Pain, Without Love - Benjamin 'Dex' Poindexter 'Bullseye' x Male Reader
Summary: He needed you to be afraid. If you were afraid, the world made sense. If you were afraid, he was just Benjamin Poindexter, Bullseye. But if you weren't...then he had to face the possibility that he was still a man. And that was a far more terrifying thought.
CW: No use of Y/N - Angst - Hard To Love trope - Hurt/Comfort - Mentions of injury - Breif mention of blood - Mentions of childhood abuse - Strangers to ? - Not explicitly romantic - Older reader (30s) - Softer reader
Words: 3.3k
A/N: I did give a really good mutual of mine a look at the first half of this, because they actually are a big reason I'm writing for Dex and their feedback was very helpful and motivational. I really think he fits the "hard to love" trope pretty well, especially when given his loose origins and Wilson's portrayal of Dex. All in all I had a good time writing this, teared up a little bit but it was totally worth the finished and edited version. Last thing, if you understand the title reference smooches all around.
FEMALES DNI
Benjamin Poindexter was an equation that had never quite balanced. He was a collection of sharp edges and cold precision, a man who had never been likable, let alone lovable. To truly know Dex was to look into a mirror and see only the cracks. Perhaps the fault lived in his marrow, inherited from a mother whose touch was a strike and a father whose presence was a threat. He had spent his childhood learning the geography of his own pain—calculating the velocity of a swinging belt, the trajectory of a glass bottle, the weight of a silence that promised a storm.
He had become a master of the bruise. He’d gotten so used to the heat of a blooming welt and the dull throb of a cracked rib that he had eventually mistaken the agony for a form of intimacy.
Was I born this hard to love? The thought was a jagged glass shard in his mind. Was I so fundamentally broken that people had to use violence just to make me feel something?
He could still see his mother’s face—not soft with maternal warmth, but tightened with a disgust that made his chest ache. He remembered his father, the smell of cheap whiskey clinging to him like a shroud, raising that half-empty bottle. Benjamin had learned to go numb. He had turned himself into a stone, cold and unmoving, because stones don't cry when they’re kicked. Not by his mom. Not by his dad. Only Nate—dead, distant Nate—had ever held a piece of his heart that wasn't scarred over.
Violence was the only intimacy Dex understood. If you weren't hurting him, you weren't really there.
The sun had long since abandoned Hell’s Kitchen, leaving the skyline to rot in a bruised purple twilight. As the shadows stretched over the grime of the city, it felt as though the world had finally balanced its books, demanding payment in blood. Dex lay there, the cold pavement leaching the last of his warmth, yet he could still feel the phantom sensation of the bullet—a white-hot needle stitching him to the earth. Pain was his only honest lover. It was the only thing that had never lied to him, never left him, and never demanded he be good to earn it. It was a constant, a fixed point in a chaotic world.
He expected the end to be a quiet calculation. He expected to draw his final, rattling breaths and see Nate waiting for him in the static—Nate, with a hand outstretched to take him somewhere where the lines were straight and the pain couldn’t find a purchase.
Instead, the void tasted of lavender.
The transition was jarring. The sharp scent of ozone and city trash was replaced by something cloying and floral, and the biting wind was traded for the gentle, rhythmic press of cold hands against his feverish skin. He tried to flinch, his muscles coiling like rusted springs, but the surface beneath him was foreign. It wasn't the sterile, lonely precision of his apartment’s mattress. It was soft, plush, and smelled of old laundry detergent and life—worn and lived-in, comforting in a way that made his throat ache with a sudden, violent thirst.
Then came the voice. It wasn't a bark or a command; it was soft, leveled, and careful. It was the kind of voice one used for a wounded animal or a ticking clock—as if speaking too loudly might cause him to shatter into a thousand unfixable pieces.
As his vision swam, your face came into focus. You were a blur of soft edges, your expression tightened with a worried intensity that Dex didn't know how to process. He wanted to look away; the kindness in your eyes felt like a physical weight, an intrusion. He could almost mistake you for his mother, but the memory of her was a sharp blade, and your touch was something else entirely. You moved with a deliberate, quiet rhythm, your hands approaching him slowly, telegraphing every move as if you understood the electricity humming under his skin—the way he was constantly braced for a blow that hadn't come yet.
With a gentleness that felt like a mockery of his own hardness, you propped his head up on plush pillows. Dex watched through hooded, glassy eyes as you began to strip him of his gear. You handled the suit—the armor he used to hide his humanity—with such strange reverence, setting it onto an old wooden coffee table as if it were made of glass.
When the soft weight of a blanket settled against his bare legs, Dex felt a sob catch in his bruised ribs, trapped behind a wall of stone. You turned him onto his side, your movements methodical and sure, and he heard the hitch in your breath that mirrored the frantic beating of his own heart. You weren't afraid of the monster; you were afraid for the man.
Was I born this hard to love? The thought was a jagged shard of glass, twisting in his mind. Was I so fundamentally broken that I had to be gutted, bleeding and hollowed out, before someone would touch me without a weapon in their hand?
You could feel the way he tracked you, his fingers twitching at his side with every movement you made. He looked at you like you were a puzzle he couldn't solve, his body reacting to your care as if it were a new kind of agony. Through and through, the bullet had gone—a clean enough hole in the flesh. But as you looked down at the man who had turned himself into a weapon just to survive, you wondered how you were supposed to fix a soul that had been taught that love was just another word for impact.
Why?
The word was a jagged stone caught in his throat, sharp enough to draw blood. Why? Why were you treating him like he mattered? Why were you so calm, your hands steady on a mutt that had spent its entire life bared-teeth and ready to snap? Why save a thing that was designed only to break other things?
He wanted to scream it, to demand a reason for this unearned grace, but his lungs felt like they were filled with wet sand. All that surfaced was a choked, broken sob. The sound was pathetic to his own ears—a wet, heaving noise that signaled the final collapse of his defenses. Tears finally broke, hot and stinging, carving clean tracks through the dried blood and gunpowder caked on his cheeks.
You didn't flinch at his grief. You didn't look away in embarrassment or disgust. Instead, you leaned into his space, your eyes searching his with an intensity he’d never had the privilege of seeing. There was no fear there, no calculation—only a deep, quiet recognition.
Your hand reached up, your fingertips barely grazing the scar on his cheek. The contact was so light it was almost a ghost of a touch, yet against his feverish skin, it felt like a brand. Dex’s breath hitched, his eyes wide and roaming your face, memorizing the way your brow furrowed not in anger, but in a frantic sort of care.
When you began to pull away, the world tilted. You turned toward the corner of the loft, toward a figure shrouded in the deep shadows—someone Dex hadn't even noticed in his delirium.
No.
His hand, heavy as lead and trembling with a fine, desperate palsy, reached out for you. His fingers caught the air, grasping at the space you had just occupied. God, don’t go, he thought, the silent plea screaming behind his teeth. Please, for once, don’t let the shadows take something from me.
You must have felt the shift in the air, the sheer magnetic pull of his panic, because you were back in an instant. You leaned over him again, becoming his entire horizon. Up close, you were unbelievable—soft in a way that shouldn't exist in a place as jagged as Hell’s Kitchen. Your eyes were the kindest things he had ever been allowed to look at.
"You're going to be okay," you whispered.
The words weren't a hollow promise; they were a directive, spoken with the quiet authority of someone who knew how to survive a storm. You reached out, brushing the sweat-slicked hair from his forehead with a slow, deliberate sweep of your hand. Then, your thumb found the pulse point on his wrist.
Dex watched, fascinated and terrified, as your fingertip began to trace a pattern on his skin. A star. One point, two, three—the lines were crisp and intentional, the center resting right over the prominent vein where his heart hammered against his skin. You were mapping him, grounding his soaring heart rate with a physical rhythm he could understand.
Dex barely heard the sound of a door closing in the distance, or the muffled scrape of furniture being moved in another room. His senses were narrowing, tunneling down until there was only the pressure of your finger on his wrist and the overwhelming, cloying scent of lavender.
It wasn't the room that smelled of it. It was you.
You smelled of safety. You smelled of the one thing Dex had never been able to calculate, the one variable that refused to fit into his equation: peace. As his vision finally darkened, the last thing he felt wasn't the pain of the bullet, but the heavy, grounding weight of your hand holding his, refusing to let him drift away into the cold.
The fever was a cruel architect. It took the plush comfort of the pull-out couch and warped it, turning the soft cushions into the hard, linoleum floor of a kitchen that hadn't seen a kind word in decades.
In the dream, the air was thick, suffocating and sour. He was small again—his bones felt fragile, his skin too thin. He could smell her before he saw her; she reeked of cheap gin and a floral perfume so cloying it made his stomach turn. It was a scent that didn't promise peace like lavender did; it promised a storm.
"Look at me when I’m talking to you!"
Her voice wasn't soft. It was a jagged edge, a serrated blade sawing through the silence of the house. Dex stood there, paralyzed, a collection of sharp angles and silent terrors. He felt the first strike—a sharp, stinging heat that radiated across his jaw. He didn't fight back. He never did. He just stood in the geography of his own ruin, tracing the familiar trajectory of her rage.
"I wish you'd never been born!" she shrieked, her face contorted into a mask of disgust that burned deeper than the physical blows. "You’re an undeserving waste of space, Benjamin! A void! There’s nothing in you worth loving!"
As her hand rose for the final, finishing blow, the world fractured. The palm collided with his cheek, and the impact sent him spiraling out of the memory and back into the present with a violent, gasping jolt.
Dex’s eyes snapped open. His chest heaved, his lungs burning as if he’d been submerged in ice water. For a terrifying second, he was still there—still that small, broken boy. But as his vision cleared, he felt the heavy, rhythmic throb in his side. His hand flew to the wound, his fingers brushing not against bruised skin, but against the textured grit of medical gauze and the firm, professional tuck of a bandage.
The weight of the fever and the panic made his equilibrium snap. He tried to shift, to find the edges of the bed, but his coordination failed him. With a pained, muffled huff, Dex tumbled off the cushions. He hit the floor hard, his knees barking against the wood, his hands trembling as they braced his weight.
He stayed there on all fours, head hanging low, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose onto the floorboards. The loft was silent. The only light came from the small, amber glow of the stove lamp in the kitchen, casting long, skeletal shadows across the room.
He strained his ears, desperate for the sound of that even, calm voice. He sniffed the air, searching for the lavender that had anchored him earlier. Nothing. The air was still and sterile.
She was right, he thought, the nightmare bleeding into his reality. You saw the hole in me. You saw the bullet, and you saw the broken parts behind it, and you finally realized I wasn't worth the effort.
He felt a hollow, cold ache in his chest that was far worse than the bullet wound. He assumed you had done what everyone else did: you had stabilized the weapon, realized it was dangerous, and walked away before it could discharge. He was a stone again. And stones didn't need blankets. Stones didn't need to be touched.
He closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cool floor, waiting for the silence to swallow him whole.
Dex’s fingers were white-knuckled, tangled deep in the matted, dirty blonde strands of his hair. He gripped his own scalp as if trying to hold his skull together, his teeth gritting so hard his jaw ached. A sob hitched in his chest—a jagged, ugly thing he refused to let out—as he began to scramble. He was a man defined by his precision, but now he was a mess of clumsy limbs and desperation.
He crawled, dragging his leaden body toward the high bar counter that separated the kitchen from the living area. His fingernails scraped against the floorboards until his hand finally slapped onto the edge of the counter. With a low, guttural groan, he hauled himself up. He clung to the wood for balance, his breath coming in ragged, shallow bursts that clouded his vision.
As the room stopped spinning, his eyes began to track the space. It wasn't like his apartment. There were no empty, echoing halls. Instead, there were colorful post-it notes scattered across the fridge and pantry in a frantic, organized chaos—reminders of tasks, thoughts, or routines. His gaze drifted, finally landing on a small framed photo nestled next to a ceramic bowl.
It was you. You were younger, a chunky kid with a smile that was a little too wide for your face, radiating a type of uncomplicated joy Dex couldn’t fathom. A woman held you, her arms a protective circle. Even through the blur of his fever, the contrast was a physical blow. You had been held like you were precious. He had been held like he was a burden.
The soft snick of the front door closing was barely a whisper, too quiet to alert a man whose senses weren't currently drowned in a fever-dream.
You didn't say a word at first. You simply set two brown paper bags onto the coffee table, placing them beside the medical supplies you’d laid out earlier with surgical neatness. You kicked off your shoes, your movements fluid and silent, and walked toward the kitchen.
"It’s my mom," you said, your voice a low, steady hum in the quiet loft.
Dex flinched, his shoulders hiking toward his ears, but as the words settled, the tension began to leach out of him. He didn't turn around; he couldn't. He just stood there, braced against your counter, staring at the photo of a life he didn't understand.
"I went to get a few things," you continued, closing the distance between you. You didn't rush him. You stepped into his peripheral vision slowly, offering him every second to react, to strike, to be the monster the world said he was. "Come on, Benjamin. Let’s get you back where it’s comfortable."
You reached out. Your hand settled on his waist, your fingers splayed softly against the bare skin just above the bandage. Your other hand moved to his, gently uncurling his white-knuckled grip from the counter and sliding your palm against his.
It was an invitation, not a command. You gave him every chance to pull away, to shove you back, to let the "mutt" bite. His muscles twitched, a reflexive spark of violence flickering in his nerves, but it died out the moment he felt the heat of your skin. He didn't push. Instead, he let out a long, shuddering breath and leaned—just an inch, but it was everything—into your touch.
You had managed to guide him back to the edge of the bed, but he wouldn't lie down. He sat on the edge, his spine a rigid line of tension, his hands clutching the soft fabric of the duvet as if it were the only thing keeping him from falling into the earth.
"Aren't you scared?"
The question was barely a whisper, cracked and dry. Dex finally looked up, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with a raw, agonizing vulnerability. "I could kill you. Right now. With anything in this room." His gaze flickered to the ceramic bowl, the coffee table, even the pens on your counter. His mind was a target computer that wouldn't shut off, even when he was dying. "Why are you doing this? Why aren't you running?"
He expected you to flinch. He expected the same look of cold terror he’d seen on the faces of his victims or the disgust he’d seen in his mother’s eyes. He expected you to realize the math didn't add up.
Instead, you just continued to kneel before him, your expression as steady as a heartbeat.
"Dex," you said, your voice low and grounding, "I’ve spent my whole life watching people try to beat the 'bad' out of things. I’ve seen how the world treats anything that doesn't fit the mold." You reached out, not to restrain him, but just to exist in his space. "Just because a dog is taught through violence...just because it’s been kicked until it learned to bite first...that doesn't mean it’s an inherently bad dog. It just means it hasn't had the right person to show it that it doesn't have to be on guard anymore."
Dex let out a harsh, jagged laugh that sounded more like a cough. "You can't fix me," he spat, the words laced with a self-loathing so deep it felt bottomless. "You’re talking about a monster. I’m a weapon. You can't fix something that’s designed to snap. Eventually, I’ll hurt you. It’s what I do. It’s the only thing I’m good at."
He waited for the blow. He waited for you to agree.
But you didn't pull away. You moved closer, your knees pressing against his shins, and you reached up to cup his face. Your palms were warm, a stark contrast to the icy chill of his fever-sweat. You looked at him—truly looked at the man behind the bullseye—with that same wide, kind smile from the photograph.
"I don't want to fix you, Benjamin," you whispered, your thumb tracing the line of his trembling lower lip. "You aren't a broken machine. You're a person who was never given a chance to grow toward the light. I’m not here to fix a monster. I’m here to mend the parts of you that were never allowed to heal."
It was the "Benjamin" that did it. Not "Dex," the soldier. Not "Poindexter," the asset. Just Benjamin.
The wall he had built out of cold precision and stone-hard apathy finally buckled. The "why" that had been stabbing at his insides finally twisted one last time and broke. A sob, deep and guttural, ripped from his throat—a sound of pure, unadulterated grief for the boy who had been kicked and the man who had been used.
He collapsed forward, his forehead dropping onto your shoulder, his fingers bunching into the fabric of your shirt. He was heavy, a dead weight of trauma and exhaustion, but for the first time in his life, he wasn't bracing for impact. He let his tears soak into your skin, his body shaking with the force of his cries.
For the first time since he was a child standing in that sour-smelling kitchen, Benjamin Poindexter let someone love him without the requirement of pain. He let the lavender drown out the gin, and for one fragile moment, the equation finally balanced.
