when i die, could i come back as the rain?
chapter 3: rules
Read on Ao3 | ch 1 | ch 2
tags: 18+, explicit sexual content, wlw, violence, stalking, angst, voyeurism (sort of accidental?), brief reference to reader being in an abusive situation (past), sex dream, blood, karen page x fem!reader, benjamin poindexter x fem!reader
notes: someone on ao3 told me they wish my chapters were longer (super grateful for that feedback so if you’re reading this ily), so idk maybe the next one will be?? I feel like on tumblr people prefer shorter chapters and on ao3 people prefer longer ones but maybe I’m making that up?? anyways enjoy
summary: dex brings you murder souvenirs like a crow bringing shiny things to whoever feeds it
── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦
Dex steps through your window. Your apartment somehow looks even more barren from the inside, except for your bedroom area, which looks like a tornado has gone through it.
Clothes, shoes, books, journals. Your work bag with your laptop sticking out of it. Various toiletries and “self care” items. All over the floor.
It’s like your entire personhood is zeroed in on this few square feet, not to escape even into the rest of your apartment.
Dex walks to the side of your bed. In the street-lit glow of the room, he can tell that the knife hasn’t cut you anywhere except for the spot on your upper arm.
A small streak of blood from the cut trails down your arm and pools where your collarbone meets your throat.
He has a sudden impulse to lick it clean.
An intrusive thought. Dex is no stranger to them.
He tries to shake it away, but he can’t stop staring at that trail of blood, picturing what it would be like to run his tongue from your throat, along your collarbone, to your arm.
How satisfying it would be to rid you of this one imperfection, leaving you clean and soundly sleeping in your bed.
Instead he steps away and begins to search your apartment, systematically cataloging everything in detail.
After he has checked and rechecked every corner of the place, his head is clear, and he feels like he can breathe again.
He quickly does what he came to do and climbs back out the window.
── .✦
You wake up the next morning with a pounding headache.
You turn over in bed and feel a sting in your arm. You look down at it— blood? Oh fuck. Where's the knife?
Panicked, you search around for it. It’s not next to you in bed. It’s not tangled in the sheets. It hasn’t fallen to the floor.
You’re about to entertain the thought that you imagined last night entirely when you catch sight of a glint of metal across the room.
And right there, sticking pointy end down out of your coffee table, is the knife. It's angled towards you so that you can clearly see the message etched on it.
You approach it slowly, as if it'll levitate on its own and launch itself at you.
Karen told you. She fucking told you.
"They will use you. They will kill you."
You thought she was exaggerating. Maybe some small part of you thought she just didn’t want to hear from you again. That she wanted to close the door tightly on that chapter of her life and start fresh.
And you wouldn’t have blamed her. You never told her you loved her for a reason. She’d lost enough. You didn’t want her to feel like she was losing anything else.
You didn't want to tell her you love her, only to have her still walk away.
But now you have this knife. With a fucking bullseye on it.
A city of nine million people and you have both Fisk and Poindexter on you in your third week here?
You’re new to this comic book shit. Vigilantes, assassins. Evil mayors and their henchmen. But this can’t be a coincidence, can it?
She fucking told you.
You suddenly feel too exposed in your apartment. Why did you come back here, where everyone seems to know you live? But where else would you have gone?
There are a few people at the office you’re friendly with, but, "hey can I crash at your place because there are multiple murderers after me?" seems like probably too big of an ask for this stage of the friendship.
You could call someone, if you had anyone to call. If you hadn't burned every single bridge before you moved to San Francisco.
Why would Poindexter take out Fisk’s man and leave you alone?
Probably the same reason he snuck into your apartment, left you unharmed, stabbed a knife into your coffee table, and fucked off.
He's toying with you. Before either trying to get Karen's location or killing you to send her a message.
You yank the knife out of your coffee table, ignoring the small hole it leaves in the exact center, grab your laptop and immediately begin looking for a way out of your lease.
── .✦
One month later
── .✦
The man’s neck snaps easily. Dex is used to the motion, he has performed it many times. Uncreative, but it gets the job done.
One left.
He stalks down the alley between your building and the next. He spots the back of an AVTF vest ahead, its owner headed towards the street.
He quickly scans the ground and picks up a loose screw. He wishes he could hold onto the intense satisfaction that courses through him as it pierces the base of the man’s skull, but it’s gone too quickly.
Maybe that's his problem. He’s too easily bored.
Dex walks over to the man’s slumped figure, observing his handiwork.
Maybe he should just end this all now and find Fisk. But the mayor and first lady have been especially slippery these past few months.
One good deed.
Absolution is worth his patience.
It’s 11:36 pm. Dex wonders if you are asleep upstairs. He’s curious if anything has changed in your apartment since he was there last.
Other than the mess by your bed and the prescriptions in your medicine cabinet, the only real personal items he'd found were stuffed into your closet.
In it, he'd found old artwork, stuffed animals, scrapbooks, and a box of trophies and medals. All of it was shoved into a corner, like you didn't want to see it but couldn't bear to get rid of it.
Maybe the abusive family he read about in your journal had something to do with that.
He feels a weird sense of pride at the idea that he'd decorated your apartment with a personal touch, right out in the open for anyone to see.
He reaches down towards the dead man, grips the screw between his gloved fingers, and tugs.
Before he can think better of it, he begins the climb up to your window.
── .✦
Karen comes in through the window of your apartment, calling your name.
You're dreaming. You know because you’ve had this dream many times over the past month. And you wouldn’t leave it for anything.
“I heard you were attacked. I was so worried. What the hell are you doing here?”
The look on her face is so intense, so Karen it hurts. Concern, admonishment, tenderness.
“Jesus, look at you. I knew this would happen,” Karen says, sitting on the edge of your bed. Only now it’s her bed, in her room. In your shared apartment in San Francisco.
You can’t help it, tears well up in your eyes and you fall, sobbing, into her arms.
“Shh,” she soothes. “I’m here.” You let out all the fear and trauma of being attacked in the street while she holds you.
She lays you down and begins to rub down your shoulders and arms. She lightly rubs her fingers over the ugly bruise under your rib cage. You shiver.
She leans in, kissing it tenderly. She continues kissing down your navel, making her way to your hip, where she stays for a while, kissing and nipping for long enough to make you squirm.
She finally, finally moves down where you need her. She’s toying with you now, giving you a smug smile before nuzzling into the already wet spot on your underwear.
The friction is too much, and not enough.
You take matters into your own hands. She laughs as you shove your panties down and pull her to you.
She eagerly kisses, licks, and sucks like she’s been starving since she left you.
“Karen,” you whine. “Fuck. Feels so good.”
── .✦
Dex unlocks your window with ease and opens it. He wonders if he should put the bloody screw on your coffee table again, where you can easily spot it, or if he should choose a more decorative location.
He’s about to decide on the latter when he hears you.
He’d double checked you were asleep before coming in, and it seems unlikely that his climbing in would wake you. He'd seen the Ambien in your medicine cabinet. The good stuff.
He hears you stir in your bed again and stalks over. In the smallest little corner of his brain, he feels a zing of thrill at the idea you might be awake.
As he gets closer he hears you mumble, “Karen…fuck…feels so good.”
He’d read about Karen in your journals too.
You've kicked the blanket off of yourself and you're laying sprawled out on your back, hand between your legs.
Dex watches as you snake your hand down your shorts, still completely asleep, completely unaware of his presence.
Dex did not consider himself much of a sexual person. He’d had a couple of unmemorable hookups with equally unmemorable people which did nothing for him besides meeting the basic need of getting off. The hookups were practical, pragmatic.
He’s also spent a lot of time watching you. He’s watched, dispassionately, as you've gotten yourself off with the toy you keep in your bedside table.
But this is different. Being right here where he can see you and hear you and feel the air in the room around you.
He feels himself getting uncomfortably hard at the sight of your brows pinched, your hips moving, grinding up into your hand.
Time to go.
He decides to put the screw right on your bedside table, and makes for the window.
── .✦
You wake up sweating, staring into the dark. It takes you a second to realize you’re in your apartment in New York and not with Karen in San Francisco.
You’re not used to waking up in the middle of the night, but ever since the first time someone snuck into your apartment without you knowing, you’ve been weaning off of your insomnia meds.
It’s not worth a good night’s sleep if you’re murdered. Priorities.
You’d spent the week after the attack trying, unsuccessfully, to find a way to get out of your lease without losing a shit ton of money. But here you still are.
It takes you a few more seconds of laying there to notice that your hand is between your legs. You vaguely remember having the dream again and now you wish you hadn’t woken up.
You’re still groggy, but you could have sworn you heard heavy footsteps and the sound of a window, opening and closing.
── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦ ── .✦
