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“Dex, put me down.”

His hand flexed against your thigh. “Pretty girl,” he murmured, voice feverish, like he was talking to himself more than you. “Can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes, can you?”

Your stomach dropped.

“I’m gonna keep you down here for a little while, okay?” he said, already reaching for the door. “Just while I clean up the mess. Then I’ll come back and make it nice. You’ll be safe.”

You went cold.

“Benjamin,”

He paused, because you using that name meant you were pissed pissed. 

Then the lock clicked under his hand. He had made this safe room for you, when you were manic and erratic and borderline uncontrollable. It worked, but you hated it, even if it did save your life more times than once. 

After all, free use was one thing. You had both agreed to that. Dex could have your body whenever he wanted, and you could have his, but your freedom was still yours, right?

“It’s for your own good,” he said.

Poor, stupid Dex.

He really should have remembered who he was in love with.

When he reached the bottom step and shifted his weight to unlock the inner door, you grabbed the heavy flashlight from the shelf beside you and swung it as hard as you could into the back of his head. Not enough to kill him, of course! You loved him. Just enough to knock him out. 

When he woke up, he was upside down.

His ankles were tied to the ceiling, body tied to the support beam in the center of the basement. His shirt was halfway dragged open by gravity, blood still smeared over his skin, rope shoved between his teeth like a gag and tied tight enough to keep all his bad ideas trapped behind it.

You knelt beside him, a pretty skirt pooled around your thighs.

Dex stared at you, testing the ropes.

His eyes were wild.

He was scared, and not of the ropes. Dex could chew through pain and spit out the bones. No, he was scared because you had that sad look on your face. Apparently, he had fucked up badly enough that you had stopped fighting and started doing whatever the hell this was.

“You hurt my feelings,” you said.

The sound he made around the gag was wet and pathetic. Spit had already slicked the rope, leaking from the corner of his mouth, sliding wrong over his cheek because he was hanging upside down. He tried to say your name. You could hear it outline of the noise: Sorry. Baby. Please. 

All those half-hearted apologies were useless behind the rope.

“I gotta punish you for wanting to lock me up in the basement again.” You frowned, reaching past his face and tapped the metal column he was tied to once to taunt him.

Dex swallowed around the gag, eyes locked on yours, then flexed his bound fingers.

Then, you looked up from where you were kneeling.

You could see that he was very clearly hard.

Of course he was fucking horrified and guilty and scared half to death, and still hard enough to strain obscenely against his pants. His length was trapped thick under the fabric, too obvious to ignore, the head pressing a dark wet spot where he had already started leaking.

You laughed under your breath. “Oh, Dex.”

His eyes squeezed shut.

You reached your hand up while still kneeling, sliding your palm over him anyway.

Dex groaned through the gag.

His hips jerked, hungry and humiliating. The ropes held him in place, but not enough to hide what he wanted. 

Your hand rubbed higher over the shape through his trousers, palm dragging up until you felt him throb under the cloth. He made a strangled sound as drool gathered at his lip and dripped onto the concrete.

Messy, just as you liked him.

Dex was always so clean, so fucking orderly. Seeing him fall apart just tickles that sweet spot in your brain. 

You shifted a bit, and your skirt swayed.

Dex looked straight up from  under the hem, and he went so still it was almost funny.

The angle was filthy. His face was right there, upside down beside your thighs, and he could see exactly what you had been pretending he couldn’t: your panties were soaked clinging wet to you because apparently nearly dying, getting carried like a hostage, knocking out your boyfriend, tying him up, and scolding him over his hard on turned you on. 

“Fucking perv,” you breathed.

His length jumped under your palm as you widened your knees a little enough to be cruel.

Dex made a sound so needy it should have embarrassed him. Instead, he looked up your skirt with his mouth forced open around the rope, spit on his forehead, eyes lustful and glassy, twitching in your hand like the sight itself was going to finish him by itself.

You squeezed him through the fabric, and he arched as much as the ropes allowed, hips trying to fuck up into your fist through his pants. You finally stood up and leaned closer, your mouth hovering over the strain. 

You kissed his clothed bulge, and he had a better view up your skirt now.

A gutted groan tore through the gag as your lips pressed a flutter of kisses over the wet spot at the head. Your palm held his thighs while your mouth dragged over the length, kissing little pecks here and there. He shivered. Big bad Dex, hanging upside down in his own basement, gagged and drooling while you made out with his arousal through his pants.

Your lips pressed harder over the head of him, and his hips kicked uselessly into your mouth. His eyes were glued under your skirt, like being denied made him fixate harder on the wet little mess between your legs.

You pulled back with a slick sound.

Dex whined.

“You don’t get to feel any more than that,” you said, sweet as rot. “You tried to lock me up.”

His eyes went devastated, but he twitched anyway. “Yeah,” you murmured, rubbing him again. “I know, baby. It’s awful when someone else decides what you’re allowed to have, isn’t it?”

His eyes darkened as fear sank deeper. Shame, too, perhaps, because he finally realised he had hurt you and would have gutted himself open if you asked sweetly enough.

You kissed him through his trousers again, because you weren’t merciful. You had never promised to be.

This time it was filthier. Your tongue dragged up the hard line of him while your fingers pressed into his hip, holding him still as you left a trail of damp in your wake. You mouthed at the clothed head, until his thighs strained against the ropes, until every breath came out muffled, until he looked split between begging and apologising and coming in his pants like a fucking loser.

Then you stopped.

Dex jerked forward, chasing your mouth.

The ropes didn't allow for much movement. 

You laughed softly. “There. Lesson one.”

You stood over him, smoothing your skirt down.

His eyes were still glued down there, shameless.

You bent down and kissed his forehead, then the scar on his cheek.

“I’ll untie you later,” you whispered, sickening and loving all the same. “After you’ve learned not to lock me in the fucking basement.”

Dex made a broken sound.

You kissed the corner of his gagged mouth, tasting spit and rope, before you turned toward the stairs.

Behind you, Dex was silent, and not because he had learned his lesson.

Because the creep you called your boyfriend was still too busy watching the slick gathering under your skirt every step of the way.

—

Note: phew, this was done in under 30 minutes and I just needed to get it outta my system 🫠🫠🫠inspired by this Batman #147 variant cover by Jorge Jimenez! (Not saying reader is Punchline and Dex is Joker, this is just a pose reference for the story!)

So you found instant coffee in the back of the cupboard and made it too strong because you were already running late. You burned your tongue, while the clasp on your necklace got caught in your hair. Your tights had a ladder in them, a thin line running up the back of your calf that no one else would probably notice but that you could feel all day like a crack in glass.

You changed twice and hated both outfits.

The third one was acceptable until you got outside and realized the waistband sat weird when you walked. It pinched at one side and shifted at the other. You kept trying to fix it discreetly beneath your coat while waiting for the train, which only made it twist more.

Then the train was delayed.

You kinda wished it would’ve been canceled; it would at least have given you something to be angry about. It was delayed by six minutes, then nine, then twelve, with the announcement changing every time you looked up. The platform filled around you as a lady stood close enough behind you that her bag pressed against your back every time they moved. A man near the stairs was watching videos without headphones, and two women beside you were having an argument in furious whispers.

Your phone buzzed in your hand.

Dex. Coffee machine dead?

You stared at the message for too long.

Normally, you would have answered with something dry and funny immediately. Instead, you typed three different replies and deleted all of them because every version sounded irritated, and you were irritated, but not with him.

You sent a heart.

He replied with three.

That nearly made you cry again.

Work was not terrible enough to justify how terrible it felt.

Nobody screamed at you and nothing caught fire. You didn’t get fired or humiliated, but it was just a constant fucking drag.

An intern, a fresh graduate called Grace, stopped you before you had taken off your coat because they needed help with something they had known about since yesterday. Your computer decided to update while going to the double-booked meeting room, so everyone stood in the corridor pretending not to be annoyed while Brad from HR insisted he had reserved it first. When you finally got inside, the projector would not connect.

Then your manager, Amy said, “This should only take five minutes,” and it took forty-three.

At some point, your coworker Jack, put a hand on your shoulder from behind to get your attention.

You nearly snapped. They apologized. You apologized for reacting. Then you spent the next ten minutes thinking about whether your apology had sounded strange.

That was when you had to go to the bathroom and cry.

You sat in the last stall with the lid down, both feet planted on the floor, trying to breathe quietly so that no one would hear you. You hated crying at work and the bathroom lighting and the thin toilet paper scraping under your eyes. You hated that there was no single problem you could point to and say, there, that’s why I can’t do this today!

Your phone buzzed again.

Dex had sent you a message about going out because task force was spotted in droves on the other side of the city, and that he was going out to get them. 

Then cried harder because you missed him, even though he lived with you and you had technically seen him that morning. 

You washed your face, went back to your desk, and tried to finish the day.

At four, Dex texted that he would probably be home late.

You stared at that one until the words blurred.

It was reasonable and normal, by your standards. He worked strange hours and disappeared with even stranger explanations. You were used to eating without him. You were used to waking up with him suddenly in bed beside you, one hand finding your waist beneath the blanket.

But you had spent the whole day thinking about going home to him.

You didn’t even want to talk to him. You wanted to walk through the door and see him standing in the kitchen. You wanted him to take your bag without asking and tell you to change into a soft cotton shirt so as not to trigger your sensory issues. You wanted to sit between his knees on the sofa while he rubbed slow circles into your thighs.

Instead, you sent. Okay. Be safe.

He reacted with a heart.

You put your phone facedown and finished the last hour.

The train home was worse than the train in.

You had to stand while a wet umbrella kept brushing your ankle, even though you didn’t realise it had been raining. A man across the carriage kept coughing into his fist and then touching the pole. Every time the train stopped, more people got on and nobody got off.

By the time you reached your building, your shoulders ached from holding them up around your ears. You dropped your keys in the hallway, and the sound of them hitting the floor was so annoying that you just stood there staring at them for several seconds before bending down.

The apartment was dark when you opened the door.

You turned on the lamp instead of the main light and you took off your coat and immediately felt colder. You put it back on. Took it off again because the lining felt horrible against your skin. You stood in the living room holding it, suddenly unable to decide what to do with it even though there was a hook three feet away.

You dropped it on the floor.

Then you felt guilty because Dex liked things clean and in their place.

Fuck. 

You sat down beside it and cried with one shoe still on and one shoe off, louder than you cried in the office bathroom. You cried because the apartment smelled faintly like Dex, but he wasn’t there. You cried because you had spent the whole day being reasonable, and now there was nobody in front of you to be reasonable for.

Afterward, you felt stupid and sticky-faced, which just made the sensations worse.

You picked up the coat and put your shoes away. You sent Dex a message asking when he would be home, then deleted it before sending because you didn’t want him distracted while he was out doing very dangerous Bullseye things.

You showered instead, and the water was too hot at first, but you didn’t fix it quickly enough, so your skin felt like it was boiling across your chest and shoulders. You washed your hair. Then the wet texture clung to your back and made you angry, so you wrapped them in one of Dex’s old shirts instead of a towel because it was softer.

You put on your sleep shorts and the gray shirt of his you always stole.

It smelled like the detergent you both used now, not specifically like him, which made you strangely sad.

You tried to eat.

There were pasta leftovers in the fridge. Dex had labelled the container DO NOT EAT in black marker, then added unless you are my girlfriend beneath it in smaller writing because you had told him one you liked one of those cheesy jokes, and Dex being Dex, listened and manufactured it into his life even though he got no real enjoyment out of it. You heated it up, took three bites, and put them back because the tomato sauce was chunky, and it felt weird on your tongue even though technically, there was nothing wrong with it. .

So you made tea and forgot the bag until it went bitter.

You turned on the television, then muted it because the voice of the newscaster irritated you. The silence irritated you too, so you turned it back on quietly with subtitles.

At some point, you checked the locks twice.

You knew Dex would not use the door when he came back. He would use the fire escape.

On most nights, the thought made you smile. Tonight, you wanted him to use his key like a normal person.

You wanted to hear it turn in the lock like a warning. You wanted him to call your name from the entrance so you had time to prepare for being touched.

But whatever. He probably didn't even bring his keys.

You climbed into bed with the lamp on.

Usually, you liked Dex coming home with that focus still in his eyes. You even loved the way he sometimes stood at the foot of the bed and looked at you as if he had followed you there. You liked the games he played to rile you up, because Dex knew exactly how to frighten you without making you unsafe. You liked restraints because he checked every knot, every buckle, every inch of space between your skin and whatever held you down.

You liked being helpless when it was Dex.

Usually.

But tonight, you just wanted him.

You wanted to press your face into his chest and let him complain that your wet hair was soaking his shirt. You wanted him to ask what happened, accept “nothing” as the answer, and hold you still.

The fire escape groaned outside the window.

Then the living room window slid open, and Dex climbed in with blood on his sleeve, still.

You were in that half-sleep state where your body had gone heavy but your mind was still floating somewhere above it, listening to the hum of the television you had left on in the living room and the old pipe knocking faintly in the wall. You were even still aware of your breathing, too shallow to be restful.

You knew what Dex was like after a long night. You knew the way adrenaline ran in his body like a live wire, making him hungry and a little fucking insane. Usually, you were more than happy to let him spend the rest of it on you.

That was the arrangement, after all.

The free use thing had happened over weeks of conversations, some serious, some filthy, some with you sitting cross-legged on the bed while Dex sat on the floor taking it all in like he was memorising a mission brief. What was okay, what was not. It was discussed and re-discussed, picked apart in daylight until even Dex’s paranoid brain had nothing left to gnaw on.

You had said it first half as a joke, grinning over your mug while Dex sat opposite you at the kitchen table looking like you had just handed him a loaded gun.

“What, you don’t like the idea?” you had teased.

His eyes had gone dark in a way that made your thighs press together beneath the table. “I like it too much.”

That had been the problem, Dex had always liked you too much, wanted you too much, so you made rules.

You told him what he could do if you were half-asleep, and what he could do if you were pretending to be asleep, which was different, because sometimes you liked lying there smug while Dex tried to kiss you patiently. You knew what he could do if he came home needy. 

Most days, you loved Dex coming into the bedroom while you were still sleepy, his hands sliding under your shirt like he owned every inch of skin he found there. You loved the first drag of his mouth against your shoulder and the rough sound he made when you pressed back into him without opening your eyes. You loved pretending to be annoyed while he kissed down your spine and told you that he knew you were awake because your thighs were already sticky for him.

You loved being wanted like that, loved Dex murmuring filthy nonsense against your skin about how pretty you were, how good you were for him even when you were barely awake. You loved the way he could make free use feel less like being used and more like being worshipped.

Sometimes he was sweet about it, climbing into the bed clean and careful, gathering you back against his chest, and kissing you awake inch by inch like he had all the time in the world. He would slide one hand over your stomach and whisper your name until you made that cute complaining sound he loved, and then he would laugh like you were the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Sometimes he was not sweet, still shaking with adrenaline and put a hand over your mouth before you could say something naughty, only to kiss your temple immediately. Sometimes he pinned your wrists because you liked to fight him for show, and he liked pretending not to know you were letting him win. Sometimes he found you half-asleep and still managed to fuck you awake so thoroughly that by the time you could think again, your face was hot, your hair was a mess, and Dex was in your ear telling you how good you were for letting him have you.

You liked that.

But tonight, your body had already been handled by the entire fucking day. Your nerves had been touched and touched and touched until touch did not feel like touch anymore. It felt more like threat.

You knew that, but then Dex came home and your first thought was still I want him.

You then heard the movement of him walking around the apartment, and not like a direct line to the bathroom, or the kitchen. Not even to check the lock, which he always did even when he had just broken into his own home like a lunatic.

Instead, he was coming to you.

The bedroom door was half-open, and you kept your eyes closed.

You told yourself it was because you were too tired to move, but part of you liked the game. Part of you wanted to be found like this, buried in the middle of the bed in his shirt and your sleep shorts, pretending you hadn’t been waiting all night, helping you forget the day, forget the job, forget everything except getting his hands on the one thing in the world that belonged to him.

He stopped in the doorway, and before you knew it, the mattress dipped.

Dex was always careful at first, even when he was feral. He put a hand beside your hip, not touching yet. His breathing was slow, but not steady. You could hear the way he held himself back for the sake of a rule he wanted to break only because you had once told him breaking it in the right way turned you into putty.

His fingers touched your ankle beneath the blanket, almost testing.

Your body gave a tiny shiver.

Dex went still, before his hand slid higher, possessive enough to make heat flicker through the exhaustion. His palm travelled up the back of your calf, over the bend of your knee, over your thigh. You heard him exhale, and the sound was so hungry it made your stomach flip despite everything.

“Pretty girl,” he whispered.

Your face warmed.

Stupid body. Stupid, fucking traitorous body.

He leaned over you, and his mouth brushed the back of your shoulder where his shirt had slipped wide at the collar. He started with one kiss, quickly followed by another. It became open-mouthed and filthy, like he was trying to be gentle and got overwhelmed. His hand found your waist beneath the shirt, fingers spreading against your skin.

For one second, it worked.

Your violent, devoted, half-mad Dex came home through windows and touched you like you were the only object of desire in the universe, who could make you feel filthy and adored at the same time, who could make being half-asleep feel like the dirtiest kind of safety.

His mouth moved to your neck, hand tightened at your waist.

“Missed you,” he breathed, rough against your skin. “Been thinking about you all night.”

Your thighs pressed together beneath the blanket before you could stop them.

Dex noticed and made a small sound against your throat, almost broken with relief, and shifted closer until his body was against your back. His hand slid over your hip, tugging you back into him.

For one second, you really wanted it.

Your body remembered him before it remembered itself. It remembered all the other nights he had come home ruined and desperate and crawled into bed like your body was the only place he knew where to put the violence. It remembered waking up already breathless to his greedy hands, his mouth saying filthy, adoring things against your skin until you went undone beneath him.

For one second, you wanted to be that girl again.

Dex’s hand tightened on your hip, and your breath broke in a way that sounded enough like pleasure to confuse both of you. He pressed his face into your neck and inhaled like he was trying to crawl inside your veins.

“Color?” he asked, it was rough, but still good of him.

You meant to say yellow.

The word was right there, sitting behind your tongue. Yellow meant slow down, meant you wanted him, but you needed him kinder. It would mean this was good, but also too much. But Dex’s mouth was on your throat, and his hand was warm under your shirt, and you had missed him so badly all day that admitting you needed less felt like losing him for a stupid reason.

So you said, “Green.”

Dex exhaled against your skin. “Yeah?” he murmured.

You nodded, eyes still closed.

You should have said yellow again then. You should have corrected yourself because there was still a good amount of space to do it, while his hand was only at your waist and his mouth was only at your neck, but your mind was gone and your body had betrayed you with that little shiver, and Dex had never been the best at reading the small things. He was more a flashing lights kinda guy.

Feelings had to be handed to him with both hands. It had had to be said plainly, right in front of his face, with no riddles and no hoping he would guess. Dex, through no fault of his own other than his upbringing, didn’t always know the difference between you trembling because you were turned on and you trembling because your nerves were fraying apart unless you told him.

He caught your hip and flipped you onto your back in one rough movement, fast enough that the mattress jolted under you and your breath left in a startled little sound. Dex was above you immediately, one knee between your thighs, one hand braced beside your head, his eyes blown wide with whatever the night had left in him. There was blood at the edge of his collar, and a smear of it near his wrist. His hair was damp from the rain, falling over his forehead in a way that made him look more unhinged at the same time.

“Missed you,” he said, voice wrecked.

Your stomach flipped.

Fuck, he was beautiful like this. Even terrifying,  he was beautiful, and you had built so much of your wanting around those two things. Dex looked down at you like he wanted to ruin you and worship whatever was left. 

His hand slid to your chin, possessive.

Your thighs pressed together on instincts held apart by his leg between them.

“Mmm ,” he whispered. “My pretty girl.”

Heat curled in you, slick and stupid, even as your skin prickled at the edges. Your bad day had not killed the part of you that loved being grabbed by him, turned by him, handled by him. You loved Dex rough because Dex rough still meant Dex focused, Dex obsessed, Dex so fucking hungry for you that the rest of the world could plunge itself into a void and he wouldn’t give two shits.

His mouth was on yours before you could think. The kiss was hard enough to make your head press back into the pillow. His hand stayed at your chin, holding you there while he took your mouth in a way that made your body go loose for him out of habit. You kissed him back, finger catching the front of his shirt, and when you pulled, Dex made a groan against your lips Then his hand went to the hem of your shirt.

His shirt, technically. He dragged it up your body impatiently, and the cool air hit your skin. You lifted your arms for him before you remembered you were tired. 

“Fuck,” he breathed.

Your face went hot.

He threw the shirt behind him.

Usually, you would have laughed and he would have said something deadpan and filthy enough to shut you up. Tonight, the loss of the shirt made you feel exposed too quickly, like your body had not agreed to be perceived that much even if your mind wanted to. 

But then Dex kissed down your throat, and you forgot for a second.

His hands were everywhere, greedy at your waist, your ribs, your thighs, reminding himself you were real, coaxing himself out of whatever horror he had done.

You arched under him, and that was honest too.

Your back lifted as your hands found his shoulders. He caught both your wrists in one hand and pressed them above your head, pinning them there against the pillow.

His eyes lifted to yours, fever-bright. “Yeah?”

You swallowed, and this time, no color came out.

Dex took it for yes because it did feel like a yes to you. Usually, you liked being held down. Tonight, you were too tired to know the difference.

Dex reached for the drawer beside the bed.

Your heart jumped, not in fear at first, but in anticipation.

You knew that drawer and what was in it. The rope came out in his hand.

Your breath caught.

“Still green?” he asked.

Say yellow.

Say yellow.

Say yellow.

You looked up at him, at the way his chest rose and fell. You thought about the whole day: the train, office, light, the way you had cried on the hallway floor because your coat had fallen.

You thought, I can take it.

So you said, “Green.”

Dex looked relieved and hungry and dangerously grateful, like he had been waiting all night for permission to stop being human in exactly the way you usually loved.

He tied your wrists to the headboard, roughly, because he was Dex.

He checked the space between rope and skin automatically, two fingers, always. Your wrists went up as the expensive silken rope was bound to the bedframe. 

Your body went liquid for one dizzy second.

You loved the helplessness that made your brain melt in a good way. It was a dirty drop of the heart, knowing you couldn’t reach for him now unless he let you. You loved how Dex looked at you when you were restrained, like your trust was the most intimate thing you had ever given him. 

“Look at you,” he whispered.

You looked at him looking at you, and for a moment, it was perfect.

Then the rope shifted just slightly. The knot didn’t tighten or hurt. Still, it felt wrong.

The texture scraped your skin in a way it never had before. You could feel every fiber, every point of contact. Your skin pressing against the rope seemed to get louder than everything else in the room somehow, louder than Dex’s breathing, louder than your own heartbeat. 

Your fingers flexed, and the rope moved again.

Your stomach dropped.

No.

You tried to breathe through it.

You tried to get the good feeling back. You tried to look at Dex, at his face, at the hunger you usually loved so much. You tried to remind your body that this was chosen and safe and that Dex had checked. That you had said green twice. That you loved this. You loved this. You loved this!

But the rope kept touching you and it felt like pure, crawling wrongness. The feeling started at your wrists and travelled up your arms until your shoulders froze and your chest went tight. The knot might as well have been around your throat for how quickly your breathing changed.

Dex lowered his mouth to your chest, still murmuring something against your skin,filthy and half-mad.

You barely heard it as your eyes filled.

At first, you did not even know you were crying. Then a tear slipped sideways into your hair, then another.

Dex felt you go still, and this time, he noticed immediately.

His head lifted. “Hey,” he said.

You blinked hard, but the tears came faster.

Dex froze above you, that predatory stance gone now. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, panic filling the back of his eyes, unable to read your thoughts.

You couldn’t answer.

His eyes moved over your face, your mouth, your chest, your wrists. He looked almost frantic trying to identify the injury. Was it blood? Bruises, pulled shoulder? Dex was good at identifying wounds. 

Emotions made him useless unless you labelled them for him, but this was blatant enough that even Dex understood something was wrong.

“Baby,” he said, voice suddenly stripped bare. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Your breath caught as the rope brushed your wrist again when you moved.

You made a horrible little sound, unable to speak.

Dex’s eyes snapped to your hands.

“What?” he said, reaching up but not touching yet. “The rope?”

You nodded once, almost ashamed.

He nodded grimly. “What about the rope?”

“I-It feels wrong,” you choked.

Dex went white.

Your fingers flexed again, and the texture dragged at your skin, and suddenly you couldn't bear it for one more second. Not even half of one. Your whole body reacted around the rejection, and the word  whispered out of you before you had decided to say it. “Red.”

Dex moved instantly.

His hand went to his belt and to his weapons, and for one horrifying second your body thought knife and almost spiralled further under, but Dex was not looking at you like that anymore. 

He pulled the blade free with the same face he wore disarming a bomb.

“Don’t move,” he said, practical.

He didn’t untie the rope, because untying took time.

Dex cut it, a clean slice through the first binding, then the second. The rope fell away from your wrists in loose pieces, useless on the pillow, and Dex threw the knife across the room like he couldn’t stand to have it near you a second longer.

Your arms dropped free, and he was already backing away.

Dex had stopped being a man and become an emergency response. His shoulder hit the dresser, hands lifted, palms open.

You were crying, that was all he saw.

Because of me, he thought.

“I’m away,” he said, a little too loudly and too quickly. “I’m away. I’m not touching you.”

His voice was flat. Dex had never been truly calm a day in his life, so was just forcing panic into a box in his mind that was labeled “procedure.”

You tried to say his name, but it came out broken, and it made him worse.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I can go. I should go. You need space. You need me out. I’ll go to the living room. No, not the living room, that’s not far enough. I’ll go downstairs. Outside. I can wait outside. I won’t come back until you tell me. I won’t touch you, I won’t—”

“Dex—”

“I hurt you.”

You wiped at the tears from your eyes now. “Y-you didn’t.”

He wasn’t listening.

His eyes kept dropping to your wrists. His mouth had gone pale and his hands were still up, still shaking slightly like he didn’t trust them anywhere near you.

You said red and you’re crying, was all he could think of.

“I hurt you.” he said, words coming faster now. “I scared you. I tied you down and you cried. I had a knife in my hand. I shouldn’t have had the knife, I knew I was—”

“Dex.”

“I’ll go.”

You tried to get back up, but even the sheets were starting to crawl as you were getting more and more overwhelmed. “N-No.”

“I need to go.”

“Dex,” it came out breathy.

“I need to not be near you right now.”

“Nuh-uh. Dex—”

“I can’t be the reason you’re looking at me like that.”

You were crying harder now because he was spiralling, and you were spiralling, and the two of you were dragging each other down in opposite directions. Dex kept retreating. You kept trying to pull him back with a voice that was too fragile to reach him.

He turned toward the door, and you finally snapped.

“I need you!”

He froze.

The shout tore out of you raw, loud enough to hurt your throat. Dex stopped like you had fired a warning shot.

You shoved yourself upright, blanket slipping around your waist, cheeks wet, chest heaving.

“Stop,” you sobbed. “Don’t you dare fucking leave while I’m-I’m l-like this.”

His face fell, panic still prevalent. “I’m trying not to make it worse.”

You choked on a breath. “You are making it worse!”

Dex went still.

You pointed at the floor like you could physically pin him there with the gesture. “You are standing over there looking at me like you’re a monster and you keep talking about leaving and I can’t— I can’t do this too, okay? I can’t comfort you while you’re trying to punish yourself. I need you.”

He looked devastated, and maybe that meant he was finally listening.

“I just—” Your voice broke, and the next words came out almost screamed, because gentleness wasn’t cutting it anymore. “I just need you to hold me, you fucking idiot!”

Dex stared at you, looking completely lost.

Every terrible conclusion he had been building in his head had slammed into that sentence like a shield and shattered at his feet.

“You want me to hold you?” he asked, barely audible.

“Yes,” you cried. “Jesus Christ, yes.”

His hands lowered by an inch.

“But I scared you.”

“Because I was already scared of everything,” you managed through gritted teeth. 

“You said red.”

“And you stopped!”

You could see it finally go through to him. His eyes flicked to the cut rope, then to your wrists, then back to your face. He was still terrified of himself, but he stopped backing away.

“I need you clean,” you said, voice shaking. “Then I need you here.”

He moved immediately.

Thank God.

Giving him an instruction helped him. Dex disappeared into the bathroom with stiff purpose, and you heard water slam on. As he scrubbed his hands too hard. You heard him almost losing it over the sink and forcing himself not to because you had not asked for that.

When he came back, the blood was gone.

His shirt was gone too, replaced with the white sleeveless one you liked, because it made him look less like he had crawled out of an alley and more like the man who lived here. Your man, who slept with one hand searching for you.

He stopped by the bed, still afraid to presume after what happened.

You opened your arms.

He climbed onto the bed slowly, gave you every second to change your mind, and only closed his arms around you when you grabbed the front of his shirt and dragged him in.

Then he was truly in, and you folded into him.

You cried into his chest with both fists clenched in his shirt, and Dex held you like he was learning how to touch you all over again. 

“Tighter,” you sobbed.

His arms tightened.

“More.”

He held you properly then, careful but not distant. His chin tucked over your head, one hand spread between your shoulder blades, the other on your back, keeping you against him without trapping you. You could feel his heartbeat racing under your cheek, and still, yours was worse.

For a while, neither of you said anything.

Words had been too much all day. Everything had been too much all day. So this was good.

Dex pressed his mouth to your hair.

“I just had a bad day,” you whispered into his chest.

His arms tightened again.

You felt him inhale. “All day?” he asked.

You nodded.

His hand flexed against your back.

He wanted to ask, you could feel it. He wanted names, causes, targets, so he could follow them home and put them through a wall for making you feel like this. But for once, he held it in.

You cried harder, because he was warm and clean and finally close enough. “I meant to say yellow,” you whispered.

His chest stopped moving for a second.

“I know,” you added, before he could spiral again. “I know I said green. I know. I just wanted to be okay. I wanted it to be like usual.”

Dex didn’t speak for a long moment.

Then he held you a little closer and pressed his cheek to the top of your head. “Okay,” he said roughly.

It sounded like he was swallowing glass.

You pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was serious, jaw tight, laying in bed with the woman he loved crying all over his shirt, trying to work out how to shoot a bad day.

And then, with absolute sincerity, he asked, “Do you want me to kill anyone?”

You stared at him.

He meant it.

Fuck. 

It was so shocking, so cathartic, that a sudden laugh burst out of you, half-strangled against his chest. You tried to stop it, but the look on his face only made it worse. He frowned slightly, earnest, still holding you like he would rather die than move wrong.

“I’m serious,” he said.

You laughed harder. “Dex.”

“What?”

“You can’t kill someone because I had a bad day.”

His brow furrowed. “Why not?”

“Oh my God.”

“If there’s a person responsible—”

“There isn’t.”

“There’s usually a person responsible.”

“There was Brad from HR.”

You blinked at him. “How do you know about Brad from HR?”

“You texted me about him once.”

“That was, like, six months ago.”

“I remember things.”

Despite yourself, you laughed again.

You buried your face against him again, laughing and crying at the same time until you could barely breathe. Dex still looked confused, but his arms settled securely around you. He understood this much, at least, when you pressed closer instead of pushing him away.

“I don’t need you to kill anyone,” you murmured once the laughter faded.

“Okay.”

“I just need you to hold me.”

His mouth pressed to your hair again. “That I can do,” he said.

And he did, held you until your breathing slowed, until the room stopped feeling like it was on fire. 

After a while, very quietly, he added, “I would, though.”

You huffed a tired laugh into his shirt. “I know, honey.”

His arms tightened carefully around you.

“Just checking,” he said.

And because it was him, because he meant it with his whole heart, because the day had been awful and you were safe now, you laughed one last tiny laugh into the dark.

Dex held you like that until you slept.

—end. 

buy me a ko-fi here!

Dex taglist part 1:

The circle was small, just ten people. Twelve if you counted the man asleep near the radiator and an elderly woman named Marie, who was knitting. The coffee was bad and the biscuits were stale. The walls were decorated with cheerful little posters about honesty and surrender and hope, which made you want to peel your skin off because honesty was hard, surrender sounded humiliating, and hope felt like a last resort people offered you when they had run out of practical advice.

Then the chair beside you scraped.

You looked over.

The man at the door had now approached you. 

Up close, he looked simultaneously worse and prettier, too, which was annoying. He looked tired, probably not attributed to a single bad night but to years stacked inside him. He had clear blue eyes and dark stubble. His left hand stayed in his pocket. His right hand still held the coffee like a prop.

“Seat taken?” he asked.

You blinked at the twenty empty chairs around the circle. “No,” you said.

He managed a smile before you sighed and moved your bag.

He sat down.

Neither of you really spoke for the rest of the sharing. A man named Dennis talked about hiding vodka in a mouthwash bottle. Marie talked about walking past the same liquor store six times and going home crying but sober. Someone laughed and another cried. The last person said they were ninety days clean and the room clapped.

You clapped too, but it was a second late.

The man beside you didn’t clap. He looked at his hand instead, like he had forgotten what applause was for.

When the meeting leader asked if anyone new wanted to introduce themselves, the room went quiet in that gentle, expectant way that made you want to crawl into the carpet.

You stared at your shoes.

The man beside you exhaled.

“I’m James,” he said.

Every head turned.

His voice was rough around the edges. He sounded like he was confessing a crime instead of a name.

“Hi, James,” the room said.

His jaw flexed. He hated that. You could tell immediately. 

He looked down at his coffee. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here.”

Nobody interrupted. Nobody corrected him.

His thumb rubbed once over the rim of the paper cup. “I can’t get drunk.”

Your eyes flicked to him.

He said it like a punchline without the mercy of being funny.

“I used to be able to, a long time ago.” His mouth tightened into a flat line. “Then things changed, and my body changed. And now alcohol doesn’t do anything,” he looked down, almost disappointed in how much he was disappointed by his own inability to get buzzed. “I can drink the bar dry and still feel every second of my life perfectly.”

You stopped breathing a little.

“It made me angry,” he admitted, quieter. “I was angry I couldn’t have that. I never cared about fun or the parties.” He gave a humourless laugh. “I wanted the off switch, and when it didn’t work, I hated myself. I hated that that has been taken from me.”

Something in your chest folded. Which one was he? Was your first shameful thought. In a world of superheroes and gods and aliens and people disappearing for five years and then coming back, you really didn’t have the time to memorise names of every Avenger by heart. 

His eyes stayed down.

“So, no. I don’t know if I count. I don’t know if this is taking up space from people who need it more. But I know I keep thinking about it, keep trying to find something that’ll do what it used to do. And I know that probably means I shouldn’t be alone with the thought.”

Then Marie, still knitting, said, “You count.”

James looked up.

The meeting leader nodded. “You’re welcome here.”

You felt a little sting behind your eyes.

Fuck, it shouldn’t have been that moving. It should not have mattered that much. He was a stranger in a church basement with untouched coffee and a voice like a bruise. But there was something so painfully familiar about wanting oblivion and being ashamed of wanting it, about standing at the edge of yourself and wishing there was a button, a bottle, a burn, anything that made being alive more bearable.

The meeting moved on, and you decided not to speak.

You were proud of not crying until the end, when everyone stood and started stacking chairs. People exchanged numbers while stirring powdered creamer into coffee. The world did not change. Nobody looked at you and said, we know what you are, or pointed at your throat and said, liar.

You grabbed your coat and made it halfway to the stairs before his voice found you.

“Hey.” James stood a few feet behind you, hands still in his pockets.

You considered pretending you hadn’t heard him. Maybe you could be rude. You considered leaving and buying the smallest bottle you could find and telling yourself it didn’t count because it was only small

Instead, you said, “What?”

His eyebrows lifted slightly.

You winced. “Sorry. That came out mean.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve heard meaner.”

For some reason, that made you almost smile.

He stepped closer, careful like you were a wounded animal that might bolt. “First meeting?”

You looked at the stairs. “Is it that obvious?”

“A little,” he said.

You huffed. “Great.”

“I’m new too.”

“I know,” you chuckled dryly, “you spoke.”

“Yeah.”

“I would rather be shot.”

He looked at you for one long second. Very dryly, he said, “It’s overrated.”

A startled laugh escaped you before you could stop it, and his gaze brightened so subtly you almost missed it.

You leaned against the stair rail, suddenly too tired to keep standing like a real person. “I’m not like you.”

James tilted his head.

Your fingers tightened around your coat. “It works on me.”

His face changed, eyes more attentive than just pity.  

You swallowed. “It works too well on me.”

You didn’t know why you said that, but you hated how small your voice got. You hated how much the truth could make you feel naked, and saying it out loud made your whole body ache for a drink with such vicious clarity that you had to grip the rail harder.

James didn’t look away.

You laughed once, but it broke wrong. “You wanted the off switch, I get that. But mine works fast. It works so well that I start thinking maybe I’m only good when I’m drinking. I think maybe the best version of me is the one that can’t feel anything. Or remember anything. Or ruin anything because I’m not really there.”

His teeth clenched, but he stayed quiet.

“And then I get sober,” you said, unable to stop baring your soul to this stranger. “And everything is worse.”

Your eyes burned. You looked down immediately, furious at yourself.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“Because I told you first,” he said.

Your throat tightened more.

He shifted his weight, and for the first time, you noticed the way he held his left side still, like he was always aware of the space his body took up. He looked like he had spent a long time making himself smaller for other people’s comfort and had never quite learned how to stop.

“I’m Bucky,” he said.

You blinked. “I thought you said James.”

“I did.”

“So you lied at AA?”

His mouth twitched again. “James is my name.”

“So Bucky is what?” You managed a chuckle, “A nickname?”

“To some people.”

“Do you like those people?”

He paused, before looking down, “I’m trying to.”

You looked at him properly, at the tired eyes, the gloved hand, the too-perfect posture. You could see grief sitting on him like a cloud. You didn't know him or his life, but you knew enough about wanting to be someone else. 

You gave him your name.

He repeated it once, like he was trying to get it right.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. Behind him, the meeting leader laughed with Marie near the coffee table as someone dragged a bin bag out of the kitchen. The basement smelled like burnt coffee, wet coats, old wood, and the possibility that maybe you could come back here. 

Maybe this terrible room could exist again next week. Maybe you could still exist next week

Bucky nodded toward the door. “You got somewhere to be?”

You almost lied, but you shook your head.

“Me neither,” he said. “There’s a diner around the corner. Coffee’s bad, but it’s not this bad.”

“You asking me out?” You tilted your head.

He just shrugged, as if duh. Why wouldn’t I want to ask out the pretty girl who’s also struggling with life, like me? “Yeah. I mostly like the pie.”

You narrowed your eyes. “What kind?”

“I don’t know. Pie kind.”

You managed a smile. “That is such a man answer.”

He looked vaguely offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

And there it was again, your accidental laugh. You could feel him noticing it, not in a smug way, but like he was relieved there was a sound in you that was not pain.

You should have said no and gone home.

You should have taken the bus and white-knuckled your way through the evening and called it a victory if you made it to bed without stopping at the shop on the corner.

But Bucky stood in front of you like a man who understood the shape of a craving, even if his body refused to let him drown in it. 

You were opposite tragedies meeting in the basement.

And you didn’t want to be alone.

Same terrible coffee.

So you pulled your coat on properly and said, “Fine. But if the pie is bad, I’m leaving you there.”

Bucky smiled and climbed up the stairs next to you, opening the door like a true gentleman, because apparently your standards were that low.

Cold evening air rushed in, and he said, “Fair.”

You stepped outside together.

For the first time all day, feeling sober didn’t feel like a punishment.

Bucky fell into step beside you, close enough to be there, far enough away to be respectful, and when your hands shook in your coat pockets, he pretended not to notice.

You loved him a little for that.

Not love-love. Just the strangest beginning of it.

—

A year later, you were sitting in the same basement where you met him.

The church still smelled faintly of old wood, overbrewed coffee, rain-damp coats, and whatever industrial cleaner someone used on the floor every Tuesday evening. The chairs were arranged in the same uneven circle as always, but there were more rows now. Nobody here had ever managed to make a circle properly, and maybe that was appropriate. Recovery was not exactly known for pretty geometry.

You sat three chairs away from the radiator now.

Now your coat was folded over your lap. Your coffee was cooling between your palms. Your breathing was almost steady.

The dog tags around your neck shifted when you leaned forward.

You saw them slip out from beneath your sweater, the familiar feeling of them falling against your chest, warm from your skin. They caught the basement light for a second, dull silver flashing against the knit you were wearing, and the man beside you noticed.

He was new, you could tell.

New people had a look to them. Sometimes it was fear or anger. This man was sitting with his shoulders held too high and his hands wrapped too tightly around his cup, staring at everything except the people in the room.

His eyes flicked to the tags.

“You serve?” he asked.

You looked down.

For one stupid second, your fingers closed over the metal before you could stop yourself. “No,” you said. “My boyfriend did.”

The man nodded, still looking at the chain. “Oh.”

“They’re his,” you added, tucking them back beneath your collar as if you had been caught showing a memory too intimate. “He gives them to me while he’s away at work.”

“At work?”

“Yeah.”

You managed to say it with a straight face, which was honestly heroic of you, considering Bucky’s “work” very rarely involved conferences or meeting rooms. His work included Captain America showing up at your apartment three days ago with that charming, apologetic smile that always meant, I’m very sorry, but I’m about to borrow your boyfriend for a classified and incredibly stupid mission.

You had rolled your eyes, and Sam did have the decency to bring him back in one piece

You looked down and added, “it’s for safekeeping.”

After all, that was what Bucky called it too.

He had stood in your kitchen two mornings ago with his duffel bag by the door and his boots not quite tied, looking too handsome for a man who was leaving you for a couple of days. His hair had still been damp from the shower, tucked behind one ear, darkening the collar of his shirt. He smelled like soap and coffee and the lavender shampoo you bought for yourself, which he continued to deny using even though you told him he could. He had been quiet all morning.

He washed his mug even though you told him to leave it. He checked the lock on the window he had already fixed months ago. Eventually, he found you by the counter when you were pretending to look for something in a drawer you had already opened twice. His hands came to your waist from behind, and he folded himself around you without a word. His chest pressed to your back, chin resting against your shoulder. For a minute, he simply held you there in the kitchen, reluctant to leave.

You covered his hands with yours.

“You’re doing the clingy thing,” you murmured, not at all complaining.

His mouth pressed to the side of your throat, not a kiss at first. Then he did kiss you, his stubble rubbing against your skin.

“Maybe I just like holding my girl before work,” he said.

“Work,” you repeated, dryly, “As if you’re dealing with team building exercises and doing trust falls with Captain America.”

“I would rather be shot.”

“Bucky.”

“What? I’ve been shot before.”

“You’re banned from making those jokes before nine in the morning.”

He hummed, amused, and turned you in his arms so your back was against the counter and he could look at you properly.

His thumbs slipped under the hem of your sweater, just enough to touch skin. The intimacy of it made your chest ache. You had lived with him, slept beside him, showered with him, kissed him breathless against this exact counter, and still there were moments where his hands on you felt new.

He bent his head and kissed you.

It was meant to be a goodbye kiss. It became sweeter, heavier. His body pressed yours into the counter, careful of his strength even when the kiss deepened and your hands found his hair. He made a sound when you tugged, more breath than voice.

“You’re going to be late,” you whispered against his mouth.

“Probably.”

“Very professional.”

“Never claimed to be.”

His metal hand stayed at your waist. His right hand came up to cradle your jaw, thumb brushing your cheek as if he could smooth the worry out of your face. He kissed you once more, lingering, then pressed his forehead to yours.

“I’ll call when I can,” he said.

“I know.”

“Marie has your number?”

“Yes.”

“Food in the fridge?”

“Yes.”

His eyes searched yours. “You’ll eat?”

“Bucky.”

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly at his worry. 

You wanted to tease him more, because that was easier than saying please don’t go. So your fingers tightened in the front of his shirt.

Bucky took the dog tags from beneath his own shirt and lifted the chain over his head. Your throat tightened before he even touched you. “Buck.”

His eyes softened at the name.

It still did that to him, even after a year.

Buck.

You had been saying it for a while now. At first by accident, then on purpose, then so often it became part of your life. You said Buck when you needed him to pass you a mug from the high shelf, a whiny Buck when he stole your side of the bed and pretended he hadn’t. You had gasped Buck when you woke up from a dream with your heart trying to claw its way out of your chest. 

The name had started in the diner, if you were honest.

That first night after AA, when he took you for pie because neither of you were ready to go home alone. Bucky had sat across from you with the menu in both hands, frowning at the pie section as though it was a tactical document.

You had not known yet whether you were allowed to joke with him. Whether he would flinch or he would shut down. 

“I remember it being less confusing than this,” he said. “There’s too many options now.”

It would take him three months to admit the last time he had pie there was 1944.

You lifted your eyebrows. “You’re panicking.”

“I’m assessing my options.”

“You’ve been looking at the word ‘cherry’ for almost a full minute.”

He had looked back down, gravely. “Maybe I like cherry.”

You squinted, then decided. “You don’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

You managed a smile.“I know everything.”

That was the first time he smiled at you properly, and it changed his whole face.

You remembered staring at him across that sticky table and thinking, oh, that is pretty.

Later, he walked you home in the rain.

He didn’t ask if he could or assume he should. He just stood beside you outside the diner, hands in his jacket pockets, and said, “I’m going this way.” and it just happened to be the same as where you were going.

So you let him walk you home.

A week later, he saved you a seat. A month later, he was going out for coffee with you every other day. Two months later, he fixed your broken window latch and stayed for dinner.

Four months later, he kissed you in a supermarket car park because you had called him crying from the frozen food aisle after the shop rearranged itself and put the wine where the pizzas used to be. He had come so quickly you were sure he must have run part of the way. He found you with your basket on the floor and your hands shaking, and he stood between you and the aisle like his body could block out the whole world.

You cried because you wanted a drink. Then you cried because he came. Then you cried because he looked at you like none of it made you difficult to love.

He kissed you after he got you outside, so gently, his hands hovering until you grabbed his jacket and pulled him closer, like he had been waiting months to be allowed to want you like this. 

After that, Bucky became yours all at once.

Your meetings became his meetings, and his nightmares became your 3 a.m. tea in the kitchen. Your cravings became walks around the block with his metal hand at the back of your neck. Your bad days became less lonely. 

There were mornings where you woke up with his face buried against your stomach, one arm heavy across your hips, his hair a disaster against your bare skin. There were evenings where he cooked badly and you ate it anyway because he looked so proud and because he kissed the back of your shoulder while you washed the dishes. There were nights where the two of you ended up tangled on the sofa with a film neither of you watched, his mouth moving slowly along your neck while your fingers slid under his shirt, both of you laughing between kisses.

It wasn’talways easy, but it was worth it.

So when he gave you the tags, standing in your kitchen with the mission waiting downstairs, it seemed like a little too much.

He slipped the chain over your head. The tags settled against your chest, cool for half a second before your skin warmed them.

“For safekeeping,” he said.

You tried to smile. “They’re metal, Buck. I think they’ll survive your l work trip.”

His thumb touched the chain. “It’s not about them surviving.”

You looked up at him.

His voice dropped. “It’s about me coming back for them.”

Oh.

Bucky kissed your forehead, then your mouth, then the corner of your mouth when you tried not to cry. He was so careful with you when he left, like one wrong touch would make both of you admit how much you hated this. He’d been gone for daytrips before, but four days seemed unbearable now.

“I’m proud of you,” he murmured.

Then he kissed you again, and for a few seconds you forgot the whole world beyond his mouth. His hands were firm at your waist, yours around his neck, the tags caught between you. He kissed you until you were breathless and clinging, until Sam honked downstairs and Bucky muttered something unflattering about him under his breath against your lips.

You laughed. He kissed the laugh out of your mouth.

Then he left.

At first, you were fine.

You made breakfast, answered messages, and washed the mug Bucky had already washed, only because it gave your hands something to do. You wore the tags beneath your sweater and touched them whenever you passed the mirror. You went to work and came home. Then ate leftovers standing in the kitchen.

The first night without him was always strange. Then the hours stretched.

The refrigerator hummed too loudly. The upstairs neighbour moved around too much. Your phone stayed blank for too long, and every time it lit up and it wasn't him, disappointment scraped through and you felt childish.

You watched half a film and absorbed none of it.

You opened the fridge, then closed it. Opened the cupboard, then closed it.

Checked your phone, no message.

The next day was the same.

By nine, you were bored. By nine-thirty, you were restless. By ten, your mind had started to tilt.

It was jarring how quickly it happened. No one warned you about it properly, or maybe they did and you had not believed them, but the craving arrived out of nowhere because you were bored. 

You were putting away a clean plate when you thought about the shop on the corner. Then you were gripping the counter so hard your fingers hurt.

You are alone. You are bored.

Nobody would know.

The tags felt too heavy. You pulled them out from beneath your sweater and held them in your hand, the chain slipping between your fingers. Bucky’s name was pressed into your palm, and you stared at it until the letters blurred.

“I’m fine,” you said out loud.

Your voice sounded odd in the empty kitchen.

You put the tags back under your sweater and changed into pyjamas. You brushed your teeth and got into bed. Five minutes later, you got out of bed. You checked your phone. You opened your messages with Bucky and looked at the last thing he sent before takeoff: Be good to yourself for me.

You threw the phone onto the bed.

Then, somehow, you were putting on shoes.

When you thought about it later, that felt frightening, how blank you were. It wasn’t exactly a blackout, because you remembered every moment, but there was a strange sequence to it, as if your body had become a machine built for one purpose: Shoes, coat, keys, stairs, and corner shop.

The bell above the door rang. You told yourself you were buying milk.

You did buy milk. In fact, you carried it to the counter with both hands like evidence of innocence, and then your eyes moved to the tiny bottles behind the register. 

You could leave. You should leave.

You heard yourself ask for one.

The man behind the counter reached back.

You almost said, nevermind. You didn’t.

The bottle was cold when he passed it to you, but it was small enough for your brain to start building arguments before you even reached the door.

It’s little. It’s one. It’s not like before. I have been good for a year. I can stop after this. I just want to know I can.

The walk home felt unreal as the milk knocked against your leg. 

At your door, your hands shook so badly you dropped your keys. you put the milk in the fridge and took the bottle out.

You placed it on the kitchen counter.

You stared at it.

Then you walked away. Then you came back. Then you picked it up. Then you put it down again.

Your whole body was hot and cold at once. Your thoughts were moving too quickly to hold. Bucky’s dog tags rested against your chest beneath your sweater, and you kept touching them, pressing them hard into your skin as if it could bring willpower.

“I won’t drink it,” you whispered.

Then you opened it.

Then you drank.

And alcohol worked on you with humiliating ease. It hit your empty stomach like warmth pretending to be mercy. For a few minutes, missing Bucky became manageable. You stood in your kitchen with the bottle empty in your hand and hated how much relief you felt

Then the relief curdled into horror. Your stomach dropped and skin prickled. The empty bottle looked terrifying in your hand, stupid and catastrophic. You sank to the kitchen floor.

The tiles were cold beneath your thighs. The dog tags swung forward when you bent over, clinking once against the empty bottle still in your fist.

You cried with your whole body, in ugly, breathless sobs that hurt your ribs and scraped your throat. 

You almost called him. You saw your hand reach for the phone.

Then you saw him in your mind, answering because he would always answer if he could. You imagined his face changing when he heard your voice, hearing the guilt he would somehow make his own, because Bucky had never met your pain he didn’t try to carry.

You couldn’t do it.

You rinsed the bottle instead. You stood at the sink with the water running and realised what you were doing and hated yourself so violently you had to grip the counter again.

Evidence.

You were rinsing evidence. You were going to get rid of it, as if this was something to hide from a parent or a teacher or a boyfriend.

You threw the bottle in the bin. Then you took it out. Then you put it back in. Then you sat on the floor until the kitchen light started to feel too bright.

You didn't sleep. Or if you did, it was full of waking.

By morning, your mouth tasted sour and your eyes were swollen.

By night, you were in the basement, a year later.

Marie was talking about her daughter’s wedding. She had her knitting in her lap, a pale yellow scarf growing slowly between her hands, and she was describing the open bar with a detail that made you want to crawl out of your own skin.

Usually, Marie made you feel safe. Tonight, she talked about champagne flutes, toasts, ginger ale, and smiling for the photos. 

The dog tags were hot against your chest.

You shifted in your chair.

The new man beside you was staring at his coffee again. The meeting leader nodded gently as Marie finished.

“Thank you, Marie.”

Everyone said thanks, and the leader looked around the circle.

“Anyone else?”

You stared at the floor. No.

Your heart began to pound so hard you felt it in your throat.

No, no, no.

Still, apparently your body was on autopilot now, because you opened your mouth before you were ready. “I’m—”

Your voice broke so bad that several heads turned at once.

You stopped as heat rushed into your face. You said your name.

The room answered, like it always did.

You could not look at anyone. You looked at your coffee instead, at the small tremors moving across the surface.

“My boyfriend and I met here,” you said, and the words came out thin.

You swallowed hard and tried again.

“My boyfriend and I met here. In this room.” Your thumb moved over the raised letters stamped into the tags beneath your sweater. 

Your breath hitched.

“He doesn’t know I drank last night because he’s away.”

The basement seemed to go still around you.

You let out a broken little laugh that was barely laughter at all. “I was just bored and spiralling and I…” You shook your head, tears spilling hot down your cheeks now, impossible to stop. “I got a little bottle.”

Your fingers curled around the tags.

“It was only a little.”

You knew better than anyone that it never was a little.

—

After the meeting, you cried into Marie’s shoulder in the church hallway until your throat hurt.

You wished you had done it in a dignified way when other people were trying to help you. You cried with your whole face pressed into her cardigan, both hands in the wool while she held the back of your head and kept murmuring, “Oh, sweetheart,” like you hadn’t done something unforgivable, as if you were not disgusting. As if you were just a person who had fallen and was still, somehow, worth helping back up.

She didn’t tell you it was fine.

She only walked you around the block twice in the cold, one arm linked through yours, talking gently about calling Bucky, about honesty, about how a slip didn’t get to eat the whole year unless you fed it the rest yourself.

By the time you got home, you were almost an hour late.

Your eyes were swollen and your face felt tight from drying tears. Bucky’s dog tags were still tucked under your sweater, pressing against your chest.

You opened the door, expecting darkness.

Instead, the kitchen light was on.

Bucky turned from the counter.

He was still in grey sweats, hair damp from a shower he had clearly taken too quickly. There was a smear of frosting on his thumb, and on the counter beside him sat a small, lopsided cake from the grocery store, with too much white icing and little piped flowers around the edge.

Across the top, in blue gel writing, slightly uneven and very obviously done by him, were the words:

ONE YEAR!

Your body went cold.

Was it supposed to be the one year anniversary today? You… hadn’t been counting. Your boyfriend, had, apparently

Bucky’s whole face lit up when he saw you.

“Mission got called short,” he said, so proud and so happy it hurt to look at him. “Happy one year sober, sweetheart.”

You stared at the cake.

The keys were still in your hand. Your coat was still on. You didn’t move, didn’t blink properly, didn’t breathe right.

Bucky kept smiling for a few seconds, but then his smile faltered. “Baby?”

You couldn’t answer as  blue icing blurred in front of you.

Three full minutes passed, maybe less, maybe more, you didn’t know. You only knew that you spent every second of them staring at that little cake like it had been made for someone who had died last night.

You didn’t even realise Bucky had been walking towards you. 

One moment, he was standing behind the little cake, his smile slowly disappearing as he watched you fail to answer him. The next, his hands were on you.

You flinched so hard the keys slipped from your fingers and hit the floor, but Bucky didn’t let go. His flesh hand closed gently around your upper arm while his metal one came to your face.

“Hey,” he said gently. “Hey, look at me.”

You couldn’t. You stared somewhere around his shoulder instead, hardly aware of his thumb brushing beneath your eye, wiping away a tear you hadn’t felt fall.

His eyes moved across your face with alarm. “Are you hurt?”

You shook your head.

“Did something happen today?”

You shook your head again

“Did someone touch you?”

“No,” you managed, but the word was barely there.

Bucky’s shoulders loosened by a bit, but the worry certainly didn't leave his face. His eyes dropped quickly over you anyway, ever so aware of blood, bruises, torn fabric, any danger. There was none.

Bucky looked over his shoulder at it, then back at you.

“Oh,” he said quietly. You didn’t know what he understood. Maybe he thought the anniversary had overwhelmed you, or maybe he thought you were crying because he had remembered, maybe he thought you were happy.

His hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck. He drew you closer, slow enough that you could have resisted, but you didn't understand what he was doing until your forehead struck his chest and his arms folded around you.

Bucky cradled you against him, metal hand across the back of your coat. His other arm wrapped around your head, his palm cupping your skull as he tucked your face beneath his chin.

You stood stiffly inside his embrace, hearing his heartbeat as your hands remained hanging uselessly at your sides.

Bucky rubbed his palm over your back. “It’s okay,” he murmured, kissing the top of your head. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

It wasn’t, and he had no idea.

You couldn’t seem to pull enough air into your lungs. Every breath caught halfway, and your body refused to complete it. Bucky must have felt the change because his grip tightened, holding you together while your knees began to feel like cooked spaghetti.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

Your fingers finally curled into the front of his shirt. You clutched him with both hands as if the floor had opened beneath you and he was the only thing left at the edge.

Bucky bent with you when you folded.

He lowered you both to the kitchen floor without ever taking his arms away, one knee touching the tile before he settled against the cabinets and pulled you fully into his lap.

A sound finally came out of you. “I-I’m sorry.”

Bucky startled, but only for a second.

You buried your face against his throat, the apology coming again before you could breathe. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Shh.”

“I’m sorry, Buck, I’m sorry—”

“Shh, sweetheart.”

He held the back of your head while you began to sob. There was no dignity left in it now. You cried so violently that your body jerked against his, words breaking apart between gasps while Bucky gathered you closer. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I ruined it.”

Bucky’s hand paused against your hair.

You felt the second he understood that this wasn’t an overwhelmed anniversary reaction. “What happened?” he asked.

You shook your head against him.

His lips pressed to your temple. “Tell me.”

“I can’t,” you hiccupped, “You’ll hate me.”

Bucky pulled back just enough to look at you. His hand remained behind your neck, supporting your head when you tried to turn away. The excitement was gone, but fear remained.

“I won’t,” he said.

“You don’t know.”

“I know I won’t hate you.”

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

You talked before you could think. “You were gone, and I—”

Your voice collapsed. Bucky waited, one arm around your waist, his thumb moving through the damp hair at your neck, while you tried to force the words past the pressure closing your throat.

“I drank.”

It came out abruptly. 

Bucky went still beneath you.

“Last night,” you gasped. “I bought one of the little bottles and I drank it. I drank the whole thing.” The confession tore itself out of you all at once. “I rinsed the bottle. I was going to hide it from you.”

Bucky’s face changed, but instead of disgust, it was recognition.

He knew how a craving could take over your body. He knew what it was to want an off switch badly enough to hate yourself for reaching for it.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

You recoiled inside his arms. “No, it’s really not.”

“It’s okay.” His hand tightened against the back of your head. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

“I ruined the whole year—”

“No.”

He didn't need the details explained to him. He understood every humiliating little ritual because addiction had taught him the same language, even if his body no longer let alcohol answer him.

“I wore your tags,” you choked out. “While I did it.”

Your hand flew to your chest, gripping the metal through your sweater hard enough for its edges to bite into your palm.

Bucky caught your wrist. “Don’t.”

“I shouldn’t have them.”

He gently pulled your hand away from your chest, but he didn’t take the tags. He only folded your fingers around them more carefully, covering your fist with his own.

“I didn’t keep anything safe,” you managed.

Bucky dragged you back against him before you could see more, tucking your face beneath his chin. His palm spread across your back as you broke open in his lap.

“It’s okay,” he repeated into your hair. “It’s okay.”

You shook your head violently, and he kissed your temple.

It’s not that what happened did not matter. It did. You both knew it did.

But he knew what you were convinced of: the certainty that one mistake had poisoned everything that came before it, insisting that because you had fallen once, you might as well stay on the floor.

Bucky knew better than to let that voice speak alone.

“You should be angry.”

His arms tightened, pressing his face against your hair and breathing through it.

“I should’ve called you.”

“Yeah,” he whispered, voice breaking. “You should’ve.”

You flinched.

Bucky immediately drew back enough to cradle your face between his hands. “But I know why you didn’t.”

His thumbs moved beneath your eyes, wiping away tears that were replaced almost immediately.

He knew what shame did, and how it convinced you isolation felt like mercy.

“I thought you’d hate me.”

He shook his head. “Never.”

It was the only reassurance he gave you because it was the only one you could believe.

Bucky pulled you against him again and let you cry until there was nothing graceful left in your chest. He held you through every shaking breath, his mouth pressed to your hair, murmuring the same words whenever your apologies started again.

It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you.

Eventually, the strength went out of your body. You sagged against him, exhausted, your fingers still trapped around the dog tags between your palm and his.

Bucky stayed on the kitchen floor with you until your breathing slowed.

Then he carefully shifted you from his lap and stood, bringing you with him. Your knees nearly folded, but his hands were already at your waist, holding you upright before you could fall.

“Go shower,” he said.

You frowned. “What?”

“Go take a shower,” he repeated kindly. “Put on something comfortable. I’ll make tea.”

You stared at him when his hand slid around the back of your neck, drawing you forward until his forehead rested against yours.

“I’m gonna be here when you come back,” he said.

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to leave?”

“No.”

“You’re not going to throw the cake away?”

His eyes flicked toward it.

“No,” he said after a moment. You nodded, though you didn’t entirely believe him.

Bucky kissed your forehead and let you go.

—

The shower took longer than it should have. You stood beneath the water until it ran lukewarm, scrubbing the dried tears from your face, replaying the conversation again and again until it turned into comfort.

When you eventually returned to the kitchen, wearing Bucky’s shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, two mugs of tea sat on the table.

Bucky was standing over the cake with a butter knife in his hand and an expression of intense concentration usually reserved for dismantling weapons.

You stopped in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

He glanced at you, then back at the cake.

The blue icing was a mess.

Bucky had scraped away most of the word YEAR. There were deep trenches in the white frosting where he had smushed the letters together, dragging the gel across the surface with very little artistic skill.

ONE YEAR! had become:

ONE DAY!

The exclamation point was still there, slightly crooked.

You stared at it.

Bucky put down the knife.

“I figured we celebrate this instead,” he said.

Your throat closed. “One day?”

He shrugged, suddenly looking uncertain. “That’s what they say, right?”

One day at a time.

But there were so many fucking days.

But there was only this one now.

You managed to walk yourself to the kitchen and threw yourself into his arms.

Bucky caught you, his arms closing around your body. You buried your face against his chest while he kissed the top of your head.

“I’m still proud of you,” he whispered.

You shook your head.

His hand moved down your back. “That’s okay,” he murmured. “I’ve got enough for both of us.”

Later, he cut two uneven slices.

The cake was too sweet, the tea had gone cold, and the blue icing stained your tongues. Bucky sat beside you, his thigh pressed against yours and his metal hand resting open on the table.

When midnight passed, his fingers closed gently around yours.

One day.

You had made it through one day.

—end. 

General Bucky taglist pt 1:

The man waited outside.

Your stomach sank.

You pulled out your phone and called Dex. It rang once before going to voicemail, which meant he was either working or already packing his things and moving towards you. You left the line open anyway, slipping your phone into your coat pocket as you stepped back onto the pavement.

“I’m on Stanton,” you said, quiet as you could, knowing the microphone would catch it. “I’m going on the safe route, and there’s a man following me.”

You headed towards the twenty-four-hour diner two streets away. At least there were lights, cameras, and most importantly, people there.

You almost reached it, but the man caught you when you passed the narrow service road behind an apartment building. One moment his footsteps were behind you; the next, his hand gripped around the back of your coat and dragged you hard enough that the thicker collar choked into your throat.

Your keys fell from your fingers, and all you could manage was a pathetic little scream before he could cover your mouth.

His palm immediately struck your lips and teeth, crushing the sound back into your skull as he hauled you into the darkness of some random New York alley. Your heel scraped uselessly across the pavement as you bit down until you tasted blood that wasn’t yours. It worked! He swore, jerking his hand away.

Immediately, you drove your elbow backwards.

Dex had shown you where to aim for, and you were trying to retrieve it from the rolodex of information in your mind, not quite the ribs, but lower in the soft tissue. 

The man grunted, but he didn’t let go. His arm locked around your throat instead, squeezing until firework-white sparks burst across your vision.

“You stupid fucking—”

You stamped on his foot before he could finish his sentence and threw your weight forwards, turning beneath his arm, exactly as Dex had taught you.

Eventually, his hold broke.

You stumbled free and ran, but the man recovered faster than you initially expected. His hand found its way and tangled his fingers in your hair, snapping your head backwards so violently that your neck burned.

He slammed you face-first against the brick wall.

Oh. Fuck. 

A burst of pain exploded through your cheek, teeth unintentionally biting into the inside of your mouth. Warm, fresh blood flooded on your tongue, thick and metallic, while his body pinned you against the wall.

The panic bells ringing in your head turned everything white-hot. “S-stop!”

He didn’t.

No. No. You were better than this.

You reached behind blindly, clawing for his eyes, his throat, anything you could find. Your nails found skin, raking down as he cursed and drove you against the brick again.

Maybe your nose broke, you couldn’t really tell.

His hand slid beneath your coat, and that’s when your vision went red. Rage flared hot inside you, burning through every thought in your head. You threw your skull backwards and felt his cartilage collapse beneath it.

His grip loosened, howling in pain.

You spun and shoved him with both hands.

He stumbled off the curb at the edge of the service road. His ankle twisted beneath him, and he went down hard. The man managed to catch himself on one palm before his shoulder struck the pavement.

You could have run.

The diner was less than a hundred yards away. You could see its red sign glowing at the end of the road, bright as a fresh exit wound.

That was when the man looked up at you.

A sick, satisfied feeling churned in your stomach as red poured from his nose and over his mouth.

And… he was smiling.

Oh. 

He still believed he was going to win.

He pushed himself onto one knee. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Your hand found the loose brick beside the wall, and it was heavier than you expected. Its edges bit into your palm as you lifted it with both hands.

When the man saw it, his smile vanished in an instant.

You brought the brick down across his temple.

The sound that came off it was shockingly small. It sounded like a damp knock, followed by the scrape of his body collapsing onto the road.

He rolled onto his back, blinking rapidly. One side of his face had already begun to swell around the ripped skin as a blotch of blood ran into his ear and disappeared beneath his head.

You stood over him, panting.

He was still conscious. “Wait.”

You could’ve stopped. You could’ve shown mercy. 

Instead, you struck him again.

This time, the brick split the skin above his eyebrow. Blood sprayed across your coat and speckled your face in warm droplets.

He raised one arm to protect himself.

Huh. Cute. 

You hit that too.

His arm gave beneath the brick with a muffled crunch. His forearm bent where it shouldn’t have been bent, and he screamed, the sound travelling through the empty service road.

You dropped the brick.

For half a second, the sight of his ruined arm nearly pulled you back into your logical self.

Then, his good hand closed around your ankle.

You shrieked and kicked him in the face. Your heel connected with his mouth as teeth snapped together. One of them even skipped across the pavement and vanished beneath a parked car.

He released you, but you fell on top of him.

Your knees struck the ground on either side of his hips, and your hands seized the front of his jacket. His blood made the material slippery beneath your fingers.

Before you could think any better of it, you dragged his head upwards, then slammed it against the curb.

The back of his skull struck concrete with a thick, hollow crack.

His eyes rolled, and it horrified you how much you liked it, seeing the man who wanted to touch you fucking bleed out. 

So you did it again.

Blood spread beneath his hair.

Again.

The hard crack now sounded wetter as the skin split and bone began to cave in. His body jerked beneath you, heels scraping against the pavement, but there was no strength left in it.

He made a noise through his broken mouth. You didn’t know whether it was a plea or merely air left escaping.

“You followed me!” you sobbed. “You fucking touched me!”

You brought his head down again.

The edge of the curb disappeared beneath blood. It ran between your fingers, coating your palms each time you pulled him upwards.

“I did everything right.”

Again.

“I—”

Again.

“Have—”

Again.

“A—”

Again.

“Fucking—”

Again.

“Boyfriend—”

Again.

“You—”

Again.

“Asshole—”

Again.

“He’ll fucking kill you!”

The last word broke somewhere in your throat, ragged. You were crying now, maybe. You couldn’t really tell. Your face was wet, your hands were red, and the whole world had shrunk down to the most-likely-dead man in your grip and the curb beneath him and the memory of his hand on you where it never should have been.

The back of his skull was now the shape of the concrete underneath.

You felt the structure collapse beneath your hands where there should have been resistance. It didn’t feel dramatic or righteous. All you could think was how it felt gooey in the wrong places. 

You pulled him up again anyway.

“I told you,” you sobbed, or screamed, or whispered. You couldn’t tell anymore. “I told you to stop.”

But his eyes were open and empty, staring past you at nothing, and when you tried to lift him one more time, your hands slipped in all the blood and he dropped back against the curb with a sound that made your stomach sink

That was when the anger went out.

All at once, as if someone had blown out a candle inside your chest.

You stared down at your hands and the red beneath your nails. You saw a dark smear across your wrist where he had grabbed you. “I did everything right,” you said again, smaller this time.

His face had lost all expression. Blood bubbled faintly at his lips before spilling down his cheek.

He was dead.

You knew he was dead.

You screamed as you struck him again, though you no longer knew whether you were furious or terrified.

You remembered Dex telling you never to stop until you were safe.

Make sure they cannot get back up. 

You had done everything he told you to do.

The man’s head struck the concrete one final time and didn’t bounce.

You released him.

His ruined skull settled crookedly against the ground. The road beneath him shone black-red beneath the distant streetlights, and blood soaked through your tights at the knees and dripped from your hands in heavy threads.

The dead man’s head no longer looked human.

Your stomach heaved.

You tried to stand, but your legs folded beneath you. The world tilted violently, the brick walls stretching upwards as though the road had dropped away beneath your body.

Footsteps thundered behind you, but you couldn’t turn around.

Your vision narrowed until the alley became a tunnel.

Then a hand touched your face, but this time, the touch was gentle.

His thumb swept carefully beneath your eye, avoiding the swelling along your cheekbone, as an arm curved around your waist before you could collapse fully onto the body.

“There you are,” Dex whispered.

His voice sounded distant beneath the rushing in your ears.

You tried to tell him what you had done, but your lips would not let you.

Dex’s palm cradled the back of your head, carefully nudging your nose back into place. He pulled you into him, turning your face away from the ruin on the pavement.

“My smart girl,” he murmured, stroking your hair with bloodless fingers. “You remembered everything.”

The praise sank through your heart as he felt his lips press against your temple.

“You saved yourself.”

Eventually, dazed and overwhelmed by the adrenaline crash, your eyes closed.

The last thing you felt was Dex’s thumb moving across your cheek, wiping away a tear.

—

Dex knew you.

He knew you were nothing like him.

That much had been obvious almost from the beginning, though he hadn’t understood it properly. Dex’s first instinct had always been violence. Whenever a problem appeared, his mind found that the bloodiest way was often the fastest way to solve it. Even inconveniences made his skin crawl, from a jammed drawer, a car alarm that would not stop, to a man looking at you for half a second too long across a restaurant. 

You were different.

You were gentle in ways Dex had once found impractical.  

You apologised to furniture when you bumped into it. You cupped moths in your hands and carried them outside. You left sugar water out for bees in summer and lowered your voice around frightened dogs. You once stopped walking entirely because there was a snail on the pavement after rain, and you refused to let anyone step on it until Dex moved it safely into the grass with a leaf.

He had stood there watching you then, half-annoyed, half-fascinated.

“It’s just a snail,” he had said.

You had looked up at him like he had spouted bullshit from his mouth. “It’s alive.”

From then on, he realized alive mattered to you.

Even small alive. Even when it was inconvenient .

Dex hadn’t been raised with that as a natural instinct. As a boy, he had thrown stones at birds because he found that he liked the little burst of movement. He hadn’t thought of it as cruelty then. It was just aim, maybe boredom. 

Then you bought a bird feeder for your apartment.

You hung it outside the kitchen window with such bright delight that Dex hadn’t even known what to say. You filled it every morning, scattering seed with your bed hair falling over your face, then stood there with your coffee while sparrows and blue tits flickered down. You loved them. You loved their stupid little hopping, their bright feathers.

You loved listening to birdsong most of all.

You whistled back sometimes without realising it while you watered plants or folded laundry. At night, when you were deep enough asleep that your body forgot to be self-conscious, you made the same small breathy sounds in your dreams, sweet enough that Dex would lie awake beside you and listen as he calmed down.

So instead of throwing rocks at it like he used to, he learned how to imitate their songs.

At first, only because you smiled when he whistled them. Then, he did it because you looked at him like he had performed a miracle when a robin landed on the feeder while Dex stood still by the window, unknowingly calling them closer.

Without realising, he had learned to mimic their distinctive calls.

He even stopped exterminating annoying bugs because of you. 

You were afraid of spiders, yes, but when one of them showed up in the nightstand and you screamed, hiding behind him like a shield, you would make this horrified and pleading sound because he reached for a shoe instead of a cup. To you, being afraid of the little thing didn’t mean it deserved to die. 

“Dex, no. Outside. Alive.”

So for you, he learned to trap spiders beneath glasses and slide envelopes carefully underneath them. He learned to carry them to the windowsill instead of crushing them. 

Eventually, he learned not to flick beetles off the balcony, because you worried about whether the fall would hurt them. He learned to scoop flies out of half-open windows with hands while you hovered behind him whispering, “Careful, careful,” like he was defusing a bomb.

He learned to pretend he cared whether tiny, ugly things lived.

Eventually, he cared because you cared, and caring about what you cared about was the closest thing to general empathy Dex had ever understood.

And that was why Dex knew that you could not wake up knowing what you had done.

Because you had not even wanted him to kill spiders.

How the hell were you supposed to survive knowing you had killed a man?

Dex had known that the moment you went limp in his arms, your bloodied hands curled weakly against his shirt, your body giving up its adrenaline high only after it was finally safe to stop fighting. You had passed out before he could praise you properly, even before he could look you in the eye and tell you that you had done exactly what he taught you to do.

You had saved yourself.

Dex was proud of you in a way he knew he couldn’t show when you woke up.

Especially not with the body in the trunk of his car and your clothes stuffed into a sealed black bag hidden in the closet. His own clothes in there too, soaked with blood where he had held you, smeared bleach where he had poured it over the concrete. 

He would deal with it later, when you were properly asleep, because the body could wait and you could not.

So Dex got you, half-passed out and half mumbling nonsense, home. Perhaps it was simply your mind coping on a traumatic memory.

He stripped you carefully, cutting fabric where it stuck, easing sleeves down your arms, peeling everything off your skin piece by piece until there was nothing left between you and him. His clothes came off too, though nothing was ever sexual about that, but because his soaked shirt was evidence, too. 

He washed you in the shower while you leaned against him, barely conscious, your forehead pressed to his shoulder, your knees buckling every time the warm water hit another bruise. He did this all while murmuring sweet nonsense into your ear, words he knew your body understood even when your mind was tuned out. “You did so good, baby. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

He washed you until water at your feet ran pink, then red, then thin and clear.

Your hands took the longest as he held each finger between his own, washing beneath the nails, over the knuckles, around the raw places where the brick and pavement had scraped you open. You whimpered once, so quietly he almost missed it, and he kissed your wet temple before continuing.

He had to make them clean because you would look at your hands first.

When it was done, he carried you to bed and lay down naked beside you, pulling you onto his chest before the cold could bite.

The skin to skin was its own kind of intimacy, no barrier, but his body around yours.

By 2 a.m., he had not slept. He had tried, once or twice, mostly for the performance, because if you woke up and found him sitting upright in the dark watching you breathe, you would know something was wrong. 

So he lay with you until dawn, and every time your breathing hitched, Dex tightened his hold. Every time you made a frightened sound, he kissed your head and whispered until you settled. He kept one eye on the bedroom door, one ear tuned to the street.

But mostly he watched you.

You looked smaller when you slept after fear, lashes clumping from old tears. Your mouth was swollen and a bruise was blooming along your cheekbone where the man had slammed you against brick, and Dex had to look away from it more than once because all he felt was red-hot rage. 

But it wasn’t like he could do anything. The man was already dead.

You woke up sometime around 3 a.m.

Dex felt it when you choked on a breath, curled against him, cheek on his chest, one leg tangled with his. Your fingers twitched against his ribs, and he knew some part of you had surfaced too quickly.

Your eyes opened.

Almost immediately, panic tore through you.

You jerked upright so fast the sheet slipped from your chest. 

Your hands flew up in front of your face, fingers spread, as though blood might still be dripping from them. They were clean, but you stared anyway. 

You turned them over, looking at your palms, backs, nails, and wrist.

You seemed shocked to find them… clean. 

Dex sat up behind you. “Baby.”

You flinched at his voice, and that knee-jerk reaction hurt more than he expected.

You twisted towards him, naked and shaking, eyes wide with a terror that had no full memory attached to it yet. 

Dex could see your mind reaching and clawing through fog, finding only flashes of memories. Maybe you remembered a streetlight, maybe a hand on your throat. 

Your lips parted, but no sound came out.

Dex reached for you.

You scrambled back half an inch, and he frowned immediately. 

He tried to make himself look harmless, like there was nothing hidden near the closet, nothing dead cooling in the back of his car.

“There you are,” he murmured.

Your face fell, but the sob didn’t come out. It got trapped in your chest, making your whole body shake. You looked down at yourself then, at your bare skin, at his bare skin, at the tangled sheets, and your confusion quickly became fear. 

Dex moved carefully, scooting closer until his thigh touched yours.

“You were cold,” he said, pulling the duvet back up around you before you could ask. “ I had to get you warm.”

Your eyes darted around the room.

The bedroom looked normal. That made it worse. 

There was no proof of anything, no blood, no alley, no proof of anything but your body remembering what your mind could not grasp.

Dex placed one hand over your knee.

You stared at it.

He expected you to pull away, but instead your breath hitched and your whole body tilted towards him, helplessly, like a compass finding north. He gathered you before you could think better of it.

You collapsed into his lap.

Dex wrapped both arms around you and pulled you against his bare chest again, tucking your face beneath his chin. You were shaking so hard it passed into him. You pressed your hands flat to his shoulders, then curled, then opened again, like you could not stand the idea of grasping flesh too tightly.

“There,” he whispered. “That’s it. Come here, baby.”

Your breath hitched against his throat, and he felt the first wet tear hit his skin.

Then you were crying without sound, which was worse than sobbing. Violent tears shook you from the inside while your body stayed stiff with shock.

Dex rocked you slowly, enough to give your panic a rhythm to follow.

“You’re home,” he murmured into your hair. “You’re with me. No one’s gonna touch you.”

Your fingers dug into him. “I—I…,” you whispered, not quite coming out with words yet

Dex closed his eyes for half a second. “It’s okay, baby.”

Your eyes darted in a panic. “I don’t know what happened.”

He tried shushing you. “You don’t have to know all of it right now.”

“I-I don’t know, Dex.”

“I know, baby. I know.”

Your breathing grew shallow, almost choking. You tried to pull back and look at your hands again, but Dex caught them between your bodies, folding them against his chest where you could feel his heartbeat beneath your palms.

Focus there.

You did.

“I-I remember him,” you managed to say.

Dex stroked the back of your head. “Okay.”

“I remember walking. I took the right way.”

“You did.”

“I did what you said.”

“You did everything right.”

The sentence seemed to be a trigger, ripping a sob out of you.

Dex held you tighter.

“I-I did everything right,” you repeated, smaller now. “I promise.”

“I know.”

“I went inside. I waited. I called you.”

“You were so smart.”

Your face pressed harder into his neck.

“So smart,” he whispered again. “My girl, you did so well.”

You shook your head, frantic, because praise did not fit beside the images cutting through you. 

You didn’t remember much, but you saw flashes of blood and concrete behind your eyelids. 

Your breathing stopped.

His hand slid up the back of your neck and held you close. “No,” he murmured, soft as velvet. “Stay with me.”

“I saw—”

“You saw too much.”

“I… did something.”

“You protected yourself.”

“No, I—”

“You protected yourself,” he repeated, more insistent this time. 

Your fingers twisted against his chest.

Dex let his voice warm up, like honey in warm water. “You were scared and hurt and you did what you had to do.”

He felt you take the information in, but your panic continued circling it like vultures on corpses.

Dex kissed the top of your head, then your temple, then the bruised corner of your brow. “You’re okay,” he breathed. “I promise.”

You made a wounded noise, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

The kindness was not accidental, it was architecture. He was building a room inside your memory, where the bloodier parts could be locked outside until you forgot where you held the key.

“Where is he?”

Oh. So you vaguely knew there was a he now. 

“He’s in the hospital.” He lied easily. 

Dex knew this was how it would happen. One lie was enough to sound like mercy, and you would hold on to it because you trusted him more than you trusted your own shattered memory. He was making you need his version of the truth because he truly believed it was the only one that would save you.

You froze in his arms, and Dex held you through it.

“The hospital?” you whispered.

“Mm.”

Your hands clutched him harder. “He looked...”

“I know what it looked like.”

You pulled back just enough to see his face.

Dex hated it, and not because he couldn’t lie to your face. He could, he had, and would again if it meant it would preserve and protect your sense of self. Instead, he hated it because you looked so desperate for him to make the world kinder than really it was, and he loved you so much it nearly made him crueler.

He cupped your cheeks.

“Head wounds bleed badly,” he said. “You know that, sweetheart.”

Your eyes blazed into his, and he knew he made a mistake then. You didn’t remember that part.

“H-head wounds?” You breathed out in disbelief, unable to claw the memory now. 

“He was breathing when I got there,” Dex lied again.

A strangled sob left you, but it didn’t sound like relief yet. For now, it was only the body realising it had been offered a way out.

“Head wounds a-are dangerous.”

“I know.”

You hiccuped. “I thought— I remember—”

“Pieces,” Dex murmured. “You remember pieces.”

“But I saw blood.”

“There was blood.”

“On me?”

“Yes.”

Your face fell, Dex pulling you back in before the horror could.

“That’s why I cleaned you up,” he whispered, and that part, at least, was not a lie. His thumb moved slowly along your cheek, careful in a way Dex was rarely careful with anything that wasn’t you. “That’s why we ended up like this. You were shaking so hard, and I couldn’t get you warm. I tried. I swear I tried.”

His mouth brushed your temple, barely a kiss.

“I kept trying to move,” he murmured. “I kept thinking I should get you a shirt, but every time I pulled away, you reached for me again like you thought I was leaving, and I couldn’t—” His voice snagged, just slightly. “I couldn’t make myself do it. Not when you looked at me like that.”

You stared at him, still heavy-limbed, your thoughts coming back to you in pieces. It sounded embarrassingly believable, because there was a warmth in your chest that remembered him. Your hands had always found him before the rest of you caught up.

“I did?” you asked quietly.

“Yes.”

Your eyes narrowed, weakly suspicious. “You’re lying.”

Dex leaned down and kissed your forehead, lingering there like the answer mattered more than the accusation. 

“About you needing me?” His voice dropped. “Never.”

You cried harder then, finally making messy little sobs that broke against his chest while Dex rocked you, He ran his hands up and down your back, whispering into your hair. He called you precious until the word stopped sounding like a word at all. 

You shook your head.

Dex closed his eyes and held you tighter.

“You’re my girl,” he whispered. “Nothing about you changed.”

His gaze drifted once, towards the closet.

The black bag waited.

Behind the wall, beyond the apartment, beneath the ordinary morning, the dead man waited too. 

Later, he would get rid of the body. Later, he would burn what needed burning. For now, you were shaking in his lap, believing him because you needed to.

“Dex,” you whispered.

“I’m here.”

“You promise?”

He knew what you were asking.

You promise I didn’t? You promise I’m still me? You promise whatever I don’t remember isn’t real?

Dex pressed his lips to your temple and held them there. “I promise you’re safe.”

It was not the answer you wanted, but it was the one he gave.

You sagged against him after that, emptied by tears, your body surrendering. Dex eased both of you down until he was lying on his back and you were draped over him, skin to skin beneath the sheet. Your cheek rested over his heart, hand curled weakly near his ribs.

He kept touching your scalp, your spine, and the back of your neck in gently repetitive strokes until your breathing evened out. 

Eventually, sleep took you again. Poor girl, still so tired after murdering an evil man. 

Every few minutes, you twitched. Every time, Dex whispered you back down.

My precious girl, he would praise. You did so well.

At last, your body grew heavy over his, your fingers stopped moving. Your mouth grew pliant against his chest.

Dex waited for five minutes, then ten, then twenty.

Only when he was certain you were properly asleep did he turn his head towards the closet again.

He had things that needed doing.

But you stirred faintly against him before he could move, and Dex froze. Your brow pinched, your hand tightening on his skin, some nightmare threatening to pull you under.

He settled back immediately.

Not yet.

The dead could wait a little longer.

Dex brushed his mouth over your hair and smiled.“My sweet girl,” he whispered.

His hand covered yours, pressing your clean palm flat over his heart.

“You did everything right.”

He adored you for last night, even if he could never let you know exactly what you had done.

He adored the shaking, furious thing you had become when there had been no one left to save you. He adored the fact that some part of you had remembered him, remembered every warning, every lesson, every instruction, just in case. 

He adored that you had survived. More than that, in some terrible private corner of himself, he adored that you had survived violently.

He adored that for a split second, you had become him. 

But he knew you best, and he knew you weren’t made for that. 

So he would take that truth to the grave, and you would wake up tomorrow with the love of your life beside you.

You would wake up believing you had done only enough to live.

And Dex loved you enough to make that true.

—end.

NOTE : I genuinely love seeing all your requests in my asks, but I do get a lot and I physically can’t write every single one. I usually write the ones that catch my eye, and it’s probably every 1 in 5. 

That’s why I have Ko-fi! If you request there, it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll write it within a month of responding as a token of appreciation (keep this post in mind for July and August 2026). If I’m uncomfortable with the request or don’t think I can do it justice, I’ll let you know and we can brainstorm something else.

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Dex taglist part 1: