine as you arch off the bed.
All you can manage is a nod before Clark is shooting his cum inside you, landing warm and sticky, clinging onto your walls. Your pussy squeezes around him, pulsing like a second heartbeat as you tumble down your own pleasure.
His breaths are hot against your neck as his hips jerk with the last spills into your pussy. You can feel it beginning to leak out from where the two of you are joined, dribbling down your ass and onto the sheets.
“Alright, Kent, gonna need you to move,” Scott mutters, using his own body to shoulder Clark out of the way.
Clark’s legs can barely hold himself up, the weight of his climax still hanging off his shoulders. His chest heaves with labored breaths as he watches Scott position himself in front of you, sandwiching himself between your parted legs.
His thumb pries your pussy open from the lips to see Clark’s cum seeping out. With a hiss, he uses the head of his own cock to nudge that cum back into your cunt and fucks it back into you. “Shit, you feel so good, sweetheart. Clark’s cum is so warm inside you, the perfect lube to fuck you.”
“S-so sore, Scott,” you whimper, the ache between your legs throbbing.
“I know, baby, but I need to cum too. I won’t take long.”
And he delivers — it only takes him a few more thrusts, every time he enters, he punctuates it with a praise. Fucking beautiful. Look at you. Gorgeous tits. Then he’s finishing inside you and you feel as if you’re about to burst with how much the two have filled you up. Your entire body feels like jell-o, not a single bone or muscle to move you.
Clark swipes the sweaty strands of hair from your face and presses a kiss to your forehead. Scott drags his cock out of you with a heavy groan.
The two of them watch in sick, rapt fascination as both their cums leak onto the bed. By this time, Scott’s mattress is a mess of stains — your arousal drenching the sheets and the cum that’s slowly pooling at the edge.
Even so, Scott only grins, “Think you can tell which cum is whose?”
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who remembers the exact day she met you, the clothes you were wearing, and the strange twist in her stomach when you smiled at her for the first time.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who loves spending time with you beyond the sex, who genuinely enjoys your presence.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who prefers giving you cash even though transfers are faster; you notice the way her eyes darken whenever she sees you on her bed, in your underwear or with nothing on at all, counting her money that’s yours now.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who never takes anything as a joke, especially when it comes to you.
One night, joking around, you posted something on your insta story saying you needed 500 dollars to buy ice cream.
Not even ten minutes passed before she called you.
“Were you sleeping, darling?” Her voice sounds soft over the phone, her posh accent thicker, maybe from exhaustion.
“I was about to,” you answer with a small smile.
“Would you mind coming over to my house?” she asks, and you know that even though she’s asking, she expects you to say yes. “To give me a goodnight kiss.”
Even when you tell her it’s too late to be out on the street, she says her driver was already on the way to your house.
Caitlyn wanted a goodnight kiss, yes. But after you give it to her, you notice that wicked shine in her eyes. “There’s a gift for you on the nightstand.” And it’s a stack of hundreds waiting for you. “For your ‘ice cream.’”
You let out a little laugh. “I was joking, you know?”
She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who keeps track of you every second of the day. Even though she says your relationship is just transactional, she can’t stop thinking about you. Flooding you with messages like “good morning, darling. i’ll pick you up in an hour, i want to see you before work.” “have you eaten yet?” “how’s your day going?”
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who eats your pussy like it’s her last meal. She loves pleasing you and takes her sweet time doing it.
Your legs are thrown over her shoulders while she gives you a “massage.” Well, that’s how it started, but her lips accidentally found your clit. Caitlyn always starts soft, little kisses against your mound. “you’re the prettiest thing i’ve ever seen, darling,” slips from her lips while her first lick is slow, gentle, just to watch your reaction. “and you taste delicious too.”
The funny thing is you both moan, Caitlyn louder than you. “better than any meal i’ve ever had.”
She can spend forever teasing you, keeping you right on the edge. She smiles when your hands tug at her hair without measuring your strength, she doesn’t care, she loves it.
“Do you want to cum in my mouth, princess? But it’s so hard to let you go, you look so pretty needy.”
At this point she’s basically talking to herself because the only things leaving your lips are whines and moans that make her even wetter.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who shows you off and takes care of you like you’re a jewel, precious, because you are, you’re HER precious girl. She has you as her lock screen, a picture of the two of you at the beach on her computer, and if anyone asks, she smiles. “that’s my girl.” And even though it’s unnecessary, she always puts emphasis on the “my.”
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who gives you an extension of her credit card because she “trusts you,” when really she doesn’t care how much you spend or what you spend it on. But if it’s clothes, you have to model every single outfit for her and she enjoys it like it’s a real show.
She’s sitting on the couch in her house, a glass of whiskey in her hands. She takes a slow sip while looking at you like she wants to devour you.
“Give me a little turn, darling,” Caitlyn demands, fingers motioning in the direction she wants you to spin. “That’s it, just like that.” You can hear the desire in her voice, the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing this only for her.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who loves trying new things with you and never imagined she’d enjoy watching you suck her strap this much. But there’s something so erotic about it, the way you look at her while doing it, how your eyes never leave hers for even a second, not even when she grabs more of your hair, pushing her hips upward, smirking whenever you choke even a little.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who rarely lets you top, but when she’s exhausted or especially needy, she gives herself to you without hesitation. She’s vocal, way more than you expected, and ridiculously sensitive, always asking to be cuddled afterward.
𓂃⋆.˚ Sugar mommy!Caitlyn who’s always cold, but some nights, when work overwhelms her or she misses her mother, she calls you without thinking.
“I need you, darling,” is all she says, and you know exactly what’s wrong.
Those nights, she lies beside you, just looking at you at first, stroking your hair, kissing your face. Even though she’s the one who needs comfort, what really gives it to her is the warmth of your body.
“You’re an angel,” she murmurs shyly, hiding her face in your neck, hugging you timidly. “Just stay like this with me all night. Please.”
Everyone outside the hotel thinks they know you. They know the stage persona, the voice, the eyeliner, the way you destroy yourself on stage night after night. But only Vi knows what happens after the lights go out—how your hands shake after concerts, how exhausted you really are, how badly you need someone to hold you together before you completely fall apart.
tags: explicit sexual content (18+), rockstar au, singer!reader, guitarist!Vi, tribbing, pussy grinding, clit stimulation, nipple play, biting, spitting, finger sucking, weed smoking, praise and teasing, emotional intimacy, soft dom Vi.
The bathroom in your hotel room smells like weed, steam, and your shampoo. The hot water runs down your body like punishment, barely any pressure behind it, but you’re grateful for every drop anyway because tonight’s show was a slaughterhouse, too many people, too much noise, too much of everything. The microphone still vibrates in your hands even though it’s been two hours since you walked offstage, your throat feels scraped raw from screaming down to your guts, your makeup running because you couldn’t even bother taking it off before the shower, and your thighs ache from jumping under the stage lights. Nobody prepared you for this, for this animal devotion, the roar, the pressure of being the band’s singer, of making every show more epic than the last even while you’re falling apart inside. Outside the hotel there are probably another hundred, another thousand fans, all convinced you’re some untouchable goddess and not a wreck of a human being who hasn’t slept properly in six months.
The only thing you have is Vi. Vi, with her razor-cut hair dyed by you, tattooed arms and easy laugh, waiting for you in bed like you’re the center of gravity of the whole fucking universe. She’s completely naked, legs spread, with that hungry look she never loses. There’s a joint between her teeth and she watches you, impatient and amused, while you walk out of the bathroom, barely drying yourself off, naked all the way to the bed where she’s already turned the lights off. Without saying anything, you throw yourself on top of her, crush her under your wet body, and she takes you in laughing, kissing you slow enough that it feels like slow motion. Vi holds the back of your neck, plays with your lips while her hands slide down your back to your ass, squeezing you and pulling you higher against her.
“You know what killed me today?” Vi asks, pulling back from the kiss, voice rough from cigarettes and screaming.
“What?”
“When you hit that high note a few hours ago. I thought your throat was gonna split in half.”
“I almost threw up,” you answer with a laugh, pressing your forehead to hers. “How’s your hand holding up?”
Vi lifts it, flexing her knuckles, all bruised and dry-skinned from the chords. “It’ll fall off on its own eventually. I’m letting it.”
You kiss her hand and look back up at her eyes, not before stopping at her lips first, of course. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stop you. Vi is always willing when it comes to you, no matter how crazy or ridiculously romantic it is. Taking advantage of that, you keep kissing lower, tracing a path to her middle finger, sucking it gently. Vi sighs at the heat of your mouth, your tongue around her finger, and decides to push her ring finger in too, grabbing your chin so she can talk.
“You know there’s an afterparty, right?” she says quietly, pulling her fingers from your mouth even though she doesn’t want to, just to hear your answer.
You nod. “I don’t give a shit about the afterparty,” you admit. To you, one more party or one less never meant much anyway. It’s all the same in the end. “I’m good here.”
“You sure you’d rather have this than a party with music, food, alcohol?” she asks in that low, dirty voice.
“Mm.” You murmur against her neck, leaving open-mouthed kisses, soft and lazy, teasing her with a small bite that makes her grab the back of your neck. “You’re better than all that, Violet.”
Vi laughs, flips you over in one sharp movement and leaves you underneath her, her thigh wedged between yours. She leans down, kneading your tits, staring at them like they’re something precious, or like she likes to call them, “her stress balls.” She licks one nipple hungrily, moaning before you even do, enjoying this as much as you, maybe more. Vi takes her time, sucking each nipple one by one, biting right at the edge of pain. She talks with her mouth still against your skin.
“We could be on a yacht right now,” she says, “But you want a stiff bed and hotel sex.”
You pull her hair back and stare into her dark, burning blue eyes.
“You can leave if you want,” you reply, pretending not to care while partly daring her to do it. With a glance, you point at the faint smoke still rising from the joint she abandoned on the nightstand. “Give it to me.”
Vi brings it to her mouth, takes a long drag, then parts your lips with her thumb and blows the smoke into your throat while kissing you. You choke a little, the burn sliding down your chest, your mind starting to float while your hands move on their own, desperate, touching Vi’s body like she’s liquid, like every inch of her skin is charged with static electricity.
Vi lowers her hand to your cunt, just playing, like she could torture you mercilessly all night long. Her finger gets bolder, stroking between your lips where she finds wetness. She laughs under her breath.
“You’re sick,” she mocks. “Concerts turn you on?”
“You turn me on, idiot.”
Now it’s your turn. You slip your hand between her legs and rub her clit with practiced rhythm, pressing slow circles, feeling the heat build while Vi curves toward you, mouth at your ear, breathing hard.
“Come on, doll, I know you love making me cum. Do it,” she begs, and the fragility in her voice catches you off guard.
You answer with the same touch, picking up the pace without going too fast, searching for the exact spot that makes her shake. Vi kisses your cheek, your neck, your shoulders, biting everything she can until you feel marked and feral. Before letting her enjoy your fingers too much, you switch positions, climbing on top of her, pressing your pelvis against hers until your cunts line up, heat and slick mixing together, your clits searching for each other.
It’s slow at first, just brushing, grinding, feeling the pulse of your bodies and the sway of your hips, sticky skin sliding together, slick overflowing between your thighs. Vi guides you with her hands on your waist, tattoos shining under the dim light, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks.
“That’s it, baby,” she murmurs against your neck, already lost in the feeling of you against her. “So good, so fucking good. Don’t stop.”
Vi forces you to grind harder, to crush yourself against her like you could eat her whole.
“Fuck, Violet.”
“Ah, there it is,” she teases quietly, breath brushing your skin. “That little voice. I like that one.”
You bite her shoulder just to shut her up for a second, but she only laughs against your neck, completely entertained by you.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Then stop making such pretty sounds.”
There’s no sound except your bodies slamming together, Vi’s muffled moans, your ragged breathing, the dull thud of your heads against the headboard, hot crushed tits and the smell of sex filling the whole room. Your mind goes blank, only movement and hunger exist, the need to grind her down until she surrenders, until she cums first.
But Vi is stubborn. She holds on like a champion. So you take control, hook her legs over your shoulders, spread her wide and line your cunt up with hers higher, closer. Then you start grinding again, slower this time, your clits rubbing together, swollen pussy lips slick and hot, heat climbing like a fever.
You look down at her, your pace slowing more and more, like you want to feel every tiny tremor running through her body. Vi’s cheeks are flushed, lips shiny and swollen from all the kissing, and she’s still smiling at you in that insolent way that melts you.
“What?” she murmurs, still rubbing against you. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
You don’t answer right away. You just brush a strand of hair stuck to her forehead aside and run your thumb over her bottom lip, soft, almost tender.
“Open your mouth, my love.”
Vi does it without questioning you, staring up at you, trusting, like she’d let you do anything to her as long as it was you. The gesture is slow, intimate, more vulnerable than anyone would ever expect from her. And when your spit falls onto her tongue, slow and warm, Vi lets out a quiet sound that tightens something in your chest more than between your legs. Her fingers sink into your thighs as she swallows without looking away.
“Again,” she whispers, rough and needy. “Please.”
The way she asks makes you kiss her before answering. Your mouths crash together wet and messy, sharing breath and taste without caring about anything else. There’s no disgust, no shame, just hunger and affection tangled together in a way that can’t be separated.
Vi cups your face while you keep grinding together, slow but desperate at the same time. Every kiss feels like she wants to swallow your moans, your soft laughs, even the air from your lungs.
You’re close, too close, orgasm bubbling low in your stomach, but you refuse to cum before she does. Vi looks wrecked, mouth open, begging for more, repeating “don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” so you keep going, grinding your cunts together until suddenly her body arches and she cries out, rough and animal, pure pleasure. Heat explodes between you, soaking everything, and only then do you let go too, your legs shaking while your body collapses onto hers.
You stay there for a moment, breathless. Vi strokes your hair, your cheek, kisses your eyelids.
“nNw it actually feels like we had a party.”
“We’re disgusting,” you say, but you’re laughing.
“Does that bother you?” she asks, with a hint of vulnerability.
“The opposite.” You kiss her cheek, her forehead, her mouth. “I want you exactly like this. With everything you come with.”
“You wanna skip rehearsal tomorrow?” she asks, grinning with that wicked spark in her eyes. “Stay here all day, fuck and write songs.”
“Otherwise what the fuck are we rockstars for?” you say, kissing her, and inside that kiss, it feels like the whole world fits.
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