summary | Your ex-boyfriend, Matt Murdock, breaks no-contact when he needs someone to patch him up. But are things really over between you?
warnings | exes to maybe-lovers, goofy/sarcastic reader, hurt/comfort, banter, Catholicism, injury and blood, ambiguous ending that leans hopeful, matt is shirtless, whale sharks
wc | 3.8k
MATT'S LIVING ROOM SWIMS IN SHADES OF BLUE.
You glance sidelong at the electronic billboard posted outside his windows. “The aquarium’s got a new whale shark exhibit,” you tell him.
The ad shows a whale shark — surprise surprise — swimming up to greet smiling guests. In bold white letters, the ad reads: Come Meet the Gentle Giant
You frown.
“Do you think they only have one?” you ask, then immediately feel like a moron when you remember Matt can’t see the billboard. “It says gentle gi-ant,” you explain, “not gi-ants.”
Matt’s response is a pained groan.
He’s lying flat on the couch. Shirtless, bruised, bloody — classic Matt.
You’re kneeling in front of the couch, an open first-aid kit at your side. You’ve got a needle pinched between your fingers, threading it with what is definitely not medical-grade thread.
Eventually Matt chokes out real words.
“Whale sharks are solitary creatures,” he says. “They only gather to eat.”
Hmph.
You don’t like the way he answered. Casual. Or as close to casual as someone can get while fighting for breath. Like this isn’t weird. Like a whole year hadn’t passed since the last time you were in a room together. Like you’re still his girlfriend, entitled to a serious response to every “Would you still love me if I was a worm?”-esque question.
“Well that’s sad,” you say.
Matt shakes his head. Pretty stupid since every movement seems to cost him, but it’s clear he means to comfort you. “They prefer it that way. Besides,” he winces, “is it the aquarium down on Surf? The building’s too small. Even if they tried, they probably couldn’t get a permit for more than one.”
“Then maybe they shouldn’t have any.”
“Even if whale sharks prefer to be alone?”
Your traitorous eyes flick up from the needle to his lips. No one prefers to be alone, you almost tell him.
But that’s too vulnerable. Too close to an admission.
Instead, you say, “Even if.”
A flash as the billboard changes. New colors bathe the living room: bright red and bleach white. You don’t have to look to know what ad is on display.
The emergency room wait time for Metro-General.
Ironic.
If it was up to you, that’s where Matt would be right now. In a real hospital, getting real medical treatment.
But that’s an old argument, and vigilantes are stupid by nature. “Why would I need a doctor?” asks a dying vigilante. “This random civilian has seen Grey’s Anatomy, right? That’s basically an M.D. crash course. Someone, quick! Give them a sewing kit before my intestines meet a Brooklyn sidewalk.”
With the needle readied, you chew your bottom lip and consider Matt’s injuries. His muscled torso is a sweaty mess of slashing cuts. The worst cut steals your attention, a straight line from the top of his hipbone to a little past his belly button. Looking at it turns your stomach. It’s one of the wounds that reminds you the human body is nothing more than a meat sack.
You swallow bile — swallow fear — and reach for one of the hand towels beside the first-aid kit.
Gently — very, VERY gently — you dab the towel against his bloody wound.
Matt writhes, arching off the cushions.
“Sorrysorrysorry!” You hardly recognize your own voice. You’re too focused on Matt, his clenched teeth stifling a groan, fists curling at his sides.
Apologies don’t cure pain.
Distraction might.
“Have I ever told you how much I hate that billboard? I mean, don’t get me wrong! I miss penthouse living every day. But you know what I don’t miss? Falling asleep on the couch and waking up to the lights of a hemorrhoid cream ad burning into my retinas.”
True. You do hate the billboard, and you do miss Matt’s apartment.
Your current apartment is a shoebox that Foggy helped you score two days post-breakup. To call it a hellscape would be too kind. The lights are all faulty, a massive roach has squatter’s rights under your white refrigerator, and you’re one hundred percent certain that Frank Castle lives down the hall.
You’ve been careful to keep that last bit hush-hush. If Foggy or Karen were to find out that you share a mailroom with the Punisher, they’d definitely tell Matt.
Not that Matt would care.
…
…
…
Okay, fine. Matt would care. About everything.
He’d go on for hours about the risk of electrical fire, how roaches carry E. coli, that your landlord’s violating New York State law by refusing to install a carbon monoxide detector, and oh, yeah, a convicted murderer might knock on your door any day now for a cup of sugar!
Just thinking about it makes your chest hurt. The depth of Matt’s care.
And Matt — sweet, loving, woeful Matt — makes it all worse by saying, “I offered to buy curtains.”
He had.
Countless times.
Once again chewing your bottom lip, you toss the towel aside. You’d cleaned enough blood to see what Meredith Grey would’ve called subcutaneous tissue. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe it’s something else. Grey’s Anatomy, after all, is not an MD crash course.
Either way, the raw mess of his stomach proves what was already obvious: this cut is deeeeeeeeeep.
“Sure you don’t want any pain killers?” you ask him. “I’ve got Midol in my bag.”
He shakes his head once.
You scoff. “You know you don’t earn tough guy points for taking it raw, right?”
Matt laughs at your poor phrasing; though “laugh” might not be the best word for it. It’s more of an exhale turned cough turned sound of agony, but whatever. You take it as a win! If Matt wants to feel the pain of being a human embroidery project, so be it. At least you managed to distract him for a second, make him chuckle-cough over something silly.
“Hold your breath,” you tell him.
His brows knit with confusion. Soon as he starts to ask why, you shove the needle through the edge of the ruined flesh above his hipbone. His question becomes an exclamation that is very un-Catholic.
“That’ll be seven Hail Marys, Murdock.”
A vein pulses at his temple. “Feels more like a Psalm 88 kind of moment.”
“Is that a joke?” You settle into the old rhythm of stitching him up. Needle in, out, pull the thread, repeat. “You know altar boy humor goes over my head.”
“I was never an altar boy,” he reminds you.
You tut. “How ableist.”
“Not because I’m blind.” Amusement flickers through agony, reminding you that pain is second nature to Matt. You’ve only finished one stitch, yet already he can mask a wince when the needle pops through flesh. “I was a nervous kid,” he explains, “especially in front of crowds. My hands used to shake so much the pastor thought I’d drop the candles and set the altar on fire.”
“What a headline,” you say. “Local Blind Boy Burns Parish: God’s Judgment or Innocent Mistake?”
He chuckle-coughs.
You ask him, “Couldn’t you have carried the wine?”
“You mean the body of Christ?”
Your eyeroll is affectionate. “The wine.”
Transubstantiation is one of those things you’ve always filed under Complete Malarkey. How does random bread and crushed grapes become the body and blood of Jesus Christ? By invoking the Holy Spirit? Is that not a form of witchcraft? And why is it cannibalism to eat each other, but not the Son of God?
Catholics are, in your opinion, an awfully confusing people.
Matt’s no exception. A devout lover of God — yet a glimpse up from stitching reveals his mouth curving into a small smile. He’s always liked your sacrilege. It amuses him. Gives him reason to challenge his faith.
“If the pastor was too nervous to let me hold a candle,” he says, “you can bet he wasn’t eager to hand me the blood of our Savior.”
“If only he could see you now,” you say. “Well not now, but in court. I’ve seen you and Foggy tackle plenty of cases in jam-packed courtrooms, and not once have you ever set a judge on fire or spilled Jesus down their moo moo.”
“You mean the judicial robes they work decades to earn?”
“Whatever. Hey, while we’re on the subject, how come they did away with those powdery wigs?”
“A barrister’s wig?”
“Do you get paid by Big Law to make sure I use their terminology right?”
“I do,” he says, “and you’re cutting into my paycheck.”
You laugh.
A comfortable silence settles.
Matt’s stomach remains tense under your fingertips. But his breaths come easier now — a steady rise and fall that breeds comfort inside you. It’s easy to lose yourself in the rhythm. Needle in, out, pull the thread, repeat.
The room around you glows pale purple. It’s easy to lose the present in the past, you realize. Your mind flips through old memories like songs in a jukebox, lingering on a favorite.
You and Matt used to dance in this room. You both had two left feet and spent more time tripping over abandoned takeout containers than actually dancing, but what did that matter? You were always giggling. Matt was always smiling.
The steady weight of his hands on your lower back had been the closest you ever came to finding proof of religion. Because someone like Matt couldn’t be the result of some random assimilation of atoms. Perfection at his level required divine planning. The sweetness of spirit mixed with the miracle of light. A pure heart placed inside his chest by the sure hand of God.
But despite what the Bible tells you, God is not an expert craftsman.
Matt is proof of this, too.
When silence stretches into discomfort, you glance up.
Matt’s dead.
Okay — okay, okay! — not dead since he’s still breathing. But he looks dead, eyes shut and lips parted enough to go full cadaver.
You snap, “Eyes open, Murdock.”
“Why?” His quick response eases your nerves, even if he doesn’t obey your command. “Want to see if I can tell how many fingers you’re holding up?”
“You probably have a concussion.” Not to mention a bloodborne illness or two. When’s the last time he got tested for hepatitis? “The last thing I need is for you to fall asleep and never wake up again.”
You’re pulling the thread through his wound when you notice the smirk in his voice.
“Would you miss me?” he asks.
You hesitate.
Of course.
Of course you’d miss him.
“Foggy will start ditching me for Thursday brunch if I let you die,” you tell him. “Do you know how many waffles your life would cost me?”
Matt opens his eyes. He blinks like his eyelids weigh a thousand pounds. Like they might shut again at any moment.
He keeps them open.
“Three,” he says.
“Waffles?” you ask.
“Fingers,” he chuckle-coughs. “That’s how many you’re holding up. Three.”
Amusement bubbles in your chest, rushing up your throat like a Mentos dropped into a bottle of Coke. You try to stifle it, but a lone giggle slips out.
“I’m not holding up any fingers, idiot.”
He huffs softly. “Talk about ableism.”
You’re offended, perplexed, giggling even more now. “That was so not ableist!”
“Since when did me insulting you become me insulting the entire blind community? And I’m not even calling you an idiot because you’re blind! I’m calling you an idiot because you’re an idiot.”
“Ouch. So you really think so low of me?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
His head tilts where it lay on the armrest. “Remember when I graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University?” he asks.
“Remember how you currently look like the victim of a violent anthropomorphic lawnmower?” You smile when he chuckle-coughs. “Yeah, not a thing that happens to smart people, Matty.”
The world stutters for a beat. Or maybe that’s only your pulse, jolting at your embarrassing slip-up.
Matty. You almost curse yourself; what was your tongue thinking?
Matt accepts defeat with a humble “Fair enough” that doubles as your path of least resistance. He’s always been good at withholding salt from a wound, giving you time to stew in self-loathing.
You have no doubt he can still hear your heart thumping stupidly against your ribs.
This isn’t easy. Being here. Seeing him. Pretending your breakup isn’t as much a third party in this room as the billboard’s glaring lights.
You’ve already stitched three-quarters of his wound. You should finish your work in silence. Then leave before he can make this anymore difficult, remind you of some reason to stay.
And yet.
“What’s Psalm 88, anyway?”
Matt likes this question.
“You dated a Catholic for two years,” he says, “and you don’t know Psalm 88?”
“Sorry, I hadn’t realized reading the Bible was a prerequisite for sucking your—”
Ever a child of God, Matt cuts you off — his voice an octave too high — with a sudden urge to recite.
“Lord, I am overwhelmed with troubles and my life is slipping toward death. You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. You have taken from me my closest friend—” his voice wavers here “—and made me repulsive to them. Why, Lord, do you reject me? From my youth I have suffered. Your wrath has swept over me. Your terrors have destroyed me. They surround me like a flood, engulfing me completely. Darkness,” he says, “is my closest friend.”
You say nothing.
Needle in—
You think about how pain has always been second nature to Matt.
—out—
You think about the breakup.
—pull thread—
The breakup you’d initiated.
—repeat.
“NOT TO TOOT MY OWN HORN, but that is going to be one fine scar.”
Half an hour has passed since you finished stitching Matt up. If you were wise, you would’ve excused yourself the moment you closed the first-aid kit. But excuses are easy to come by, and even easier to make yourself believe.
I’ll stay a little longer, you keep telling yourself. Just to make sure he’s okay.
At some point the two of you switched places. You’re on the couch now, legs folded underneath you. Matt stands in front of you, testing his body for breaks and sprains — stretching an arm, rolling his neck.
At your comment, he pauses his self-assessment to run his fingertips over the stitches. You track the movement, a slow sweep from hipbone to belly button.
“Some of your best work.”
The praise straightens your posture.
The curve of his lips becomes devilish. “I’m surprised,” he adds. “I thought you’d be rusty.”
“Your faith in me is astounding, Murdock.”
“My faith in you is boundless,” he shoots back. “But it’s been a while since you last played nurse.”
With theatrical flair, you say, “An artist never forgets how to paint.”
“Even if they swore they’d never touch a brush again?”
Levity drops from the air like a butterfly hitting a bug zapper.
He hadn’t meant for it to come out that way. Not resentful, but…hurt. You know this because you know Matt, and he’d sooner walk into traffic than make you feel guilty for your choices.
Some relationships are like a winter storm. Rarely do we take the first snowflake to mean danger. Some people even find them beautiful — like noticing the quirks and habits of the one we love. But snowflakes pile up. They become inconvenient. Isolating. And, in some cases, they become dangerous, too.
Sometimes the only way to stay safe is to evacuate.
Matt will never blame you for evacuating.
With a soft sniff, he turns his head toward the windows. Too quiet, he asks, "What advertisement is showing?"
The billboard shines with a dark image, car keys lying next to an empty whiskey glass. "Think twice," you read aloud, "don't drink and drive."
Matt nods. "Good message."
You nod. "Indubitably."
Matt keeps facing the windows, but your own focus has already shifted back to him. He looks sad. Confused. Like he’s trying hard to hide both emotions, yet failing miserably.
A flash as the billboard changes. White light illuminates Matt’s profile — bruised, bloody, beautiful as ever.
As if he knows the ad has changed — as if he can hear it somewhere, electrical pulses whispering secrets only to him — he asks, “How about now?”
You don’t answer. You don’t know.
You can’t look away from him long enough to find out.
“I would’ve bought curtains,” he mumbles, and you don’t know what he’s talking about. Then it hits you. Your confession about the billboard, how you always hated it. “If you would’ve told me the light bothered you, I…” He swallows. Calls upon shaky confidence, betraying that what he says next lives somewhere between truth and wishful thinking. “I would’ve fixed it.”
Your eyes start to burn.
He would’ve tried, you know. He would’ve tried.
You find yourself rising off the couch. Taking a step — two, three — to close the gap between you. Matt looks away from the windows and you swear he can see you. He does, in that peculiar way of his. Through soundwaves bouncing off your skin. The smell of your shampoo. The rhythm of your heartbeat.
“I know,” you say.
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“Back then. Why didn’t you tell me back then? It would’ve been an easy fix.”
Your laugh is half-sob. “No, Matt–”
He reaches up to cup your cheek. “Yes,” he whispers.
It takes Herculean effort not to lean into his touch. You manage, but don’t pull away from him, either.
“Fine. You’re right. Curtains would be an easy fix. Get on Amazon and they’ll be here in ten seconds. But what about the bigger issues? The lies? The secrets? You trying to get yourself killed?”
He winces. “I’m not dead yet,” he tries to argue.
“Yet,” you say. “Key word, Matty.”
An awful key word. One that had been haunting you for far longer than the year you two had been apart.
You had never wanted to leave Matt. And if you’re being honest, you hadn’t even left because of the lying and the secrets — though they were factors. When it came down to it, you’d left because Matt was on a suicide mission. Because you wouldn’t survive watching him die.
Only now — with the warmth of his hand on your cheek — can you see the flawed logic in your breakup plan.
Sure, leaving Matt ensured you won’t be front row for his death. That it won’t be you holding pressure to wounds that can’t be stitched, crying “Lord, why do you reject him? Your perfect soldier, your pure-hearted boy?”
But that doesn’t free you from pain.
You’ll feel Matt’s death as a ripple effect through Foggy and Karen. You'll feel it inside of you, when his last breath severs the invisible string connecting you to him and him to you.
Distance will not spare you.
You will feel it.
It will hurt.
And will all this distance make it hurt worse? you wonder. Until tonight you hadn’t realized how unsteady you stood on your decision to leave. A single phone call had been all it took to undo three-hundred sixty-five days of progress. So much time spent assuring everyone you had made the right decision. That you’re happier without Matt. So much time — each second a tally toward a life free from pain, now useless as sand in an hourglass, so easy to flip.
You’re not happier without Matt.
You’re not happy, period.
The heat coming off his palm is too much. Does he have a fever? Probably. Is fever a normal response to getting sliced up like salmon on a Hibachi line? You have no clue. You'll Google it if you ever remember how to form thoughts not centered on the flecks of gold in Matt's eyes.
He speaks.
“I’m sorry I called tonight. I know I shouldn’t have. I know when you—” He can’t make himself say it. So he drags a hand through his hair. Pulls easier words from a bucket labeled: Half-truths. "I know you wanted to get away from all this. From me. And it was wrong of me to drag you back into it, but..." A chuckle-cough. "Whenever something happens...when I'm stressed, or hurt, or...or happy, I..."
His thumb traces your lower lip. Lovingly. Mournfully.
"You're still the only one I want around.”
You're bawling. You hate yourself for it, and you hate him for causing it. You sob and laugh and tell him, "You're a goddamn idiot, Matty."
He smiles at you. "I know."
"It was never you I wanted to get away from."
He hesitates. "I know."
You hate him for that, too. But what else could he have said? You both know nothing can erase the true problem. The Achilles' heel to an otherwise perfect relationship.
Daredevil.
God, you think, how is it possible to hate the mask but love the man behind it?
It's simple, though. You don't hate Daredevil. Can't. He'll be the death of Matt Murdock, but that doesn't make him any less the salvation of Hell's Kitchen.
You sigh. Does that justify it, then? Does some PEMDAS bullshit make it okay that Matt suffers so long as his suffering saves others?
You don't think so.
But you know Matt holds a different opinion.
A stupid opinion, but.
"I wish things were different," you tell him. No jokes. "Maybe we could drop Daredevil off at the shelter. Y'know, like a stray dog who won't stop digging in our trash."
Okay, fine. Some jokes.
Matt chuckles. “I don’t think the shelter will take him.”
“Can’t say I blame them.”
You don’t know when you grabbed Matt’s other hand, the one not touching your face. You only know that you’re playing with his fingers, trying to keep more tears from escaping. He hadn’t coughed when he chuckled this time. Does that mean he’s feeling better? You hope so — and hope not, too.
You're not ready to go back to your shoebox apartment. You don't want to crawl into bed alone. Spend all night wondering if walking out Matt's door a second time makes it permanent. What are you supposed to do? Go back to getting all your Matt-related info via Thursday brunch with Foggy? Search for scraps of him in your texts with Karen?
No.
You're not sure you can survive that, either.
But what does that leave?
"Let me buy you dinner."
Your pulse jolts. “Matt…”
"Nothing romantic," he promises. Though the way his thumb continues brushing your bottom lip feels opposite of that. "And it doesn't have to change anything. Tomorrow we can go back to our normal lives, pretend none of this ever happened. But tonight...how about pizza? We can call it repayment for you saving my life."
You should say no.
You smile despite yourself. "Fine, but I get to pick the toppings."
A flash as the billboard changes. Shades of blue wash over you both.
Even without Matt’s enhanced senses, you swear you hear joy spark to life in his veins.
"I wouldn't have it any other way.”
A/N | if you've read this far, i am in love with you and i've already booked our flight to Vegas. booked the Elvis impersonator, too. do you have any allergies i should know about? i love you.
seriously, thank you so much for reading! comments and reblogs much appreciated :)
synopsis ⠀:: ⠀ the way they cope after your death.
including ⠀! ⠀ matt murdock. benjamin poindexter. ✶
contents ⠀! ⠀ fem reader. obsession. angst. both matt and dex are fucked in the head. dead dove? not really. nsfw in matt's part. gifs by @.emziess. masterlist. english is not my first language. ✶
MATT MURDOCK
Sex.
He will have sex constantly.
Every morning. Every night. Sometimes in the middle of the day when the silence becomes too much.
He fucks women who wear the exact same perfume you used. The one that still makes his cock twitch when he catches it on the wind.
He seeks out women whose heartbeats sync almost perfectly with the rhythm he still hears in his sleep. Women who moan his name in that same breathy pitch you once did, right before you cum on his tongue.
Matt always growls your name when he cums inside. Every single time.
“Y/n—” torn out like a prayer as he spills into a stranger’s cunt, hips stuttering, eyes squeezed shut so he can pretend it’s your wet heat milking him.
He knows it’s disgusting. He knows it’s vile.
But it’s the only way he can bury the grief, the guilt, the self hatred that rots him from the inside like maggots in a open wound.
Because he couldn’t protect you.
Because he didn't do shit.
He's daredevil isn't he? The devil of hell’s kitchen. The hand of god himself.
And yet he couldn’t keep one woman safe. One fragile, beautiful woman.
It’s his fault. All of it. Every fucking second of it.
Because he was selfish. Because he loved the suit more than you. Because he wanted to be superior to Fisk, better than the devil whispering in his ear.
Because he was a hypocrite who preached justice but did nothing when you needed him.
What a pathetic piece of shit.
If he had just been faster... If he had been stronger… If he had just killed—
Yeah. If.
It's always "what if."
Would it bring you back?
Would it let him taste your skin one more time instead of some stranger’s sweat?
What would you think if you saw him like this?
His face between another woman’s thighs just because her laugh sounded a little like yours for three pathetic seconds?
Would you be mad?
Disgusted?
Disappointed?
Or happy?
Are you happy now?
Are you smiling now? Do you laugh when he’s like this? Broken, leaking cum and tears into someone who isn’t you?
You must be.
You hated him, after all.
That’s when the hysterical laughter starts bubbling up while he’s still balls deep inside some poor woman’s pussy.
She is freaked out. He can tell by her heartbeats.
What was her name again?
Emma?
Emily?
Y/n.
Fuck.
He misses you.
He misses you so much. So much it feels like his ribcage is caving in, bones splintering inward to stab his heart.
He can't breathe.
There’s a stone lodged in his throat, heavy and sharp, and he doesn’t know if he wants to swallow it or vomit it up along with everything else rotting inside him.
His dick goes soft instantly. And then the tears come, hot and ugly, while some stranger holds him like a broken child, stroking his hair as he sobs your name into her tits.
Please come back.
Please.
He be better.
He do anything you want.
Just come back.
Please...
BENJAMIN POINDEXTER
The day you died, he had a mental breakdown.
His brain simply couldn't accept that you were dead.
You were not dead. You could not be dead.
Of course you're not dead.
You're sleeping.
You're sick.
You're tired.
You just need rest.
That's all.
That's all.
That's all.
You’re resting in the other room. You’ll wake up soon and smile at him with those pretty eyes that made him feel like he was on cloud nine.
You would never leave him.
You said it yourself. You said you loved him. You said you liked his eyes. You said he was good. You love him. You said you’d stay. You promised. You said you’d stay forever. You said— you said—
Ah.
He burned the eggs again.
Shit.
It’s fine. You can have pancakes today. You always liked them better. Extra syrup, just how you want it.
And apple juice. Cold. Fresh. Sweet.
He has to go get some right now.
Where are his keys? Where’s his keys? Where’s his keys? Where’s his fucking—
“Y/n? Have you seen my keys, baby? I need to get your apple juice.”
No answer.
Hmm?
“Baby?”
…why won't you answer?
“Y/n?”
Nothing.
A chill crawls down his back, slow and wet like melting ice. His pulse hammers in his ears.
Dex immediately runs to your room. Heart beating so fast it feels like it might burst through his chest.
What if you fell? What if you hurt yourself? What if you’re dea—
Shut the fuck up. Shut up shut up shut up.
Then he opens the door and—
Oh.
Ohhh.
Haha.
So you’re still sleeping. Alright.
Ok ok ok, everything's fine.
Look at you.
So lovely. So perfect. So peaceful.
You look so cute like that, don’t you?
Cute?
Yeah. So cute.
What’s so cute about a rotting corpse, Dex?
…what?
He stands there smiling, head tilted, fingers twitching at his sides. The delusion cracks for half a second, then seals itself again like a fresh wound.
You’re just sleep. You’ll wake up. You have to. Because if you don’t… if you really left him…
No. No no no.
He’ll make breakfast anyway. He’ll set the table. He’ll sit across from your cold body and talk to you about his day, stroking your stiffening hand while the smell gets worse and the flies start to gather at the corners of your eyes.
Then he crawls onto the bed beside you, careful not to disturb the way your stiff limbs have settled.
He brushes a strand of hair from your forehead—skin cold, slightly slick now—and presses a kiss to your dry lips.
“It’s okay. You’re just tired. I’ll take care of everything. I never leave you.”
He curls around your decaying body, nose buried in your neck where the rot is sweetest, breathing you in like his life is depends on it.
His hand strokes down your side, over the bloating beginning in your belly, fingers tracing the places he used to mark with his teeth when you were warm and moaning.
You’re not leaving. You can’t. You promised.
And in the quiet of the apartment, with the flies humming their little hymn above you both, Dex smiles against your cold skin and whispers the same things he told you every night when you were alive.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
He’ll stay right here until you wake up.
Even if it takes weeks.
Even if the smell gets worse.
Even if pieces of you start to slip off when he holds you too tight.
You’ll wake up.
You have to.
Because you promised.
Right?
If you want to be in my daredevil taglist let me know :)
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.
summary: On their wedding night, (Y/n) disappears in Matt’s arms-blipped without warning. For five years, he mourns her, tormented by grief and hallucinations. When she returns, unchanged, he’s convinced she’s not real. (angst mostly with fluff ending)
warnings: angst, cussing, lack of proofreading rip, set in infinity war - endgame timeline (reader getting blipped, etc)
a/n: Listen, my boy Matt is the PERFECT practice for writing angst. I just like to put him in situations and watch him like he's in a fish tank and I'm outside tapping on the glass. This man absolutely cannot catch a break and while I am partially to blame (cause I'm writing it this time), just how Matt is written in general is in a way that it just makes sense to put him through shit. He is a walking amalgam of Catholic Guilt, adrenaline, and poor decision making and I love him so much. This one is a boatload of angst but I threw in some fluff in the ending because well, we deserve good things.
The apartment door creaked open with the softest thud, and then her back hit it as Matt pressed her gently against the wood, lips grazing her jaw, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. He was smiling.
That rare, devastating smile he only wore when it was just them.
“You’re supposed to carry me across the threshold, remember?” she whispered, breathless with laughter.
“Oh, I didn’t forget,” Matt murmured. “Just wanted a moment alone with my wife first.”
Wife.
The word made her stomach flip in a good way- warm and giddy and ridiculous.
He scooped her up easily, one arm beneath her knees, the other at her back, and she looped her arms around his neck like she’d never let go. “You’re enjoying this a little too much.”
“I’m legally required to now,” he said with a smirk. “It’s in the vows. Carry you everywhere. Worship the ground you walk on. Try not to lose my mind over how good you look in that dress.”
“Flawless delivery, Murdock,” she teased. “Truly. I can tell you definitely wrote your own vows.”
He chuckled against her shoulder as he carried her through the doorway into the quiet, dimly lit apartment. Candles flickered. Soft music still hummed faintly from the speaker they forgot to turn off before the ceremony.
And for a second- just one perfect second- it was all stillness. Just them. Just this.
He set her down gently, hands lingering at her waist. They kissed again, slower now. Softer. Everything feeling like it had finally settled into place. She pressed her forehead to his, heart beating a little too fast.
“I think I’m going to cry.”
“I’ll beat you to it,” he murmured, eyes closing, nose brushing hers. “You’re here. You’re mine. We made it.”
She smiled, eyes glassy. “We did.”
They stood there for a while. Just holding each other. Breathing the same air. Wedding bands warm against skin.
But then-
She shifted slightly in his arms. Her brows furrowed.
“Matt?”
He straightened a little, instantly alert. “Yeah?”
“I feel... weird.”
He tilted his head, concern filtering through his features. “Weird how?”
She pressed a hand to her stomach. “I don’t know. It’s like- I just got dizzy all of a sudden. Like the room’s moving.”
Matt gently guided her toward the couch, helping her sit down. “Okay. Just breathe. You might be dehydrated. Or just- adrenaline crash.”
She tried to smile. “Yeah. Big day. Lots of emotions. Too many speeches.”
She stood too fast. Her hand slipped from his.
“Careful,” Matt said, already reaching for her again. “Take it slow- ”
“I think I need to throw up,” she mumbled, voice shaky.
“Okay, yeah,” he nodded, already guiding her. “Bathroom’s just- ”
She staggered.
Her balance tipped.
Matt caught her by the waist before she could fall. “Hey. Hey, I got you. It’s okay- ”
She didn’t answer.
Her body felt... lighter. Unsteady. Like her weight was shifting in his arms.
He tilted his head, trying to focus on her. “(Y/n)? You with me?”
She looked up at him.
Confused.
Scared.
“M-Matt, I...”
And then her voice just- cut out.
His arms were suddenly empty.
He blinked.
No sound. No step. No breath.
Just... gone.
The faintest warmth lingered against his fingertips- and then something like dust scattered through them.
“What the- ?” he whispered, stepping back. “(Y/n)?”
His hand shook. Her scent was still in the room. Her heartbeat-
No. No, that wasn’t right.
He turned, listening harder, straining his senses.
Nothing.
There was nothing.
The silence grew louder. His throat closed up.
“(Y/n)?”
He moved down the hallway. Checked the bathroom. The bedroom. “(y/n), c’mon. Say something.”
No heartbeat. No motion. Not even the creak of a floorboard. Like she’d never been there. Matt’s chest started to cave in.
“Okay, this isn’t- this doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Maybe you passed out. Maybe you hit your head. Maybe- ”
His foot bumped something.
Her ring.
Her wedding ring.
Lying on the floor.
His knees hit the hardwood before he could stop them. “No.”
He crawled forward, hands blindly reaching, as if she might be hidden just out of reach.
“(Y/n)!” His voice cracked. “Where are you?!”
Still nothing.
Just the flicker of the candles.
Just the soft sound of ash settling.
“No, no- God, no!” He stood again. Stumbled. Slipped.
“(Y/n)!” He shouted so hard it tore something in his throat. “Talk to me!”
He made it to the front door. Opened it. Nothing. No one. No footsteps. No sounds of retreat. Matt’s breathing picked up. His fingers trembled as he unlocked his phone, nearly dropping it before hitting Call.
Foggy.
It rang once. Twice-
Pick up.
The sound of the city outside had changed. He could hear it.
Screaming. Tires screeching. Glass shattering six blocks over. Someone crying for help. Sirens multiplying like wildfire. It all surged into his head at once- too much, too fast.
He pressed his palm against his ear, gritting his teeth. “Too loud. I can’t- ”
Click.
“Matt?” Foggy answered, out of breath. “Hey, shouldn’t you be- ?”
“She’s gone,” Matt said immediately, voice fraying. “Foggy- she was right here, and then she just... disappeared.”
“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?”
“I mean she turned to ash in my hands,” Matt snapped, breath catching. “I was holding her. She said she felt sick and then- then she just... she was gone.”
There was a pause.
“Matt, hang on- wait- ” Foggy’s voice shifted, panic creeping in. “I think... Matt, something’s happening. It’s not just her.”
Matt stilled. “What do you mean?”
“I’m outside and people are vanishing. Right in front of me. There was a guy walking beside me- just turned to dust. A woman screaming for her kid, and the kid vanished. A guy in a cab just disappeared behind the wheel, Matt. It crashed into a light post.”
Matt pressed a hand to the center of his chest like he could anchor himself to the sound of Foggy’s voice. But even that was drowned out by the chaos around him.
“I can’t hear her,” he whispered. “Her heartbeat- her breathing- it’s just gone. Like she was never here, foggy.”
Foggy’s voice came through again, strained and tense. “It’s happening everywhere. I can’t keep up. There’s shouting, people running- I think half the crowd outside just vanished. I’m not exaggerating.”
Matt stumbled toward the couch, hand landing on the coffee table. “She was right here.”
“I’m coming to you,” Foggy said quickly. “Stay there, Matt. Don’t go outside- Jesus Christ, someone else just- ”
The line crackled. Cut out. Came back.
Matt’s hands were shaking as he reached for the remote.
The TV flicked on.
"...mass disappearances reported in New York, Chicago, London- this is now confirmed to be a global event..."
Footage played- Times Square chaos. Pedestrians turning to dust mid-step. News anchors looking off-camera in horror. Phones on the ground. Car alarms going off in every direction.
“We are receiving reports that approximately half the world’s population has- vanished.”
The camera panned to a child’s stuffed toy, untouched, lying in a pile of ash. Everything was still. Except the noise. And the empty space beside him on the floor.
“She was right here,” he said again, softly. Like it might undo it.
One foot lifted toward the bathroom- and when it landed, everything was wrong.
The apartment was darker. Colder. Rearranged.
The soft glow from the corner lamp was unfamiliar. The kitchen counter had a different crack. The rug was new. The air carried a different scent- like dust and time and a city that had moved on without her.
“Matt?” she called, voice hoarse.
Silence.
She stepped further in. The living room looked lived-in, but not by her. Not anymore. Not for a long time. The coffee table was cluttered with open case files. There was a cane by the door she didn’t recognize. Her heart pounded faster.
“Matt-?”
And then he was there. He stood in the doorway like he’d been carved from stone, unreadable and unmoved. Then, quietly- too calmly- he said, “So. You’re back.”
She stopped cold.
“Matt-”
He tilted his head slightly, almost as if studying her. “Took longer this time.”
“What…?” she breathed.
“Usually you show up around hour thirty-six,” he said, like it was a fact. “Right after the exhaustion hits but before the whiskey does anything useful.”
Her stomach twisted. “Matt, I’m not-”
“Don’t,” he cut in, sharp. “Don’t do that.”
She swallowed hard. “This isn’t what you think.”
“No?” His voice was soft, even, lethal. “Because it looks a hell of a lot like every other time I’ve lost my mind and imagined you standing in this room.”
(Y/n) blinked, her chest rising and falling too fast. “Matt, I- I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
He exhaled sharply through his nose, no trace of humor. “You wouldn’t.”
“I was just- I felt sick and then it was cold, and everything looked wrong and-" Her words tangled, tripping over each other. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He didn’t answer.
“Matt?”
Nothing.
She took a tentative step forward. “Please. Say something. What happened? What- what’s going on?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His voice, when it came, was low and sharp, like a scalpel slicing through skin without even trying.
“Don’t do this to me again.”
Her breath caught. “What- what do you mean, again?”
“I know your routine now,” he said, voice tightening with each word. “You show up, confused. You ask questions. You cry. And then just when I start to believe you might be real- when I almost let myself feel something again- you vanish.”
“Matt, I don’t- ”
“No,” he snapped. “Stop. Just stop.”
She froze. He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, his jaw locked, eyes unreadable.
“You know what it’s like to bury someone without a body, (Y/n)?” he asked. “To sit in this apartment with your ring in my hand, trying to convince myself that ash on the floor was all that was left of you?”
She shook her head, tears spilling freely now. “I don’t remember anything-”
“Exactly,” he said, bitter. “You never do. That’s the trick, isn’t it? You pretend like you’re all confused. Like you don’t know what’s happening. And I- I fall for it. Every time. Like an idiot.”
“Matt- please, just listen to my heartbeat-”
“I did,” he cut in. “I’ve heard it before. Right before it disappears.”
Her lips trembled. “I swear I’m not-”
“You don’t get to do this,” he said, his voice suddenly shaking, but no less cruel. “You don’t get to come back here like nothing happened. Like you didn’t leave me bleeding on the floor that night. Like I didn’t spend years trying to claw my way out of what you left behind.”
“I didn’t leave you,” she whispered.
“But you’re dead,” Matt hissed, stepping close enough for her to feel the heat off his skin. “You died. And whatever this is- this illusion, this dream- it doesn’t change that. You don’t get to hurt me again.”
He said it like a closing statement. Like a sentence passed down after a trial that never had a chance. But he didn’t stop there.
“You think this is easy for me?” he went on, voice low, cracking at the edges now. “You think I want to keep seeing you in doorways? Hearing your voice when I close my eyes? You think I haven’t begged for it to stop?”
(Y/n) stood frozen, lips parted, tears streaking silently down her face.
“I have spent five years trying to forget the exact way you said my name before you disappeared. Five years trying not to hear it in someone else’s mouth. Five years waking up thinking you might be there- just once- and then realizing that all I’ve got left is a bed that’s too big and silence that’s too loud.”
He was pacing now, hands in his hair, breathing hard, unable to stop himself.
“You were my wife. You were supposed to be the rest of my life. And I had you for minutes. You were ripped out of my arms before I even got to love you properly. Do you understand that? Do you even get what you left behind?”
“Matt-”
“I grieved you like a man who’d never believe in God again,” he growled. “I went back to that night a thousand times in my head-wondering if I missed something, if I could’ve saved you, if I’d just done one thing different-”
“Matt-”
“I begged,” he snapped. “I begged God to bring you back. I lost everything trying to survive you. And now you show up here, looking exactly the same, like time hasn’t touched you, like you’re just picking up where you left off- like you didn’t burn me to the fucking ground-”
“Matt.”
She said it once.
Quietly.
And then she reached for him.
He flinched on instinct, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, gently, deliberately, she took his hand in hers- still trembling from the weight of his words- and guided it up between them.
To her chest. To her heartbeat. Right there. Steady. Real. Alive. His breath hitched. She kept his hand pressed there, fingers wrapped around his wrist like she could anchor him to this one undeniable truth.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m not in your head. I don’t know how or why or what the hell happened, but I’m here.”
Matt didn’t move at first. Just stood there, hand pressed to her chest, like he didn’t trust what he was feeling. Like it might stop if he acknowledged it out loud. Then- suddenly- he let out a shaky breath and pulled her into him, hard.
His voice was muffled against her shoulder. “What the fuck.”
Her hands gripped his shirt like she was afraid he’d drop her again. “Yeah, what the fuck. I don’t know what’s happening.”
He laughed once, breathless and half-broken. “Yeah. Me neither.”
They just stood there for a second. Breathing each other in. Trying to recalibrate. Then, against his chest, she mumbled, “You look like shit, by the way.”
It slipped out before she could stop it. Matt let out an actual laugh- short, incredulous, almost like it startled him.
“That’s not funny,” he said, wiping at his eyes, still half-laughing.
She smiled weakly. “Little bit funny.”
He shook his head, still not quite believing any of it. “God, I missed you.”
And then he kissed her.
Desperate and real and messy- too much force, too much urgency, like he didn’t trust it to last. His hands found her face, holding her like he needed proof she was solid. She kissed him back just as hard, fingers in his hair, anchoring him to now. To her.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. And that was enough.
a little bonus content because well it was funny in my head
A few days later
She was curled up next to him on the couch, legs tangled, one of his old hoodies hanging off her shoulder. The TV was on, volume low, neither of them really watching.
She was still catching up- on everything. The blip. The aftermath. The years she missed. Sometimes it hit her like a freight train. Other times, like now, it just snuck up and poked her in the ribs.
She turned to look at him, brow furrowed. “Wait a second.”
Matt tilted his head toward her. “Uh-oh.”
She sat up a little. “So… technically, you’re five years older than me now?”
He blinked. “That’s what you’re choosing to focus on right now?”
“It’s a valid question,” she insisted, grinning. “I married a man my age, not some grizzled thirty-something.”
He scoffed. “Grizzled?”
“I mean, I don’t see any grey hairs, but-”
“I’m blind, not deaf. I heard that smirk.”
She tried to hold back a laugh. Failed. “So you’re like… what, thirty-eight?”
“Thirty-seven,” he corrected flatly.
“Oh no. I married an older man.”
Matt deadpanned, “And I married a time traveler. Guess we’re even.”
She bumped her shoulder into his. “You gonna start calling me ‘kid’ now?”
He turned toward her, a slow smirk tugging at his mouth. “Only if you want to see how fast a five-year age gap doesn’t matter.”
Her face flushed. “Okay, grandpa.”
Matt groaned. “Regret. Immediate regret.”
She laughed, leaning back into him again, warm and solid and finally, finally real.
ex!matt who runs into you by accident months after the breakup and greets you with an easy smile that almost convinces you he’s okay, only for foggy to find him sitting in his office after you leave, tie loosened and head in his hands because pretending not to love you for five minutes took everything out of him.
ex!matt who keeps the sweater you accidentally left at his apartment folded in the back of his closet. he tells himself he’s forgotten it’s there, but he knows exactly where it is every time he opens the door.
ex!matt who could have another relationship if he really wanted one, but every attempt dies quietly after a date or two because he catches himself comparing tiny things to you - the cadence of their voice, the questions they ask, the way they reach for his hand and nobody ever comes close.
ex!matt who still remembers the exact way you liked your coffee and orders it by reflex when he stops at your favorite café, only realizing his mistake when the second cup is set on the counter and there’s no one waiting beside him to take it.
ex!matt who can pick your heartbeat out of a crowd without even trying. hundreds of people pass him every day, but yours settles into his ears like it belongs there. the first time he realizes he can still recognize it after months apart, he stands completely still on the sidewalk and lets you walk away because following you would only hurt more.
ex!matt who catches himself listening for you whenever he’s in your neighborhood. he’ll tell himself he’s only taking the quickest route home, but his senses reach farther than his feet ever do, searching for the rhythm of your breathing, the scrape of your shoes against the pavement, anything that says you’re close.
ex!matt who knows the exact moment you enter a room he’s already in. his posture changes before anyone says your name, his head turning just enough that foggy notices and sighs quietly to himself. you think you slipped in unnoticed. matt knew before the door had fully opened.
ex!matt who pauses outside your apartment building some nights, listening only long enough to hear that your heartbeat is slow and even, that you’re asleep and safe. once he knows that, he turns around and walks home without ever knocking.
ex!matt who can tell when you’re exhausted just from the way your heartbeat drags and your breathing shortens. without ever revealing he knows, he has coffee delivered anonymously to your office.
ex!matt who hears the hesitation in your heartbeat whenever the conversation drifts toward the two of you. he knows the sound of hope, fear, and certainty, and yours is painfully clear. you care about him. you might always care about him. but you’ve made peace with the breakup in a way he hasn’t.
ex!matt who accepts that you won’t come back long before he stops hoping you might. he respects your decision enough never to pressure you, never to guilt you, never to show up asking for another chance. he simply carries the love with him, quietly, treating it less like something to fix and more like an old scar that never really stopped aching.
It was quiet in the apartment, at least as quiet as it can be for New York. The lull of traffic used to grate terribly when you first arrived in the city but now you've grown used to the constant hum of the streets.
You sit comfortably under the covers of your clean sheets, legs struggling to move due to the thoroughness of how tight the sheets were tucked in.
---
"Dex, your bedroom is not an Ikea showroom - i want to be able to sleep in the bed."
"You can - i just want it to be tidy. It looks nicer this way." He makes a move towards the sheets, untucking them and gesturing for you to look at the point he's making.
---
Your book lays neatly on your lap, the spine ridged from being pried open so many times from previous owners. The attempt to read are left forgotten as a noise interrupts your thoughts.
Gentle footfall outside the bedroom door becomes repetitive, the creak of the floorboards paint a picture of Dex pacing from one room to another, becoming more and more frantic. You could tell something was bothering him, but anytime you asked he just grew silent and withdrawn.
"Dex?" You call through bedroom door, hoping it was loud enough for him to hear.
The pacing pauses, silence filling the apartment. A moment passes before the footfall begins again - but this time heading closer.
The door creaks open, he stands there, hair mussed from hands running through it. His eyes are wild, searching for you.
He clears his throat, a hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck before he speaks. "You okay?"
"Yeah - I'm okay, are you okay?"
The question hangs in the air whilst he avoids your gaze, you can almost hear his brain ticking whilst he formulates an answer.
"Of course, m'just tired. That's all."
You lean forward, fingers reaching out to him. His hand meets yours - cautious. He's always so gentle with you, worry constantly presses at the back of his mind that he could damage you in some way.
He sits on the edge of the bed, moving closer but somehow feeling further away.
"If there's something bothering you - you can just tell me, you can tell me anything Dex, you know that right?"
His knuckles grasp tighter around you, his gaze flickering away from your own. His lip catching in his teeth, pushing his emotions deeper inside himself. He hides the way his eyes water, hoping you don't catch it.
He stays silent, trying to regain control of the rise and fall of his chest. "Just take a deep breath - it's okay," his breathing stutters against you, "it's okay. You're safe, honey, it's going to be fine,"
He pushes himself closer, his head finding it's way to the crook of your neck, hot wet tears fall against the skin. Your arms wrap round him, tracing soothing circles against his back.
"I just -" he speaks between heavy breaths, "just -"
"Just what, Dex?"
"I just love you - so much," he confesses, "i don't fucking deserve you,"
"Is that what's got you so worked up?" You question. "Don't worry about things like that,"
Your fingers run through his hair, pulling him into your chest, leaning further down against the headboard.
"M'sorry. I'm sorry,"
"Don't be, is that all you're worried about? Have your meds been working okay?"
The mention of his medication has become a sore spot between you both, frequent arguements caused by Dex's new habit of no longer leaving them in the shared cupboard.
"Don't talk about me like that,"
"I'm sorry - i just worry about you that's all."
Silence fills the room again - the traffic outside still bustling, the occasional sound of a horn pulling you back into your current state.
"You won't love me anymore,"
"Don't say that -"
"I know you won't - i know you'll leave me -" His grip tightens on you, worried you'll slip away from him.
"Dex -"
"- then i'll be alone again," he takes a breath, a hint of resentment building in his tone. "i don't wanna be alone, i can't take it."
"Stop it" you interrupt him, "You aren't going to be alone, i won't leave you, i promise."
"I can't tell you - you'll hate me and you'll think I'm a monster -" His anger bubbles, almost reaching the surface, "i'd rather die than have you think that about me,"
"Don't - don't say that,"
"It's true," he whispers, "i'd rather die,"
What have you done, Dex?
His breathing begins to slow, the sound of your heartbeat lulling him away from his own.
A/n if I told u guys I started this with the intention of it being fluff would u believe me.
“See you on Monday?” You lie with ease. “‘Course!”
wc: 2700 // matt murdock x reader // pt 2
cw: SUPER duper big tw. I was pretty descriptive. depression, suicidal ideation & attempt. overdose. angst. angst. angst. but no death tho. the most minuscule amount of comfort one can get.
note: Guess who's hypomanic episode endeedd??? Mine! And guess who has fallen face-first into a depressive state? Also meeeee !❤️ im fine i just need to write sad shit and word vomit this out tbh. plus we got ddba tomorrow so we gotta lock tf in.
You would like to think you’re nice. Maybe even kind. Old acquaintances and previous coworkers called you sweet, and perhaps your current coworkers or your well-visited baristas think similarly.
Regardless, you’ve made the effort to memorize people’s names and faces. To remember aspects of their lives and characteristics.
You stop at the same coffee shop even while your bank balance teeters on empty. You see the workers. The owner, Jamie, puts their heart and soul into the business. Ashley, who constantly works to provide for her cats, whom she loves more than her husband.
You see the regulars whose timelines align with yours. Vincent, his twirled mustache, and red eye with an extra shot. Matt, his flirtatious comments, and an americano with a splash of cream. His sweeping cane bumps into your shoe more often than not.
Conversations with all of them are familiar things, but with Matt most of all. It doesn’t necessarily mean much; it’s just that the two of you manage to get there at similar times and walk in the same direction to work. He talks about current cases and friendly shenanigans. You talk about work and your newest read.
There isn’t much at work either: writing sales reports, doing financials, and pushing paperwork. You’ve done your best to make friends, but it seems superficial, because the thing is—no one sees you.
The last thing you want is to regress and forgo all the care you could give, but you’re tired, and noticing takes energy. You feel the light conversations with personal questions recede. Positive affirmations are pried from your tongue. You want to keep caring, but it’s getting harder. I think it’ll be over soon.
Hypomania kept you on your toes. Aware. It was a bounce around the city. Coffee shops, work, theaters, dishing out the little money you had. Anything. It kept you social, talkative, and present.
But it’s bad again. It always returns, and you always forget how low it goes. It’s home and work. It’s peeling yourself up each day and falling down every night. But last night, you came to the conclusion: I can make it…stop. This morning was light.
Over the past few weeks, the coffee shop visits were sporadic, but the peace of your impending choice tapped into a forgotten energy. Make today count.
Now, you spiral as you wait in line.
Make today count. You make a twenty-dollar tip. Ashley exclaims, “Whoops! Think you added a zero there, bud.”
“Nah, just making up for past visits.” It’s hard to focus on Ashley’s chatter, but you’re pretty sure you’ve nodded at the right times and hummed when appropriate. You’re content and exhausted.
Poke. Following the movement, you find Matt with a tilted head and a waiting expression. The smell of espresso hits your nose, and frothing milk screeches in the background. He looks at you expectantly. “Sorry?”
When Matt smiles, he only has one dimple, but it looks shallow today. “How you are? Haven’t heard your voice or order in a while.” Slow, you blink. You’re moving and processing at half-speed. It registers.
“Me?”
His face pinches. “Yeah. I haven’t had my walking buddy these past few weeks, thought we were two ships passing in the night, but Ashley and Jamie said they haven’t gotten to see you either.” He fidgets with the grip of his cane.
Who are you to say that the once dormant depression is restless again? That everything feels impossible? Eating. Thinking. Moving. It’s my turn to talk.
Waving a hand, you dismiss his concern. “Oh, I’ve been sleeping in, and you know, can’t afford fancy coffee all the time.”
He clicks his tongue. “Ah, very true.” Nodding, he faces the counter. It’ll be better tonight. A wave of calm passes by with reassurance. Unfortunately, Matt is a wallflower as well, observing others and gathering information. “So how are you?”
I don’t want to think about how bad it is. “Hmm, well, a bit more tired these days.” I’m exhausted. “But it’s probably the weather. It’s been drab.” I only leave my apartment for work. “How are you? How’s the life of lawyering?”
Just like with Ashley, you think you’re saying and humming the right things.
Then urgency smashes inside your chest, no regard for the situation or conversation. Fuck, another one. God, I’m so tired of these. I can’t- I can’t. No, no. Not here, please. I don’t wanna have a panic attack. I don’t. Don’t. No, no-
Matt’s hand presses against your shoulder, lightly shaking and repeating your name. “You okay? Your breathing is heavy.”
Even with your jackhammering heart and collapsing lungs, you pull it together. “‘M sorry. Yeah, I’ve just been tired recently, not sleeping well.” I just have to make it through today. Then I can finish it tonight.
“Thought you said you were sleeping in?”
Something inside snaps. “Am I on the stand or something?" Both of you are surprised at the outburst. Matt’s head moves back a tad, and your eyebrows shoot up. I ruin everything. Covering your mouth, you desperately wish to reel the words back. “I’m sorry. I dunno- I’m so sorry.”
Matt's concern is obvious, but he shakes it off and shrugs. “It’s alright. Are- has life been crazy?”
I feel crazy. I feel insane. You admit, “Yeah. It’s just. The world is on fire, and I’ve been kinda tired. And–” Ashley calls your name, smiles, and nudges your drink towards the end of the bar. Stuff it down. It’s fine. Make today count.
Slipping forward, you grab your drink. “Thanks, Ashley. You always make my mornings. Tell Jamie I say thank you.” Today, you forego the coffee sleeve in the hopes that the burn against your palm would rouse you in some way, shape, or form. The hurt feels deserved.
Matt feels for and grabs your arm before you can slip further. “Matt? What are you-”
“Walk with me today, yeah?”
“Okay? I was planning on it?” An americano joins the bar.
One hand holds his drink, and the other moves to you. “Can you walk with me to work?”
In the few months you've had this routine, you've walk to his office twice? Both times you were bouncing and unable to cut yourself off.
But he's never asked explicitly or seemed so...clingy? Maybe he isn’t doing well, or he needs someone to talk to. Blinking incessantly, you steal yourself, but your words still hold confusion. “Yeah, sure, Matt.”
The call bell behind you is just another form of white noise. Nelson and Murdock isn’t directly on your way to work; it’s a few streets over, but still the same general direction.
The walk is quiet for a block. Normally, you find something to chatter about, but the space between the two of you feels incredibly odd. Maybe something's happened to him these past few weeks. Gingerly, you ask, “Are you doing okay?”
The grip on your elbow tightens and loosens immediately after. “I’m okay. I was wanting to catch up since we haven’t talked in a while.” You eye the bruise under his chin.
“Alright…catch me up. What new cases and weirdos do you have in store?” Matt seems almost disappointed in your question. Pausing, he licks his lips, then relents, sharing the most recent oddity of a lower-level felony client and their poor arson attempt against a metal park bench.
Matt continues, "The crime rate in that neighborhood isn’t high anyway. The bystanders were more annoyed than anything.” You chuckle. “Are you anywhere near the high crime areas?”
“Somewhat, I’m on the outskirts of Hell’s Kitchen, but I’m not too worried.” I won’t have to be worried.
Arriving at Nelson and Murdock, you slow, then bump your shoe against his like he does to you. Make today count. “Sorry for snapping earlier, but, um, it’s always nice to see you, Matt. Take care of yourself.” You're yanked back by the elbow. He doesn't say anything. “Yes?”
Even without sight, he's studying you. “Stop by sometime. Maybe after work?” His chest rises and lowers faster than it should.
Perplexed, you smile and shrug. “Maybe.”
Slipping away, his hand unwillingly leaves you. The spiral begins again. Will anyone actually think about me after today? Next week? Matt calls your name and asks, “See you on Monday?”
Apparently. But he’ll be okay. It’ll all be fine. The lie slips with ease. “‘Course!”
Even though you called out sick the past few days, no one asks how you’re feeling. If you caught the flu or were just using PTO. It’s no one's job to check on you; you’re an adult. But it would be nice. It just… it would be nice.
Eating your lunch in the break room, you wonder how your coworkers will find out. Wellness check maybe. Paul in accounting reads the newspaper front to back, so maybe they’ll find you in the obituary column. He loves the Peanuts comic strips best. Your sandwich is flavorless. Chips too.
Small talk and document deadlines feel easier, and an unfamiliar contentment follows you throughout the day. In the moments you stop, you think of Matt. His question is repeated. “See you on Monday?” The world feels oppressive again. So you keep moving. You came in today to put everything in order. It only seems fair.
With everything as good as it can get, you leave earlier than normal. “Stop by sometime.” Wishing your coworkers a good night and saying goodbye, they do likewise and are none the wiser.
An oddity occurs on your walk home: you change route and fumble over your own feet outside Nelson and Murdock, as if your mind was pushing you to ask for help before tonight. “Stop by sometime. Maybe after work?” You linger at the corner. I should. You keep walking.
The same thing happens outside your tried and true coffee shop. Stop in one last time? Shaking your head, you walk home with a heavy chest. The energy of this morning is gone.
It’s not exactly like you have a timestamp. A plan, yes, but a chosen hour? No. You’ll be upstairs and enjoy the view. Let it get dark enough for the street lamps to blink to life and neon signs to buzz.
Before you know it, you find yourself in bed. “See you on Monday?” Chalky pills coat your tongue, but you throw back some vodka, and gag at the burn. You feel good, though.
Slumping, you’re folded in your mused comforter, but flop onto your back and stare at the water stains. What if I did something crazy? Maybe you could pick a fight with a stranger, the kind of person with skittering eyes. Or what if I played the hero?
Empty laughter scatters off your apartment walls. Oh, man, imagine that. You, out there in some costume, being a vigilante in the night. Fighting for justice, stopping some bad guys, and going out in a shootout to protect someone. Crazed giggles spill. Everything is warm. “See you on Monday?”
You blink, and it’s dark out. Or you fell asleep. Could be either. Whatever. Then a few more pills.
Slipping up the stairwell and up onto the roof, you bring a bottle of vodka and your graceless self. I should have grabbed a chaser and made it a little more fun. Fumbling against some AC unit, your blurred eyes make the lights look impressionistic.
Your nose curls and you take a swig and gag, barely keeping it down.
This is you. And you can feel good here. You do. Another drink. “See you on Monday?” You smack your head against the metal until the repeating question stops. Another drink.
Your stomach and chest cramp, but you breathe through it. You’ll be just fine. It’s all just fine. Mumbling to the city lights, you garble,“‘M fine.”
A wave hits, bringing a niche euphoria you've never experienced, which delves deep inside your chest. Your breathing is nice and slow, the beats feel minutes apart.
The light shining directly into your eyes turns off for a moment, then flicks back on. A shadow moves on the rooftop across from you. It comes closer, swiftly jumping over and across the ledge, onto your building. Clambering away, you scrape your skin against the cement.
Panting, the figure asks, “Are you okay?”
The halo of light behind him outlines devil horns. Ohhhh. Clumsy, you wave and mumble, “Heyyy, Mr.Dev'l. ‘M good.”
Suddenly, he’s squatting at eye level and asking, “How much have you had to drink?”
You get in his face and retort, “You'd a cop?” But with a body that’s far too heavy, you slump back and smack your head against the metal again. “Sor'ry.”
His head moves like a bird’s. Staccato movements stop abruptly. “Did…did you take something?”
“See you on Monday?” It clicks in your lethargic mind. “Whoaa, soun’ jus’ like my bud, tha’s crazy.”
Crowding closer, he hisses and questions, “What did you take?”
He’s like a gnat. Stupid, annoying gnat. You want him away. “I’da know, kinda like Xanax, think, bu’ you can’ have none, ‘m sorry.”
God, he’s so close, up in your personal space and everything. “How many?”
Flimsy, you jerk and shrug. “Dunno? Hey, you e’vn look like-” Your heavy arm moves to nudge his mask, but he grabs your forearm midair. He’s ruining your high. This dude sucks.
“I need you to think. How many?” They’re not questions anymore; he’s just angry-sounding. I just wanted a nice, calm night. To sleep forever and– “How many? Two or three?”
Your stomach cramps when a small chuckle titters. “Oh! No, kinda, like a han’ful I think.”
His chest heaves and hand tightens. “A handful?”
Your head feels like concrete, but you nod and hum. “Mhm, think so.”
He pats down your body, and you exclaim, “Whoa! Hans’ to y’rself!” Daredevil steals your phone off your body and dials.
“911, what’s the address of your emergency?”
He rattles off the address and situation. He's fucking this whole thing up. With a surprising strength, you knock the phone away from his ear. “F'ck off!” You want to convince him that everything’s okay, it’s just like you planned. “‘S okay. ‘S kay!”
But the phone is quickly swooped back up. Then he’s moving you. Clammy, your shivering body burns. The sudden spinning motions make you even more nauseous than before. Panting, you plead, “Stahp, imma throw up.” The movements become slower. “God, bein’ mean ‘da me!”
It pisses you off. He’s ruining it. Even through waves of unrelenting nausea and a barely expanding chest, weakly curled fists thump against his chest. You try to push him away, but high and drunk, it’s an extremely pathetic attempt. You throw up on…everything, you think. “Ugggh. Noo, errg. Damn it.”
Even being manhandled, you reach for a half full bottle to get rid of the gross acidic taste. Before the glass can skim your fingertips, it’s snatched and chucked across the roof, hits the lip, and shatters on impact. “Damn.”
Breathing restricted, you hack and wheeze. It’s an ugly sound. Tons of pounds are pressing on your chest and your lungs crumple from the inside.
Daredevil moves you, flipping you into recovery position: on your side, your upper leg hitched up, and a hand tucked under your head. You groan and try to move, but he holds you still.
The Devil looks worried, but you’re angry. “Wasn’ suppos’ hap’n. Why’d you gotta’ be ‘er?” I'm sad.
His leather hand moves up and down your back. “You’re okay. Help is on the way; I just need you to stay awake.” You don’t know it, but the ambulance is three blocks away, speeding and wailing.
Your chest is tight. Air is scarce. A gasping breath is cut off, your stomach revolts once more, but he just moves you away from the choking hazard. “Shi’, fu-this hur’s.”
His chin trmbles and his voice cracks, “It’s okay. You’re o-okay.”
You don’t want to, but you start crying. Unwilling tears and frustration groan into the rooftop. “Fuu- s’ mad.”
“No one's mad. No one.” A flesh hand skims down your cheek. The skin feels warm against you.
Hiccuping, you moan, “‘M mad. Jus’ wanna sleep.”
Hunkering closer, Daredevil murmurs to you. “I know. I know, but we gotta stay awake.” It’s the world's most pathetic attempt to wriggle away, but you try anyhow. He holds you close, offering physical comfort amidst your shattering world. The whisper, “You’ll be okay. We’ll figure this out,” makes everything shatter.
We. It's just me. “Fu- ‘m so ‘lone.”
Daredevil’s wobbling chin presses into your head. It’s scratchy, but he chokes, “You're not aIone. I’m right here.”
Summary: Matt Misses the most important night of your life
Pairing: Matt Murdock x reader
Warnings: 18+ only, angst angst angst
Word count: ~1.2k
Authors note: listened to “the moment I knew” and this quick lil blurb bloomed. It is unedited so I’m sorry for any issues.
The sound of the party settles into a dull, distant thud at the back of your mind. Laughter too cheery, music too loud, glasses clinking like they mean something. None of it reaches you. Your eyes stay fixed on the door.
It hasn’t opened for him. Not in over two hours.
You check your phone again even though you already know—no missed calls, no messages, nothing to explain the silence. That’s what gets to you. Not even a bad excuse. Just… nothing.
Everyone else showed up. Friends, colleagues, people who said they wouldn’t miss this for the world. And they didn’t.
“Hey.”
Foggy steps into your line of sight, blocking the door like he’s doing you a favor. You don’t look at him right away.
“He said he’d be here…” you say, quieter than you meant to.
Foggy hesitates. It’s small, but you catch it; the way he shifts his weight, the breath he takes before answering. A lawyer buying time.
“Yeah. He’ll be here..”
You finally look at him.
Foggy’s good at a lot of things. Lying in these moments is not one of them
The noise of the party presses in again, heavier now.
And for the first time tonight, you stop thinking he’s just late.
Congratulations come quickly after that. Warm smiles, steady voices, hands brushing your arm like this moment belongs to you. Your long-awaited book launch. Your night.
You thank them. You mean it.
But it doesn’t reach your chest.
The ache settles in deeper with every word until you can’t hold it there anymore. You excuse yourself, slipping away from the noise and the lights, into the quiet of the bathroom.
The door shuts behind you with a soft click.
You brace your hands against the sink, staring at your reflection. You look exactly how you’re supposed to. Composed, radiant, untouchable.
It almost makes it worse.
That sinking feeling spreads, slow and heavy, settling somewhere just beneath your ribs.
“He said he’d be here.”
You say it to the mirror like it might answer you back. Like it might fix something.
Heat rises behind your eyes, sharp and immediate. You swallow it down, lock your jaw, and your grip tightens against the porcelain until it’s the only thing you can feel.
You steady your breathing, forcing everything back under control.
No cracks.
Not here.
You can hear foggy and Karen muttering outside the bathroom door. Your reading is coming up, and Matt is still nowhere.
On stage, you set a copy of your book on the podium and smile at the crowd. The lights of New York glitter behind you in the night sky as you introduce yourself, thanking everyone for coming as they settle into their seats.
Your eyes move across their eager faces, anticipation filling the room. Then they catch on the only empty chair. Front and center row.
Your heart gives a sharp, unsteady lurch—but you cover it quickly, the smile never slipping as you begin to read.
“To Matt, and our friends.”
A dry laugh slips out before you can stop it as you read the dedication. You brush past it and begin the book, reading the first chapter aloud to the crowd. The pride never really lands, smothered under the weight of an empty chair.
Foggy and Karen drag you out for one last celebratory drink, but it doesn’t feel like a celebration. The tension hangs thick, unspoken. They try. God, they try. Try To pull you into lighter conversation, but they both know where your mind keeps circling. Matt.
Back at the loft, the quiet settles in like a weight. You pour a glass of wine, turn the armchair to face the stairs leading up to the roof door, and sit. Legs crossed. Glass in hand. Waiting.
The city hums outside, restless and alive, but up here it feels like a held breath. You take a slow sip, eyes fixed on the door, and wait for him to drag his sorry ass home.
You must’ve dozed off at some point, as the door cracking open startles you.
Matt goes still at the top of the stairs. Gloved hands flex. tight, then loose, then tight again. like he’s bracing for impact. The room shifts, the air going thick and charged. Your heartbeat spikes, loud and uneven, a tell he’s never been able to ignore.
That’s when it lands.
Oh. Shit.
“Babe—” he starts, already dragging the cowl off as he descends, voice low, careful. like he’s stepping into a crime scene.
“Don’t ‘babe’ me.” The words cut out of you, bitter and sharp, harsher than you meant. But you don’t take them back.
“I’m sorry,” he says. There’s panic threading through his voice, edged with just enough defensiveness to make it worse. “It was supposed to be quick—”
“I asked you to hang up the horns for one night, Matthew.”
“I know bu-“
“One night.” Your voice doesn’t rise this time. It sinks, heavy and fragile all at once, like it might collapse under the tears burning in your eyes.
“I asked for one night where it wasn’t about the city, or the mask, or everything else that always comes before me.” A breath catches in your chest. “Just one night for something I’ve been working toward for years. Something that mattered to me.”
“It mattered to me too—”
“Then where were you?” The question isn’t sharp—it’s soft. That’s what makes it hurt. “Because I kept looking at that door, Matt. Over and over like an idiot, thinking any second you’d walk through it.” Your lips press together, but it doesn’t stop the crack in your voice. “I had this whole picture in my head. You, standing there with flowers, smiling at me like I was the only thing in the room.”
“You’re right,” he says, quieter than you’ve ever heard him. For once he doesn’t try to fix anything. He just puts the cowl on the table. fingers lingering on it for a second, Then he sinks down to his knees in front of you, slow, deliberate. Like this is a kind of penance. Like this is the only place he knows how to be when he’s failed you completely.
Your eyes lock on him. There’s no sympathy left to offer. You’d told him it didn’t matter. That you understood. But now, faced with his absence on the most important night of your life, you realize just how much it bothers you.
You don’t move to comfort him. You take a slow sip of wine, set the glass down, and let the silence speak for you. There’s nothing left here to salvage.
Your body language tells Matt everything he needs to know. His head drops into your lap, tears prickling in his eyes.
“I’ll be out by Monday night.” Your voice is strained.
The silence stretches. Heavy, and unforgiving.
A broken sigh leaves him. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Im sorry too.”
You stay there, quiet. You’re still dressed for your night; he’s bruised, still in his suit. Neither of you moves. Whatever held you together doesn’t anymore.
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