I Could Drown Myself In Someone Like You
Summary : Dex was doing just fine being the only prisoner in Enhanced Supervision Housing until they put you in the cell next door.
Pairing : DDBA!Benjamin Poindexter x mutant!reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : hurt/comfort! Meet cute at Rikers, prison isolation, mutant!reader, thermokinetic!reader (controls temperature, pyrokinesis and cryokinesis), restraint jacket/straitjacket, institutional neglect, arson and murder mention, Foggy’s death mentioned, blood, injury, prison break, guard death, violence, through-the-wall romance, hurt/comfort, first kiss, Set in DDBA S1, including part of the episode 8, where Dex uses his tooth to break out of prison. (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 6.3k
Notes : Need more mutant! reader in this fandom. The title is inspired by Impossible by Nothing but Thieves. Enjoy!
Dex had spent five months alone in Rikers’ brand-new Enhanced Supervision Housing after killing Foggy Nelson.
Of course, the city had decided that Benjamin Poindexter was not a man you put in general population, or solitary, or protective custody, or any other place built for your run-of-the-mill violent offenders. Apparently, if a person could kill his way out of most situations with a paperclip, a loose screw, or the edge of a dinner tray, the state had to start getting creative.
So they made a new building just for him and called it Enhanced Supervision Housing. ESH for short.
It was funny. As if calling what he could do an enhancement instead of a talent meant anything when they still fed him through a slot, restrained his hands before opening the door, and had three men with rifles posted behind reinforced glass every time he was escorted anywhere.
There were eight cells in ESH. Eight beautiful little boxes built with reinforced doors, observation panels, pressure sensors, thermal cameras, anti-ligature fixtures, shatterproof windows, and enough cameras to make privacy feel like a fairy tale told to a child.
Dex had seen the brochure when one of the guards had left paperwork too close to his cell during intake, and Dex had read it upside down through a reflection in the polished floor.
It was made for “high-risk enhanced detainees” with “special containment protocols” and “behavioural isolation.”
Cute.
The problem was, there were no other enhanced detainees. After all, not every day did somebody with a weird little gift or near-superhuman talent get arrested in New York. Not every day did someone land in Rikers with enough justification of being locked in a concrete aquarium, and half of them were in the supermax across the country, and the other half was in The Raft.
So it was just Dex.
Eight cells, seven empty. A whole hallway built for monsters, and only one monster inside it.
It was isolating, sure. But it was fine. There were worse places to be in the world. Maybe. Meh.
Rikers still had a rhythm. Even the ESH had one, if you were trapped long enough to learn it. He learned that the lights dimmed but never went fully off and guards passed every twelve minutes unless the night shift was bored, then every nine. The vents clicked twice before the air shifted temperature. Camera four made the smallest electric whine when it adjusted focus. Guard Velasquez dragged his left foot when he was tired and guard Miller breathed through his mouth and smelled like cheap coffee.
Dex knew all of it, and it helped with the silence creeping in sometimes.
The silence was the worst part, probably, not the restraints. Not even the meals so bland they felt punitive on a spiritual level.
This type of silence made his thoughts louder and made the walls seem closer at night, when he lay on the thin mattress with his hands folded over his stomach, staring at the ceiling like the ceiling might someday blink first.
Sometimes he thought about Foggy Nelson, but not in the way people probably wanted him to. He didn’t feel guilty; he did what he thought he had to do. He thought about that chapter in his life like a splinter under skin– impossible to forget without digging too deep and making it worse.
Sometimes he thought about Fisk. Sometimes he thought about his spine. Sometimes he thought about how easy it would be, if someone made one mistake.
Just one.
If someone would just accidentally give him the wrong set of cuffs. If a new guard would just be standing too close to the bars with his badge clipped to the wrong side of his belt.
But no one had made a mistake. Yet.
Then, in the middle of June, in the middle of the night, the hallway suddenly erupted.
The far door opened with a metallic groan, then another. Buzz. door one. Buzz. door two. Buzz. door three.
Eventually, boots flooded the corridor, and Dex counted twenty guards. Maybe more.
He could hear the metallic clangs of rifles and the plastic bounce of shields as static popping over radios. A guard whispered., “Keep moving,” like whatever they were escorting might change its mind if they hesitated.
Dex sat up.
The lights snapped brighter overhead, white and ugly, turning his cell blind at the edges.
He didn't move to the door. He stayed on the bed, head tilted slightly, listening.
There was a slightly smaller set footsteps beneath all the others.
This one must be the prisoner. It dragged, but not fighting. Perhaps this person was sedated? No. There was a little bit of struggle. Maybe they weren’t sedated enough. Whoever it was kept resisting the pace without ever fully stopping.
Metal clinked as someone cursed under their breath.
Then came a sound like fabric straining, and he could tell it was heavy fabric. Then, he heard thick restraints being adjusted. Not ordinary cuffs, and definitely not a chain.
Dex tilted his head. Interesting.
The procession stopped in front of the cell next to his.
The guards shifted around the door, blocking his view through the narrow panel in his own cell. He caught pieces of you, though nothing whole. He could see a bit of your hair, and the corner of something white and reinforced strapped across your torso. Your rikers-issued shoes were planted firmly against the floor, like you were refusing to be placed anywhere by anyone.
One of the guards knocked twice on Dex’s door with his baton. “Got a neighbor now, Poindexter.”
Dex looked at him.
The guard smiled like he’d said something funny, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. In fact, none of them looked relaxed.
Tonight, they were not afraid of Dex. They were afraid of you.
The door to Cell Two opened and they moved you inside.
You didn't scream, threaten, or beg, even if you were half-awake.
Weird, Dex thought, people usually did one of the three when they arrived in a place like this.
You were shoved past the threshold in silence, and the guards backed out fast. The door shut with a brutal final sound, locks engaging one after another, heavy and layered and unnecessarily dramatic. A guard gave an all-clear over the radio. Another laughed once, shakily, then stopped abruptly when nobody joined in.
Dex stayed very still as the guards filed out, one by one, until the hallway swallowed their footsteps one by one.
Eight cells, two occupied.
For the first time in five months, Dex was not alone.
He waited for you to make a sound, but he couldn't hear any noise, not even crying from the next cell. You weren’t pacing, like he did on the first night, and you barely even rattled whatever restraints they put on you. Most notable, you didn’t even attempt to make contact through the wall.
Dex stared at the wall between his cell and yours: solid concrete, thick enough that he shouldn't have been able to feel anything through it.
He did, though he didn’t know how to explain it. The only measurable metric was that somehow the room had felt cooler than it had been an hour ago.
He lay back down eventually.
From the other side of the wall, you still said nothing, no sound at all except the occasional shift of fabric and once, very quietly, an exhale through your teeth.
Dex almost smiled. That’s when he saw the window.
At first, he thought the glass had caught the overhead light strangely. ESH windows were narrow, reinforced slits. You could see a suggestion of the sky if you stood at the right angle, but mostly you saw the garden roses and your own reflection staring back like a bad idea.
Tonight, the glass was… clouding.
What?
Dex sat up again.
A thin white film crept across the corner of the window, delicate and pretty. Tiny veins of frost branching outward in lacy patterns, spreading over reinforced glass that had no reason to be cold.
Why was his window frosting up in the middle of summer?
—
For the first couple of days, Dex assumed you were asleep. Or unconscious. Or dead.
It was hard to tell with the wall between you and him. Still, the guards checked on you often enough that he knew you must technically be alive, but they did it through the panel, never through the door unless there were at least six of them and one of them had the long black shock baton they liked pretending it was not a weapon.
Dex had seen criminals arrive angry. During his time in the bureau, he had seen them arrive screaming, pleading, spitting, promising lawsuits, promising revenge, promising innocence. He had seen prisoners break under silence in twelve hours and start telling the ceiling their childhood nicknames.
You did none of that. In fact, you barely moved.
That was the strangest part, not the frost, not even the straitjacket, which was still interesting in a funny way to him, because they had Dex’s hands restrained any time they opened his door like he was going to start flicking femurs through skulls, but you must be special. After all, you had arrived wrapped up like a badly behaved present.
By the second day, he started actively listening for you.
It was pathetic, maybe, but there were very few things to do in Enhanced Supervision Housing besides become intimately familiar with the sound of your own breathing and develop opinions about fluorescent lights, so a new person on the other side of the wall was not nothing.
You shifted sometimes, when he heard a small scrape of fabric against concrete. He could hear the faint clink from whatever additional restraints they had attached to the jacket. Once, your head hit the wall with a dull little thud, and Dex turned his face toward the sound before he could stop himself.
Then… nothing. Nothing but a drag of breath through your nose.
The guards did not like you either, that became obvious pretty quickly.
They liked Dex, in a way. Obviously, they didn’t like him as a person, they were not stupid. But they understood him. They had made a little mental box for him: former FBI agent turned murderer. They had rules: keep your distance, keep his hands restrained, do not let him near anything that he could throw.
You, they did not understand.
They approached your cell like prey approaching a sleeping animal in the wrong enclosure.
On the third morning, one of them brought your breakfast and stood too close to the slot.
Dex heard a soft crackle before the guard even reacted. Then the man swore and stumbled back. “What the fuck—”
“Don’t put your hand in,” another guard snapped.
“I didn’t put my hand in!”
“Then stop whining.”
“She froze my fucking fingers, man!”
Dex sat on his mattress, elbows on his knees, staring at the wall. Interesting.
Your cell stayed silent and the breakfast tray was shoved in with much less dignity after that.
Nobody asked if you were hungry. Nobody asked if you were hurt. Nobody asked if you needed the jacket loosened, even though Dex could hear the shallow and held in breath, clearly struggling for air half the time. It was as if the straps cut across your ribs and you were trying not to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing it bothered you.
By the fourth day, Dex had decided you were either extremely disciplined or extremely broken. Possibly both.
He had also decided that the silence was annoying. This was unfair, because he had hated the silence before you arrived, and now that the silence had another person inside it, he hated it more.
He tried not to care, but that only lasted until evening.
A guard walked past and muttered, “Crazy bitch still hasn’t said a word.”
Dex’s head lifted.
The guard kept walking, probably feeling very brave because there were reinforced doors and rifles between him and the consequences of being stupid.
Dex watched him go. He didn’t say anything, and neither did you.
The night after that, the frost came back, but not just on Dex’s window this time. They were crawling up the walls.
It crept from the seam where the concrete met the floor, thin and white under the dimmed lights. At first, he thought it was moisture, a product of bad ventilation and Rikers being Rikers. Then the frost branched, crawling in little veins across the wall between your cells.
Dex got up and walked over, putting two fingers against the concrete. It was painfully cold.
On the other side of the wall, you breathed out, and frost thickened under his fingers.
Dex almost knocked. That felt ridiculous.
What was he going to do? Tap his knuckles against reinforced concrete and ask the stranger in the murder-prison next door if she was making the building colder because she was sad?
No. So he went back to bed, but did not sleep.
By day five, the guards had stopped pretending this was normal.
Maintenance came in wearing insulated gloves, and even gave Dex a thicker orange jumpsuit, even though he never minded the cold. They took temperature readings in the hallway, checked the vents, checked the windows. They argued about condensation. One of them said it was probably a system fault, and then immediately shut up when a thin line of ice crawled over his boot.
Dex enjoyed that a lot, actually. It was the first entertainment he’d had in months.
By the fifth night, Dex woke up to snow.
At first, he thought it was dust falling from the ceiling. But then a single cold snowflake landed on his cheek.
Dex blinked.
For a moment, he lay very still, staring up at the ceiling where tiny white flakes drifted down from nowhere. Another landed on his chest. Then another. Soon there were dozens, small, delicate, almost shy.
Dex sat up slowly.
The floor was beginning to powder white. His blanket had caught a fine layer of it. The air was cold enough now that his breath was visible.
He looked toward the wall, and for the first time in five days, he spoke to you. “You doing this, neighbor?”
Nothing but silence.
Dex waited.
The hallway outside was quiet, which meant either the guards had not noticed yet or they were all standing very still pretending they had not noticed yet. Dex watched snow gather on the toes of his prison-issued socks.
Then, from the other side of the wall, there was the faintest shift.
And then your voice, rough from disuse. You sounded almost… bored. “...mmhm.”
Dex’s mouth curved up. Ah. She speaks.
He leaned back against the wall, feeling the cold bite through the cotton of his shirt. “Should I be concerned?”
Then, barely louder than before, you said, “Probably.”
Dex laughed once under his breath.
His own sound surprised him, because it sounded wrong in the cell. Too human then he had ever been.
The snow kept drifting down. It should have made him uneasy. It should have made him think about containment failures and emergency protocols and what the guards might do if the whole unit iced over. Instead, Dex sat there with his shoulder pressed to the wall between you, watching winter collect in his lap.
“Good to know,” he said.
You didn’t answer. But a few seconds later, the snow slowed down.
—
After that, Dex learned how to read you. It was not subtle, once he understood what he was looking at.
When you were sad, you were cold so it made sense that in the first month, it snowed almost every day.
You barely spoke during those days, you barely even moved.
The guards asked questions through your door and received nothing but silence. The nurses came by with clipboards, asking if you had eaten, if you were injured, if you needed medical attention, if you understood where you were. You gave them nothing.
Sometimes, actual ice sealed your food slot shut. Snow collected in the corners of Dex’s cell.
His blanket went damp and cold and his breath fogged when he sat up. Even the guards stopped making jokes when they passed Cell Two because nobody wanted to laugh in a place that had started to feel like a morgue.
Dex sat with his back to the wall and listened. That was all there was to do: listen and wait for proof that you were still in there.
Then, eventually, the cold would begin to cease.
The frost on his window would sweat and snow would melt into silver lines down the concrete. The air would warm by a degree, then another, like your body was remembering that it was summer.
And then, and only then, you would speak. “Neighbor?”
His eyes opened in the dark. “What?”
You inhaled, as if you had been thinking about this for days. “Do you think they’d let me have a hairbrush?”
Dex stared at the ceiling. “No.”
You were quiet for the rest of the night, but the cells suddenly became as warm as a hug, as if someone had reminded you that human connections were possible.
Then, the next day, you called out again. “Poindexter, right?”
“Mm,” he replied.
You paused, as if considering whether or not the question was stupid, but said it anyway. “Do you think pigeons know they’re ugly?”
Dex blinked. “I don’t think pigeons care.”
“Good for them.”
Then, a few hours later, after hearing a prison guard during dinner time call you this, you said, “Dex.”
The name came too naturally from your mouth for someone who had never said it before.
He turned his head toward the wall. “What?”
“I have an itch.”
He waited. You said nothing else.
“Okay.” he finally said.
“I’m in a restraint jacket.”
“I figured.”
“It’s under my shoulder blade.”
“That sounds inconvenient.”
“It is,” you sounded very, very annoyed.
The room heated so fast it made the steel bars creak.
Dex smiled into the dark.
You were quiet a moment longer, then said, “They keep calling it that.”
“What?”
“A restraint jacket.”
“That’s what it is.”
“No,” you said. “It’s a straitjacket.They just call it a “fireproof restraint jacket” because that sounds nicer with the taxpayers, and straitjacket makes me sound like I’m supposed to be in a basement eating wallpaper.”
Fireproof, huh?
Dex found your comparison amusing and laughed under his breath. “You’d prefer that?”
The wall warmed. You heard him. He knew you did, because the warmth stayed.
“At least it’s not an inhibitor collar,” you muttered finally.
Dex went still. “They have those?”
“Not anymore,” you said, though Dex didn’t ask for any clarifications that day.
For a while he stared out quietly.
After a moment, you asked, “Are you in one?”
“An inhibitor collar?”
“A straitjacket, genius.”
“No.”
The temperature dropped, but only in a small enough increment. “You’re not in a straitjacket?”
“No.”
“That is so fucked up.”
Dex closed his eyes. “Is it?”
“Yes,” you scoffed, “What makes you so special?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is discrimination.”
Dex, who couldn’t miss if he wanted to, looked around to see nothing in his cell that he could throw or ricochet with. And if he was imagining you right, your hands must be the main conduit to your power. You didn’t need an object to break out if your hands were free. “I don’t think that’s what that is.”
“It is to me.”
After that, you told him your name. You said it at two in the morning, half-muffled through concrete, like it had slipped out by accident.
Dex repeated it once.
The heat that bloomed through the wall felt almost shy.
After that, Dex started sleeping with his shoulder closer to your side of the cell, though he told himself it meant nothing: The bed was narrow and the room was small, that’s all. There were only so many places to put a body inside a box. But every night, somehow, he ended up turning toward you, listening for your breathing through concrete like it was the only sound in Rikers that mattered.
And when you went quiet for a bit too long, Dex would listen in, panic blooming, and it would not calm until you shifted or sighed or muttered something ridiculous about prison oatmeal, and then he could breathe again like an idiot.
That was when he understood the other half of you.
When you were in a good enough mood, your powers weren’t icy anymore. You’d run hot.
The first time it really hit him, Dex woke up sweating with his shirt clinging to his back. The window was fogged over and the snow had vanished completely, and the whole cell felt damp and tropical, like a greenhouse in Rikers.
And you were talking. God, you were talking.
You were talking your ass off, giving him whole floods of thought, fast and impossible to hold still.
“Do you think they built this place because of you specifically,” you asked once you realised your rambles had shook him awake, voice bright through the wall, “or do you think someone made a budget request years ago and then got really excited when you gave them a reason?”
Dex looked to the wall. You didn’t wait for an answer.
“Because eight cells is very ambitious. Someone must’ve sat in a meeting going, no, trust me, we are going to have so many enhanced criminals. And then it was just you for like, half a year.”
Dex sat up, and the air was even warmer.
On the other side of the wall, you shifted in the jacket, fabric rasping hard against concrete.
“Also, do you think enhanced is offensive? I can’t decide. It feels offensive. Like I didn’t ask to be labelled like a skincare serum.”
Dex’s mouth twitched up a little. “You done?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I also think the eggs are powdered.”
“They are.”
“I knew it.”
Then you laughed, and it was a half-controlled laugh this time, wild around the edges. The temperature in Dex’s cell jumped so fast it felt like someone had opened an oven door.
Dex now knew how your powers worked: when you were kinda sad, things frosted over. When you could barely move, it snowed.
Good mood meant warmth. Full manic meant tropical.
It was ridiculous and fascinating all the same. Sometimes, the whole unit went damp and sticky, other times the reinforced windows fogged over, the walls sweating like the building was nervous.
Eventually, it got warmer and warmer, and you would be pacing, five steps one way, five steps back, talking out of your ass like language had become a pressure valve.
You talked about everything. The guards’ schedules, the ceiling tiles, how ugly prison socks were, whether corporations should be burned down in alphabetical order or by severity of moral failure.
Dex listened to all of it.
He learned of who you were without ever seeing your face. He knew when you were smiling because the wall warmed before your voice changed. He knew when you were pretending not to cry because the frost came fast, like you were trying to hide it and failed anyway. He knew the difference between your tired silence, your angry silence, your sad silence, your plotting silence. So he knew you.
And you knew him, too, in ways no one alive had earned before. You knew when his guards had pissed him off before he said anything. You knew when his spine hurt from the way he breathed through his teeth. Once, when he had gone too silent, you knocked your forehead lightly against the wall and said, “Dex, don’t go wherever your mind just went.” He had stared at the concrete for a long time after that, because nobody had ever come looking for him inside his own head before.
That's why, when you talked, he listened.
Some of it was nonsense. Some of it was clever. Some of it was both. You talked like someone sprinting downhill with no interest in stopping, fast and too amused by terrible things. You even told him what you did: apparently you burned down a warehouse and office of a company called Meridian Dynamics. They made suppression tech: Inhibitor collars, cuffs, injectables, sold to prisons and private security. Apparently, you planned to burn the building down during a very important board meeting, which resulted in your two counts of arson and twenty four counts of murder.
And, inevitably, you started talking about escape.
“I’m getting out,” you told Dex one night.
He was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, sweat dampening his collar. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You can’t burn through reinforced doors.”
“I could if I had my hands.”
Dex looked down at his own, free, for now. He was still dangerous. His hands had always been the part of him people watched first, the part they feared, the part they restrained before opening any door.
He understood, suddenly, the cruelty of having your body treated like a weapon even when you were just sitting there, breathing.
You shifted in the jacket, and the fabric rasped like it hurt.
“Obviously,” you said, trying for lightness and missing by inches, “I don’t have them.”
Dex stared at the wall. For once, he did not know what to say.
You laughed, but it came out thin. “I can feel them. That’s the worst part. They’re right there. I just can’t use them.”
The heat dimmed.
“That why you keep talking about chewing through your jacket?”
You shrugged, though it hurt. “Maybe.”
“You’ll break your teeth.”
“You care about my teeth?”
“I care about not listening to you complain.”
“You care.”
He should have denied it, but he didn’t.
Dex had spent his entire life understanding attachment as a liability, something people could weaponize until he became useful or pathetic or both. But with you on the other side of the wall, this attachment didn’t feel temporary. It was clear in the way he measured his nights by whether you spoke. He had an ache of wanting to see your face and being terrified that if he did, it would only make this feeling worse.
The silence stretched, warmer than it should have been. Then you said, very quietly, “I don’t think I could actually chew through it.”
“No,” Dex said. “Probably not.”
“I still might try.”
“Don’t.”
That made you laugh for real. The wall warmed beneath his palm. For a moment, it was almost gentle.
One night, after hours of heat and pacing and a long speech about how prison architecture lacked imagination, you went suddenly quiet.
Dex waited.
The wall was warm against his shoulder. Then you whispered, “Dex?”
“What?”
“Do you think I’m going to be like this forever?”
Dex looked at the concrete between you, at the damp shine where the heat had melted old frost.
“No,” he answered.
It was the closest thing to a promise he could make through a wall. He wanted to say more, but everything else felt too fake.
He didn’t know why, but he had the urge to tell you that you were not an object or a containment problem. He wanted to tell you that if the world had built eight cells for monsters, then fine, let the world call him one, because he had found you in the next cage over and suddenly the world didn’t feel so lonely anymore.
Instead, Dex pressed his palm flat to the wall.
A second later, warmth bloomed under his hand. Not enough to burn, but enough to meet him.
—
Dex getting moved to general population should have made him think about the Fisks.
It should have made him think about the obvious thing first, which was that Vanessa Fisk wanted him dead.
Being moved to genpop was not a transfer. To him, a former FBI agent in a room full of convicts who has also pissed people off by working for the Kingpin, it was a death sentence. Genpop was a fancy term for a room full of men, any one of them purchasable, any one of them stupid or desperate enough to try him with a sharpened toothbrush, a melted piece of plastic, a hand around his throat in the showers.
But when the guards dragged him out of ESH when you were asleep in your cell, that was not what Dex thought about.
He thought, with a sudden, sick clarity, that you were going to be alone.
You would be alone like he had been alone for five months, rotting in a hallway built for people the world didn’t know how to categorize.
Alone with no one but the guards who would never understood your moods.
So he called Matt and offered him a lifeline: tell him who hired him to kill Foggy Nelson in exchange for freedom.
Of course he didn’t think Matt would forgive him. But Matt had believed in the law. And mercy too, whether he wanted it or not. Dex needed both, and hated needing both, and hated more that he was not even asking just for himself.
Need sat wrong in his head. It had always felt like weakness or an exposed artery, as if anyone could just hook a finger into and pull. Needing Matt Murdock was bad enough. Needing Matt Murdock for you was humiliating in a way that Dex didn’t have vocabulary for, because it meant there was something in the world he could not take, kill, steal, or aim to fix.
See, he wanted an appeal for you, too. He had this whole speech of how in another life, Matt would defend him. About isn’t that what good men do? Defend their worst enemies? About I’m bargaining for our life here, counsellor.
Our life. Not mine. Ours.
“Oh,” Matt said. “That’s what this is.”
Dex said nothing.
“So fell in love in prison?” Matt said sarcastically. “Sweetheart, what do you want me to do? Want me to get a couple of murderers out of prison, want me to get an appeal?”
Dex didn’t answer, because answering would have made it sound too… juvenile.
Love was not a strong enough word for a woman he had only known through a concrete wall and had fallen for anyway. It was not right for experiencing snow in a prison cell, or feeling heat through the wall, or your voice talking nonsense at three in the morning. It was not right for the way he had started sleeping closer to your side of the room.
Matt saw enough of it anyway, and maybe that’s why he had a glimmer of sympathy. Maybe it was disgust. Maybe he thought again of Foggy, and before he knew it, Matt was slamming his head on the metal table.
Dex barely had time to register it before pain flared through his mouth and his head snapped hard enough against the metal that the room flashed white, blood filling his mouth.
Then, he felt something small and hard come loose against his tongue.
A tooth.
A projectile.
“Thank you, counsellor,” he smiled.
The guards pulled Dex back, and he let them haul him away, head bowed, blood dripping down his lip, the tooth hidden carefully.
Killing the doctor and the guard was child’s play after that. Navigating the prison with the dead guard’s badge was even easier.
He would break out and kill Fisk in his black and white ball. But for now, he had something else to do in this hell hole.
He wouldn’t escape without you.
Dex moved through Rikers with blood still drying at the corner of his mouth.
When he reached ESH, he killed the two stationed guards with medical tools stolen from the infirmary.
And when he got in, the hallway was frozen.
Ice crawled over the floor in white veins. Frost had swallowed the observation glass. Snow had gathered in the corners like the building had been abandoned for winter. Your food tray sat untouched outside the slot because the mechanism had sealed shut.
Dex stopped outside Cell Two and looked through the narrow panel.
This was the first time that Dex ever really saw you.
He had seen flashes between guards, maybe a reflection from one of the guard’s shields during training drills.
You were curled on the floor in the fireproof straitjacket, knees drawn up as much as the restraints allowed, cheek resting against the concrete. Your hair was messy. Your lips were discolored from the cold, frost clinging to your lashes like a lifeline, delicate as glitter, cruel as evidence.
You looked… smaller than he had imagined, but no less beautiful.
He had built you in his head as strong as weather, a voice bright enough to make lights flicker. But through the glass, you were just a girl in a white straitjacket, cold and alone and trying not to disappear.
Dex pressed his bloody hand to the door.
He looked at the jacket and the lock and and thought of every hand that had put you in there and every person who had looked at you like you were a weapon before you were a human being.
He broke the door open with the stolen keycard first.
When the door gave out, the cold rushed out around him.
You stirred, eyes opening slowly.
For one second, you only stared at him like he couldn’t possibly be real. Like maybe the cold had finally started making things up for you.
Then the frost nearest his feet began to melt.
“Dex?”
You looked confused. As if it was a guess.
That's when you realised… you had never really seen him, either.
He nodded, stepping inside.
Snow fell between you, unnatural and absurd beneath the fluorescent lights. Your eyes moved over his face to the blood on his mouth and the stitches on his forehead. You knew him, finally, after months of knowing him only as a voice through concrete.
Your voice sounded broken. “Is that what you look like?”
Dex almost smiled, thrilled that you looked anything but disappointed. “Yeah.”
You blinked at him, dazed and trying very hard to make your mouth curve up like this was funny. Like you had not been left alone, and that loneliness without him had turned the building into a snowy wasteland.
He crouched in front of you.
For the first time, there was no wall between you.
Dex reached for the straps.
You flinched, but not because you were afraid of him, but because the last person who reached for the jacket had touched you like you were an object, and you had burned him by accident, and then they had hurt you for it.
Dex saw all of that cross your faces so he stopped.
His hands hovered over the buckles.
“I’m taking it off,” he said, “that’s all.”
You looked at him, considering your choices. Then, just a little, you nodded.
Dex broke the first strap, the fabric strained under his grip before giving in with a harsh snap. The sound echoed through the frozen cell. Your breath caught, and his eyes flicked back to yours immediately, checking if you were okay.
You were.
So he broke the next one.
Then the next.
Each strap breaking felt personal, and each piece tearing loose felt like he was taking something back from everyone who had decided your hands were too dangerous to belong to yourself.
When the last strap snapped, the jacket loosened.
Then your arms slipped free. You did so slowly, like you had forgotten they were ever yours.
Your hands trembled in your lap.
Dex looked at them.
So did you.
You had not seen them for months.
The snow thinned at first, then eventually, it stopped, the last few flakes drifting down and melting before they touched the floor. Warmth bloomed from you in a fragile little wave.
This time, it wasn’t manic heat. Instead it was warmth, like spring breaking after a cold winter.
You lifted one hand carefully, almost shyly, and the first thing you did was touch the scar on Dex’s face.
He went perfectly still.
You brushed the blood at the corner of his mouth with your thumb, your eyes furrowing.
“You came back,” you whispered, which, to Dex translated to: I thought you left me forever.
Dex leaned into your touch before he could stop himself. “Yeah.”
There were alarms somewhere in the distance, but ESH was far away, out of security. It would take them a while to get here. And by the time they did, it would’ve been too late.
Dex didn’t move. Neither did you.
Then your fingers curled lightly against his chin, and before he could think better of it, Dex bent forward and kissed you.
It was small, nothing but a brush of his mouth against yours, warm and bloody from the missing teeth.
You froze for half a second before you kissed him back.
You were sweet and a little clumsy, because your arms were stiff and your hands were shaking and neither of you had any business being tender in a prison cell full of evidence of your sadness and isolation.
When he pulled back, you stared at him.
The frost on the walls ran down in thin silver lines.
Then you smiled, sheepish and dazed, like you were embarrassed by your own warming heart.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” you admitted.
Dex looked at you and he had no answer.
The ruined straitjacket was still in his hands, your fingertips still against his face, and the warmth of your lips lingering on his mouth.
Outside, the prison began to panic. Inside, you smiled at him like he had brought summer with him.
And Dex, who had spent five months alone in a place built for monsters, thought there was no better reason to become one again.
—end.
Extra note: I reread this before posting and realised I may have accidentally written reader as bipolar-coded, which is very me😭😭😭 I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around a decade ago, and it’s manageable now, but this fic ended up feeling way more personal than I expected. This is the first time I’ve ever written mood disorder x mood disorder so I hope I did alright. So please be kind with this one. She’s special to me 🫶
Please send in an ask or message if you want to be added to the dex general / series specific taglist! Comments get lost sometimes! Let me know if I missed anyone!
