rules, masterlist, series

thoughts 💭

request 💬

drabble ❕

therapist! dex stayed seated behind his desk, watching you with that steady, unreadable gaze. "your boyfriend thinks it's gross," he repeated, voice low. "and unsatisfying for him." he leaned forward slightly, elbows on the desk. "but what about you?"

you kept talking, explaining how your boyfriend refused, how he made faces at the idea, how the whole thing felt one-sided. dex listened without interrupting, fingers tapping once against the wood.

when you finished he stood, came around the desk, and stopped right in front of your chair. "stand up," he said quietly. you did. he guided you back until your ass met the edge of the desk, then pressed your shoulders until you sat on it. his hands went to your pants, undoing them without asking, tugging them down along with your underwear until they pooled at your ankles.

he dropped to his knees between your spread legs. "this is what he won't do?" dex murmured, then leaned in and dragged his tongue flat over your pussy in one slow, deliberate lick. he didn't wait for permission. his mouth sealed over you, tongue working in firm strokes, circling your clit before dipping lower to push inside, groaning into your pretty pussy as your nails scratched against his scalp and gripped his hair tightly.

he ate you with focused intensity, sucking gently on your clit while two fingers slid into your cunt, curling to press against that sensitive spot. the wet sounds of his mouth filled the small office. he groaned against you, the vibration traveling straight through your core. his free hand gripped your thigh, holding you open as he licked and sucked harder, tongue flicking rapidly over your clit now.

you could feel how much he wanted it, how he buried his face deeper, nose pressed against you while his tongue fucked in and out alongside his fingers, whining and muttering muffled praise, grinning at his spit and your wetness coating his chin. he didn't pull back once, just kept devouring you, pace steady and relentless until your thighs started shaking around his head and your voice got high and pitchy.

when your orgasm hit he didn't stop. he kept licking through it, fingers pumping steadily as you clenched around them, tongue softening only when the aftershocks made you twitch and cry. finally he pulled back, lips shiny, breathing a little heavier. he wiped his mouth with the back of his shaking hand and stood on weak knees.

"same time next week," he said, already moving to sit behind the desk again to hide his hard cock. "we can talk about whatever you need."

the first time he took her to dinner, she had known him for eleven days and had spent most of them trying not to look at him directly, the way you avoid looking directly at something that might be dangerous or might be the most important thing you've ever seen and you haven't yet worked out which.

she'd been an agent for six years by then. she knew how to read a room and she knew how to read a person and she had read him in the first thirty seconds of their introduction and understood immediately that he was going to be a problem for her. not in the way men were usually a problem. in the specific, quiet, irreversible way of something that rearranges the furniture of you without asking permission.

steve had introduced them on a tuesday. she remembered the day because natasha had been in the corner of the briefing room pretending to read a file and not watching them with the focused attention of a woman cataloguing data for future use, which was the most natasha thing imaginable. "this is the person I mentioned," steve had said, with his careful, gentle diplomatic neutrality, the tone he used when he was handling something he cared about, and she had turned and there he was — standing a little apart from everything the way he always stood, like proximity to things was something he was still negotiating — and he had offered his right hand and she had shaken it and said "it's nice to meet you," and he had said "likewise, ma'am," and that had been that.

she called him soldier for three weeks. he called her ma'am until she told him it made her feel like someone's aunt, and something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile but was the shape one might leave behind, like the memory of warmth on a surface after the heat source has been removed.

natasha started watching her differently after that first week. not unkindly. just with that specific dark-eyed attention that meant she had filed something away and was waiting for it to become useful information. "he brought you coffee," natasha said one morning in the corridor, without preamble, the way natasha said all things that were not questions even when they functioned as questions.

"everyone gets coffee," she said.

"everyone gets coffee from the machine," natasha said. "yours is from the place three blocks away. the one he walks past on his way in."

she didn't have anything to say to that. natasha moved on down the corridor with the faint expression of a woman who has made her point and knows it.

it was tony who said anything out loud about it first, because it was always tony. they were in the lab three weeks in and he was halfway through something that involved two separate screens and a handful of components that probably cost more than her apartment, and he looked up and said "so you and the soldier," and she said "I don't know what you mean," and tony said "yes you do, everyone does, steve's been smiling to himself for a week and natasha ran me a probability estimate last thursday, she had it at eighty-four percent," and she said "eighty-four percent what," and tony said "that you'd be engaged within the year," and went back to his components.

she thought about that for a long time.

it was a wednesday night in the third week when it started properly, though she didn't know that was what it was at the time. she was in the compound kitchen at half past eleven trying to find something that wasn't mission food or protein bars, and she was standing with the refrigerator open, staring into it with the dissatisfied expression of a person who has opened the same door four times hoping the contents will have changed, when she heard him in the doorway.

"there's nothing in there," he said.

"I know," she said. "I keep checking in case I'm wrong."

he came in and leaned against the counter opposite her with the careful deliberateness of a man who had learned to take up as little space as possible, and they stood in the kitchen in comfortable silence for a moment, which was its own small thing — that it was comfortable, that early, that easily.

"tony has shortbread," he said.

she looked at him. "tony's shortbread is for tony."

"tony is in malibu," he said. "tony has been in malibu for four days."

there was a pause in which she absolutely did not think about whether this was a good idea.

"where does he keep it," she said.

he found it on the third cabinet — a large blue tin with a faded tartan design, expensive and imported, clearly ordered from somewhere that took shortbread as seriously as shortbread deserved to be taken. he set it on the counter and opened it and the smell alone was enough to make her feel that some things in the world were fundamentally right, and she took one and ate it and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

"that's obscene," she said.

"I know," he said. he was looking at the shortbread with an expression she recognised as the expression he wore when something surprised him by being good. like goodness was still, always, faintly unexpected.

they ate nearly half the tin standing at tony's kitchen counter at midnight. they didn't talk about anything important. she told him about a mission in prague two years ago that had gone sideways in a way that was, in retrospect, genuinely funny, and he listened with the full, unhurried attention he gave to everything she said, and once — just once — he laughed, a real one, and she felt it like the first warm day after a long winter and pretended she hadn't.

tony came home two days later and opened the cabinet and said "someone ate my shortbread," in the tone of a man who has been personally wronged by the universe, and she said "I don't know what you're talking about," and the soldier, standing nearby, looked at the wall.

tony looked at them both for a long moment.

"eighty-four percent," he said, and went to reorder the shortbread.

the first date was the soldier's idea. he came to find her where she was doing paperwork — came to find her specifically, walked past three other people's workspaces to get to hers — and stood at the slight distance she was already learning to recognise as his version of being close, and said: "I'd like to take you to dinner. if that's — if you'd like that." and there was a pause between those two sentences where a braver man might have simply kept talking, but he was braver than most men she'd known and the pause was not weakness, it was honesty, and she had been lied to smoothly enough times to understand the difference.

"yes," she said. "I'd like that."

he looked at her like he was checking whether she meant it. then he nodded, once. "friday," he said. "I'll come to yours."

he came to hers on friday with small pale flowers she didn't know the name of, wrapped in brown paper, slightly crushed on one side like he'd been holding them too tightly on the way over. he held them out with the solemnity of a man presenting evidence at a tribunal and she took them and said "they're beautiful," and he said "I asked someone what was appropriate and they told me roses, but I didn't want to get you something I hadn't chosen myself," and she stood in her doorway holding slightly crushed flowers from a man who had wanted to choose them himself and understood with total clarity that she was in a great deal of trouble.

he held the restaurant door. he pulled out her chair. he walked on the outside of the pavement on the way there without making a thing of it, without any performance, just quietly repositioned himself each time they turned a corner so that he was always between her and the road, and she noticed the third time and the fourth time and by the fifth time she understood that it wasn't something he thought about. it was something worn into him from an era that still lived in his muscles even when his memory had been stripped bare, some chivalry so old it had survived everything they'd done to him. she found that the most devastating thing of all. that they had taken so much and somehow not taken that.

he watched her eat. she told him it was unsettling and he said "I know, I'm working on it," and picked up his fork and didn't eat anything and she laughed and he looked startled by the sound in the specific way of a man who had been in a silent room so long that any noise made him flinch even when it was a good one.

she filed all of it away.

the second date was her suggestion. she took him to a bookshop she'd been going to since she first moved to the city, narrow and overstocked with the particular pleasurable chaos of a place run by someone who loves books more than organisation, and she watched him move through it slowly, picking things up and reading the first page before he put them back, and thought: here is a man who was a reader before they took everything, and underneath whatever they built him into the reader is still there, waiting in the stacks. he found a book about the forties and stood very still with it in both hands and didn't open it, just held it, and she pretended to be absorbed in a shelf nearby until he put it back and came to find her.

"did you want it?" she asked.

"no," he said.

she went back the next day and bought it and left it outside his door without a note. he knocked on her door that evening and stood there with it in his hands and looked at her for a moment and said "thank you," very quietly, and she said "don't mention it," and he said "I won't," and they understood each other.

the third date was a disaster in the best possible way. they'd been supposed to go to a gallery — she'd mentioned in passing once that she'd been meaning to go, and he had, she discovered, remembered and booked it — but they arrived to find it closed for a private event and stood on the pavement in light drizzle and she said "well," and he said "I'm sorry," and she said "don't be," and then they walked for two hours in the rain while he told her, with total seriousness, about the architectural differences between what the neighbourhood had looked like in the forties and what it looked like now. he knew which buildings were original. he pointed out where things had been — a diner, a hardware store, a dance hall he'd gone to twice — and she listened and thought: he is walking me through a city that is a graveyard of a version of itself that only he remembers, and he is showing it to me anyway, and that is an extraordinary thing to be given.

they ended up in a diner and she ordered pie and he ordered coffee he didn't drink and natasha texted her a single question mark and she turned her phone face down on the table.

"your friend?" he said.

"she's checking in," she said.

"the red-haired one," he said. not a question.

"she noticed the coffee from three blocks away," she said.

something moved in his expression. not quite embarrassment. closer to a man caught caring about something and not yet sure whether that was safe. "is it alright," he said. "that I brought you coffee."

"yes," she said. "it's alright."

it became a habit after that. not spoken — he never announced it — but three or four mornings a week there would be a cup on her desk, made the way she took it, which she had mentioned once in passing and which he had filed and kept. she didn't acknowledge it and neither did he. it simply happened, with the quiet regularity of something that had always been true.

tony brought it up in the middle of a briefing — right in the middle, while someone was still talking — and said "the coffee thing is genuinely romantic, I don't say that lightly, I'm not a romantic person," and steve said "tony," and tony said "I'm serious, romanticise the small stuff, that's what the good ones do, pepper cried when I remembered her complicated order, not because of the coffee, but because —" and natasha said "tony," and tony stopped and there was a silence and she stared at the briefing table and felt his gaze on the side of her face like warmth from a distance.

after the briefing tony fell into step beside her in the corridor and said, quieter than he usually said anything: "he came to me in the lab the morning before your first date and asked what a person brings on a first date. I said roses. he stood there a while and then said 'I don't want to bring her something I haven't chosen myself.' then he left." tony paused. "I thought you should know that."

"why," she said.

"because you should know what you have," tony said simply, and went back to his lab.

the nightmares started before she loved him. she heard them through the wall — some sound that lived between a voice and a cry, caught in the throat of a man somewhere else entirely. she lay in her own bed and made herself stay because he hadn't asked, because she understood the particular violence of comfort without consent. but one night it went on longer than usual and when the silence came it had weight to it, the particular weight of aftermath, and she got up anyway and found him sitting on the edge of his bed with his face in both hands and the moonlight on the metal arm.

"I'm fine," he said. into his palms.

"I know," she said. "I just came for water."

he looked up. the kitchen was in the opposite direction. he was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't speak, and then: "when I close my eyes," he said, "there's something else there. a different —" he stopped. shook his head. tried again. "it feels like I'm living someone else's life. like in the dream I can see the real one — the one that's supposed to be mine — and I can never hold onto it when I wake up."

she crossed the room and sat beside him on the edge of the mattress. not touching. just present. just here. they sat in the dark together while his breathing slowed and eventually he said, very quietly: "you don't have to stay."

"I know," she said.

she stayed anyway.

she told natasha about it a week later. not all of it — she kept the parts that were his — but enough. natasha listened with total stillness and those dark eyes already three steps ahead, and when she finished natasha said: "he told steve once that he's afraid of what he sees in the dreams. not the nightmares. something else. steve said he wouldn't explain what he meant."

"he said it feels like a different life," she said. "like the real one."

natasha was quiet for a moment. "that must be very lonely," she said, and that was the most feeling natasha would ever put into a sentence about someone she loved, and it was therefore enormous.

they went to five more dinners. he brought flowers every time — never the same thing twice, always something thought about, and she kept all of them until they were past keeping. he walked on the outside of the pavement every time, held every door, pulled out every chair. after the seventh dinner he walked her back to her door and they stood in the corridor and he said "I'd like to do this again," and she said "you say that every time," and he said "I mean it every time," and she leaned up and kissed him and felt the slight sharp exhale of a man who has been wanting something and had stopped letting himself believe he was going to get it.

he left flowers outside her door the next morning. small yellow things, brown paper. she put them in water and stood in her kitchen and felt the particular, extraordinary, completely terrifying thing of being known.

they had nearly five years before the wedding. five years of missions and safe houses and flowers on fridays and him walking on the outside of every pavement like the world owed her something he had personally decided to repay. five years of steve watching them with his whole face trying to contain itself, and natasha recalibrating quietly, and tony saying "told you, eighty-four percent" when the ring was mentioned.

the proposal came at two in the morning in the kitchen with the radio on low and the kettle heating. he put down the book he wasn't reading and said "I want to ask you something." she turned around. the kettle began to whine. "I don't have a lot of things that are mine," he said. "most of what I am was given to me by someone else. or taken. I don't —" he stopped. started again. "I don't say that so you feel sorry for me. I say it because you are one of the only things I chose. that I keep choosing. and I want to keep choosing you." he exhaled. "I don't have the ring yet. I should have the ring."

"ask me anyway," she said. the kettle was screaming.

"will you marry me," he said, like a man running toward something before his fear could catch his legs.

"yes," she said.

he looked at her a long moment, checking whether it was real.

"yes," she said again, softer, because he needed to hear it twice.

he crossed the kitchen in three steps and kissed her while the kettle screamed and the radio played something from nineteen forty-something and neither of them reached for any of it. tony cried when they told him and denied it immediately. steve said "I'm glad," and then said it again, directly to the soldier, with his hand on his shoulder: "I'm really glad." natasha looked at them both for a long moment with those dark eyes and then nodded once, the way natasha nodded things that were too large for words, and that was that.

the wedding was in october. small — only the necessary people, the ones who understood what it had cost to get here. steve stood at the front doing the thing where his whole face was feeling everything and failing to pretend otherwise. natasha sat in the second row in total composed stillness that meant she was feeling all of it and had decided not to show it, which was its own kind of showing it. tony sat beside her and spent the first twenty minutes pretending to check his phone and the rest of the ceremony not even bothering. bruce folded his hands in his lap and looked at the floor the way bruce looked at floors when things were too large and too human and too real.

she had told him months before, casually, that she didn't care about flowers, that the whole industry was a racket. he had said "I'll remember that" and she had taken it for teasing. he arrived at her door the morning of their wedding with a single sprig of rosemary and said, quietly: "for remembrance," and she turned away and spent four minutes in the bathroom getting herself together.

he cried at the altar. just once, one thing that escaped before he caught it, and he blinked hard and looked at the ceiling and she reached up without making it a moment and pressed her thumb against his cheek, and his whole body let go of something it had been holding for a very long time.

"I take you," he said, when it was his turn, "as my family."

she hadn't expected that. she'd expected the words from the book. instead she got that — low and certain, like a vow that predated the ceremony, like something true before either of them had known to say it — and she didn't get through the rest without crying, which she had specifically promised herself she wouldn't do, and she could feel him trying not to smile about it while also visibly moved himself, and that was so completely, utterly him that she loved him almost past the point of bearing.

tony toasted them for eleven minutes. natasha timed it. it was genuinely the kindest eleven minutes tony stark had ever spoken aloud and he never mentioned it afterward and neither did they.

their first anniversary, natasha arrived at the door of their apartment that morning before either of them was fully assembled and held out a large blue tin with a faded tartan design without saying anything. she looked at it. she looked at natasha.

"tony's shortbread," she said.

"not tony's," natasha said. "same place he orders from. I found the supplier." a pause. "the night you two ate half his tin was the night I moved the probability estimate to ninety-six percent."

she took the tin. there was a moment where she thought she might cry about a biscuit, which was absurd, but natasha was already turning to leave and so she was saved the embarrassment of it.

she brought the tin inside and set it on the kitchen counter and he came in from the other room and looked at it and then looked at her, and she watched the same thing move through his face that had moved through it the first time — the faint, genuine surprise of something being good. like goodness was still, always, faintly unexpected.

"natasha," she said.

"of course," he said.

they ate shortbread at their kitchen counter on their first anniversary the same way they had eaten tony's stolen shortbread at midnight eighteen months before, standing up, not talking about anything important, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted, which had nothing to do with the shortbread.

every anniversary after that, natasha left a tin outside their door without knocking. never with a note. never mentioned. it was simply there, with the same quiet regularity as the coffee three blocks away, as the flowers on fridays, as the way he walked on the outside of every pavement — the accumulated language of people who love each other carefully and with great attention, over time.

the second anniversary he took her back to the diner. the one from the third date, the bad-coffee-and-pie place with the chrome surfaces and the rain-blurred window. he'd remembered, naturally. he had always remembered everything. they sat in the same booth and she ordered the same pie and he ordered coffee he didn't drink and they sat there for two hours talking about nothing important and she thought: this is the whole of it. this right here. not the grand gestures, not the tin of shortbread or the sprig of rosemary or the ring across the breakfast table — though all of those too, all of those as well — but this. a man who remembered a rainy tuesday night eighteen months ago and brought her back to it on purpose so she'd know that it had mattered to him. that she mattered to him. that she had always, would always, matter to him.

he walked her home after in the cold and she put her arm through his — through the metal one, the left one, the one he still sometimes hid under tablecloths in restaurants where he didn't yet feel safe — and she felt him look down at her when she did it and she didn't look up and after a moment he tucked her arm more firmly against his side and they walked the rest of the way home like that, and she thought: I am going to carry this. I am going to carry this exact moment in me for the rest of my life.

the baby came in the fourth year of their marriage, in march, when the city was still cold and the hospital room too bright. he sat in the chair by her bed and held their daughter in both arms — metal and warm — like everything was suddenly made of the same substance as the thing he was holding. he didn't speak for a long time. just looked, the way he looked at things he was trying to keep.

"she has your nose," he said.

"she has your eyes," she said.

"they're closed," he said.

"I can tell," she said.

he looked up and there was something in his face she didn't have a name for — grief and awe and a terror so old it predated everything except maybe him — and she thought: I have never seen him so undone and so present at the same time.

"I don't know how to do this," he said, very quietly.

"nobody does," she said. "you just do it anyway."

he nodded slowly. looked back down at their daughter. "okay," he said. quietly. to himself, to the baby, to whatever he believed in. just: "okay."

steve came within the hour and stood by the window and looked at the baby in the soldier's arms and his face did the full-face thing and he didn't bother trying to stop it. natasha came the next morning and held the baby with a careful, practised stillness and looked at her for a very long time and then handed her back and said "she's remarkable," which was enormous coming from natasha and they both knew it. tony sent three separate food deliveries and a note that said for when you're ready, no rush, welcome to the next part, you did good and she cried about it in the bathroom while her husband held their daughter in the room next door. bruce knitted something. she never determined what it had been intended to be but she kept it for years.

their fifth anniversary natasha left two tins.

she stared at them on the doorstep for a long moment and then picked them both up and brought them inside and he looked at them from across the kitchen and she watched something quiet and enormous move across his face, the kind of thing that moved through him when a good thing arrived and he didn't yet know what to do with it.

"two," he said.

"five years," she said.

he looked at her the way he always looked at her — that memorising look, the one she'd first noticed in the restaurant with the candles too low, the one she'd been seeing for years now across kitchens and briefing rooms and hospital beds and anniversary dinners and the ordinary unremarkable evenings that turned out, in retrospect, to be the whole of everything — and she looked back and they stood there in their kitchen with two tins of expensive shortbread and their daughter asleep in the next room and seven years ahead of them that neither of them knew yet was what they had left, and the morning light came through the window the way it always did in that apartment, in that specific way that didn't exist anywhere else, and he said: "I'd marry you again."

"you say that every year," she said.

"I mean it every year," he said.

they had seven years of that. seven years of a life built with damaged materials and love and the willingness to repair rather than replace. flowers every friday, always chosen. the outside of every pavement. every door held, every chair pulled out, every small mention filed and retrieved at exactly the right moment. sunday dinners at the compound that weren't mandatory and always attended. tony teaching their daughter things he definitely shouldn't in the lab and looking wholly unrepentant when caught. natasha's dark braiding thread and small careful hands producing a perfect french braid, their daughter going to sleep proud. steve reading old stories in the evenings, unhurried, warm, and the soldier sitting in the doorway to listen, looking — in those moments — like a man who was actually, finally, really home.

and every october without fail, a tin on the doorstep from natasha. never with a note. the years stacking up beside it quiet as rings in a tree — first anniversary, second, fifth, eighth — and each time she brought it inside and set it on the counter and he looked at it with that expression, the faint genuine surprise of something being good, and they stood in their kitchen and ate shortbread and didn't talk about the clock they were both running on because some things you don't say and still know.

she had learned to see the difference, over fifteen years. learned the topography of mornings when he moved through the kitchen with a looseness that wasn't quite right, a warmth that lived in different places in his face. a laugh that came too easily. a way of standing that had less vigilance in it, less soldier. she would watch him for half a second and think: there you are. and feel the whole complicated weight of it, because bucky was real, bucky was surfacing, and the man she had married was also real, also present, also hers — but they were both real and she couldn't have them both and the universe was not going to apologise for that.

natasha noticed first. said nothing, which was its own kind of saying something. steve noticed second and said less than natasha, which was extraordinary. tony pulled her aside after a sunday dinner one evening and said, very quietly: "I know what's happening. I've been watching the pattern. if there's anything —" and then stopped. just: "if there's anything." she nodded. he squeezed her arm once and let her go back to the table where her husband was cutting their daughter's food into the small, careful pieces of a man paying absolute attention to the task of keeping something safe.

she didn't tell him what she was seeing. she didn't tell him because he was managing it and she was managing it and their daughter had her father's eyes and didn't know the difference, and some things you just carry. you carry them because the alternative is putting them down somewhere they'll hurt someone, and so you carry them and you get used to the weight and you stop mentioning it even to yourself.

it got worse. she'd be talking to her husband in the evening and he'd glance away and glance back and something tidal would have shifted, and the man who answered her would answer with a warmth that was different, an ease that sat differently in his body, and she'd think the name. the other name. think bucky like she was acknowledging someone in a doorway she hadn't opened.

he made her coffee one morning the way she'd mentioned once, three conversations ago, that she liked it — a small thing, a tiny variation, the kind of thing only someone who had been paying very close attention would have caught — and handed it to her without ceremony, and she stood in her kitchen and understood with total clarity that the time she had been afraid of had arrived.

"we should talk," she said.

"yeah," he said. he wrapped both hands around his own mug. metal and warm. "I know."

she asked how long.

he looked out the window. "a while," he said. "it's not that he's gone. he's just —" he stopped. jaw tightening. "it's harder to go back. to the other side of it. I don't know how to explain it."

"he's quieter," she said.

he looked at her. "you knew."

"I'm his wife," she said. "I know what he looks like."

she watched him absorb that. watched something move through his face she recognised — the specific grief of a man who has not chosen to take something but has taken it anyway, by existing, by surviving, by waking up.

"I don't want to do this to you," he said.

"you're not doing it to me," she said. "it's just what's happening."

"that's not enough," he said.

"no," she agreed. "it's not."

natasha came over the night after that conversation and didn't say anything about why she was there and she didn't ask. they sat in the kitchen while the apartment was quiet and drank tea and natasha stayed until nearly midnight and when she left she put her hand briefly against her cheek — just once, just for a second — and then she was gone. it was the most natasha had ever touched her in a non-tactical context and it meant everything.

steve came two days later and sat with him for three hours in the other room while she took their daughter to the park and she didn't ask what was said. some things between them predated her and would outlast all of this and she understood that and was glad of it, that he had that, that there was someone who had known him before the worst of it and would know him after.

tony sent shortbread. no note. just a tin, delivered to the door. she held it in both hands in the entryway for a long time before she brought it inside.

the divorce was quiet. that was the part that undid her afterward, in the small hours for years — not that it happened but that it was quiet, that there was no anger to press against. just two people in a lawyer's office signing papers while something irreversible moved through the room with them like weather, and he kept both hands flat on the desk when it was his turn to sign, and she watched the metal one and thought about a restaurant table and a kept hand and fifteen years and a tin of stolen shortbread at midnight and everything they had built out of damaged materials and love and a clock they'd both known was running.

she kept the house. she kept their daughter. he came every other weekend and played on the floor and read old stories in the same unhurried voice and those afternoons were fine, were even good, and she sat in the kitchen and drank her tea and was very careful not to think too clearly about the sound of his voice in the next room, the way her daughter laughed at the same rhythm she always had, the way some things survived everything.

the october after the divorce, natasha left a tin on her doorstep. no note. same tin, same tartan, same quiet regularity as every year before. she opened the door and found it and stood there in the early morning in her socks and looked at it for a long time. then she picked it up and brought it inside and sat at the kitchen counter and ate three pieces and cried about it, which she had promised herself she wouldn't do, and the morning light came through the window in the way that it always had in this apartment, in the specific way that didn't exist anywhere else, and she thought: he noticed that too. that light. he said that once. I'll remember that.

she watched him go into politics the way you watch something that makes a terrible specific sense. james buchanan barnes, congressman. she saw the first interview and felt it move through her like weather — not surprise, not quite grief, just recognition. watching someone become who they were supposed to be. he was warm in front of cameras and measured in committee rooms and he laughed that whole easy laugh she'd seen on mornings in her own kitchen, and he was, she understood, exactly where he had always been meant to end up, in the life that had always been meant to be his.

she was glad for him. she was glad the way you are glad when you have loved someone long enough and well enough to want their happiness even when it belongs to a version of them that isn't yours, that was never entirely yours, that you understood from the very beginning — from a nightmare through a wall and a dream of a different life he couldn't hold onto — was only ever on loan.

their daughter had fallen asleep against her. soft and trusting and boneless the way sleeping children are boneless, heavy with the absolute peace of someone who does not yet know that the world requires bracing against. the television was on low because she'd stopped being able to sit in quiet rooms in the evenings, because quiet had a sound now that she didn't love. some news programme. some panel. she wasn't watching, just letting it be noise, until the segment changed and there he was — grey suit, both hands visible, the metal one and the warm one, talking about something measured and deliberate, gesturing in the way he gestured when he was fully present, fully himself, fully there in the way she had always known he was capable of being — and she looked at him for a long moment the way she had looked at him in the botanical gardens that first year, when he'd known the latin names of things and been so earnest about having something to say. he looked like himself. he looked good. he looked like a man who had grown into the shape he was always supposed to fill, like the bones of him had been waiting for the right life.

I knew him before this, she thought. I knew him in his worst winters and his most frightened mornings and I knew the sound he made when the dark got too loud and I knew what he looked like when he held our daughter for the first time, and I was there for all of the before, and I was there when natasha left the first tin on the doorstep without a note, and I was there when he said I take you as my family like a vow that predated everything — and none of the after. none of the congressman, none of the grey suit, none of whatever he is now in the right life that was always supposed to be his.

and here she sat with their child sleeping softly in the crook of her elbow, as she watched the man she fell in love with wear the skin of a congressman on tv. maybe somewhere, in another life, they were happy.

taglist: @n1ght-mares-from-h3ll @randomfanpage @delffiini3 @sebastians-love @beforemdnight @amarielinmiddleearth @sizzlingstarlightsky @hagridshaircare @matchat3a @jainaeatsstars @k1wwwol4 @mathcat345 @boomboommountain420 @for-hearthand-home @delffiini3 @randomfanpage

 iso's grin was already wicked as he vaulted a crate, dual pistols spinning in his hands. "eyes up, rookie," he called, voice dripping with that cheeky tone. "or are you too busy staring at my ass to focus?"

you fired back, pulse hammering, but every time you lined up a shot he was there—close, warm, breath brushing your ear. "missed again? cute. need me to hold your hand?" his shoulder bumped yours deliberately, sending a spark through your gear.

bots spawned in fresh waves, red lasers sweeping the ground. you ducked and rolled, clipping one in the shoulder, but another flanked hard from the side. your back slammed against the wall just as iso slid in beside you, arms crossed like he had all the time in the world.

"getting tired already?" he teased, leaning closer until his chest brushed your arm. "thought you were supposed to be the hotshot today."

a new wave poured in. you tried to push out but got pinned, shots pinging off the barrier. iso stayed put, that cocky smirk never fading. "say it," he murmured, lips nearly grazing your neck. "tell me you need my help."

you swallowed, cheeks burning hot. "...i need your help."

his smile widened. "louder."

"i need your help, iso."

he grabbed you without another word, one arm hooking under your knees, the other around your back. he lifted you clean off the ground like you weighed nothing, sprinting for the next cover point. bots swarmed behind you but he moved like the arena belonged to him—leaping crates, dodging fire, carrying you straight through the chaos with effortless strength.

he set you down behind a reinforced wall, bodies pressed close in the narrow space. his hand stayed on your waist, thumb stroking once, teasing lower. "good girl," he whispered. "now watch how a real duelist clears the field."

iso spun out, pistols blazing. every shot landed clean. the bots dropped in rapid succession while he glanced back at you between kills, that same cocky smirk never leaving his face. when the last one fell he returned, crowding you against the wall again. "told you i'd save your pretty ass. what do i get as thanks?"

his fingers traced lower, slipping under the edge of your gear. the simulation timer kept running but iso clearly had other plans—teasing touches turning firmer, his body pinning you in place while the next wave loaded in the distance. "better decide quick," he murmured against your ear, lips brushing skin. "because once those bots respawn, i'm not stopping until you moan my name loud enough for the whole arena to hear."

he pressed closer, one knee sliding between your thighs, grinding just enough to make your breath hitch. his free hand cupped your ass, squeezing as he nipped at your earlobe. "feel that? that's what happens when you admit you need me." the arena lights flickered with the incoming wave, but iso ignored it, sliding his fingers deeper under your gear to stroke along your skin. "say my name again," he demanded softly, "and maybe i'll let you cum before the next round starts."

you gasped as his touch grew bolder, circling and pressing exactly where you needed it. iso's cheeky laugh rumbled against your throat. "that's it, rookie. let me hear you. the bots can wait—i've got you right where i want you." his hips rolled forward, hard length rubbing against your hip through his suit while his fingers worked faster, drawing out whimpers you couldn't hold back. "louder," he teased, teeth grazing your jaw. "or do i have to carry you again just to make you scream?"

another wave spawned behind the wall but iso kept you pinned, mouth claiming yours in a heated kiss that tasted like victory and trouble. his tongue slid against yours as his hand pumped steadily, building that tight coil in your core. "iso," you moaned, fingers clutching his shoulders. he grinned into the kiss, pulling back just enough to watch your face.

"good girl. now ride my hand while i keep those bots off us." he shifted, lifting you slightly so your legs wrapped around his waist, giving him better access as his fingers thrust deeper. the simulation echoed with gunfire but all you felt was him—teasing, dominant, carrying you through pleasure just like he carried you through the fight.

"that's my teammate," he whispered, voice rough with want. "taking what you need. cum for me before they break through." his thumb pressed harder, circling your clit while his cock throbbed against you, promising more once the round ended. you shattered with a cry, body clenching around his fingers as he held you steady, murmuring filthy praise against your lips. "fuck, that's hot. round two's gonna be even better."

the letter arrives on a thursday and dex reads it standing at his kitchen counter still in his work clothes, jacket on, gun still holstered, and he reads it twice and then puts it down and stands there with his hands flat on the counter and breathes through his nose for a moment in the way of someone who is being very controlled about something.

he picks it up and reads it a third time.

following your most recent psychological evaluation, it says, and in accordance with the terms of your continued employment and the recommendations of the bureau’s occupational health division, you are required to engage with the approved companion programme for a minimum trial period of ninety days. non-compliance will be noted in your file and may result in suspension from active field duty pending further review. your companion has been selected following compatibility assessment and will arrive at your residence on saturday between the hours of ten and twelve. please ensure you are home to receive them.

dex puts the letter down.

he thinks about ramirez. about her office and the soft lighting and the two hours of careful questions about sleep and interpersonal relationships and emotional regulation and about his answers, which had been accurate, which had apparently been the wrong choice. specifically he thinks about the question she’d asked near the end — do you have people, benjamin. people you’d call if something went wrong — and about the silence that had followed it, the silence that he had eventually filled with i have colleagues and that ramirez had written something about in her notes with the particular quality of someone writing something significant.

companion programme. ninety days.

the problem — the problem that he hasn’t looked at directly, that he’s been keeping in his peripheral vision since the letter arrived — is that part of him, a small and poorly-lit part that he would not acknowledge under interrogation, had read the line your companion has been selected and felt something that was not entirely objection.

he has north stars. he knows what it is to orient yourself toward something outside yourself, to need the fixed point of another person’s existence to keep the noise from getting too loud. he knows what it is to function best when someone is there, specifically there, present in the way that presence organises everything around it.

he has never had that in a way that was sanctioned. in a way that was just for him, arranged and designated and his.

he puts the letter in the kitchen drawer.

he doesn’t call his handler.

saturday arrives.

he’s been up since six. he runs. he comes back. he showers. he makes coffee and sits at the kitchen table with case files he’s not supposed to have at home and works through them with the focused efficiency of someone for whom this is simply what mornings are, and he does not think about ten o’clock, and at nine forty-five he puts the files away and makes another coffee he doesn’t need and stands in the kitchen and is not waiting.

at ten oh four, someone knocks.

the walk to the door is even and unhurried. he opens it with the flat neutral expression he wears for most things.

there is an agency representative with a clipboard and, standing slightly behind her with a duffel bag over one shoulder and her head tilted at an angle that suggests she has already been listening through the door for at least the past minute, is someone he was not expecting.

the ears register first — warm golden-brown, soft, tipped darker, swivelling immediately and completely toward him the moment the door opens with the focused attention of something that has identified the primary point of interest in the room and is not pretending otherwise. below them, dark eyes find his face with a directness that is not aggressive and is not deferential and is not anything except genuinely interested. she has a tail, the same colouring, curled warmly and already doing a slow involuntary wag that she does not appear to be policing. she is wearing a soft sweater and she has a duffel bag over one shoulder and she looks, standing in his hallway in the rain-grey light of a saturday morning, like someone who has already decided she is going to like it here.

she smiles at him.

it is a large and entirely unguarded smile and it lands somewhere in dex’s chest in a way that he immediately identifies and immediately dislikes identifying.

“hi,” she says.

dex looks at her. he looks at the agency representative. he looks back at her. he looks at the smile. “you’re the companion,” he says.

“that’s me,” she says, and her tail wags more decidedly, and she shifts the duffel bag on her shoulder. “sorry about the — i know it can be a lot when you open the door and there’s a person. i’ve been told the adjustment period varies.” her ears tip forward. “you’re benjamin poindexter.”

“dex,” he says. he doesn’t know why he says it. he always says it, it’s simply what he goes by, but there is a specific quality to saying it now that he notices and does not examine.

something in her expression does the warm thing. “dex,” she says, trying it, and her tail does an arc and her ears stay forward and she looks at him like she’s adding the information to something she’s building. “okay. i like that.”

he is not going to think about the fact that she likes it. that is not relevant information.

the agency representative talks. dex signs. the representative leaves. the hallway goes quiet.

she stands in his doorway with her duffel bag and her forward ears and her tail in its slow warm arc and she is looking at his apartment with the peripheral focused attention of someone building a picture, and he is looking at her, and the thing in the poorly-lit part of his chest is doing something he is going to need it to stop doing.

“you can come in,” he says. it comes out flatter than he intended, which is usually how things come out and is usually an asset and right now feels like it might not be.

she comes in.

she steps through the door and stops and takes the apartment in properly — the ears doing their continuous adjusting work, the nose making its subtle assessments, her eyes moving across the clean organised space with the systematic quality of someone who is actually processing what they’re seeing. she turns in a slow half circle and her tail is still doing its warm wag and she looks at the kitchen and the window and the complete absence of anything without a designated place, and she receives it all without judgment, which he notices, which he was not expecting to notice.

“very clean,” she says.

“i like order,” he says, from the doorway, because he hasn’t decided where to be yet in this situation and the doorway is at least a defined position.

“i noticed,” she says, without any edge to it, just a fact received and acknowledged, and she sets her duffel bag down against the wall by the door with a precision that he clocks immediately — out of every walkway, against the wall, minimum footprint — and turns to look at him properly.

she looks at him the way people look at things they are genuinely trying to understand, openly and with patience, and dex looks back at her with the flat observational attention of someone who has been doing this professionally for years, and neither of them looks away, and the apartment is very quiet.

“the spices are alphabetical,” she says. “cardamom, cinnamon, cumin. left to right.” her ears tip forward. “is that the whole kitchen?”

he looks at the spice rack. he looks at her. “how did you know that.”

she taps the side of her nose, matter-of-fact. “good nose. occupational thing.” a small pause, and her tail does a warm arc. “the whole kitchen?”

“yes,” he says.

“good,” she says, with the simple satisfaction of someone who has received information they were hoping for, and dex looks at the satisfaction and looks away from it because he is not going to stand in his own kitchen being affected by the fact that she approves of his organisational system. he is a federal agent. he has been in rooms with people who wanted to kill him and maintained appropriate professional detachment. he is going to manage this.

“i know this wasn’t your idea,” she says.

the directness of it catches him. not unkind, not pointed, just stated plainly and left there, clearing the air of the thing that would otherwise sit in it and get complicated.

“no,” he says.

“that’s fine,” she says. “i’m not here to make you do anything. i’m not going to ask you to talk about your feelings or sit in a circle or whatever ramirez had in mind.” she says the name easily, which means she’s read his file, which he files under noted and which should probably bother him and doesn’t particularly. “i’m just here.” her ears are forward and her tail is doing its slow warm sway and she looks at him with the expression of someone who means exactly what they say and is aware that this is unusual. “that’s all. i’m just here.”

i’m just here.

the thing in the poorly-lit part of dex’s chest does something significant that he is going to need considerable time and privacy to deal with. a fixed point. a designated, sanctioned, just for him fixed point, standing in his apartment in a soft sweater with golden-brown ears and a tail that wags without her permission and looking at him like his presence in the room is a fact she finds straightforwardly good.

he thinks about the north stars. about needing the fixed point to keep the noise level. about what it is to function best when something is there.

he thinks about how much he wants her to like his apartment.

the thought arrives fully formed and he dislikes it immediately, the wanting, the specific shape of it — not just the ninety days, not just the programme requirement, but the particular small desperate quality of i want her to think this is a good place, i want her to be comfortable here, i want her to stay. four minutes and he wants her to stay. he is aware of how this reflects on him and he is not going to let it show.

“you’ll need somewhere to sleep,” he says, because he needs to say something practical and this is practical.

“couch is fine,” she says.

“there’s a room,” he says. “with a bed. you can use it.”

she does the warm thing again with her expression, the open unguarded thing, and he looks away from it at the middle distance. “thank you,” she says, simply.

“don’t touch the files on the desk,” he says. “the kitchen closes at ten. i’m up at six.”

“i’m up at six too,” she says.

he looks at her.

“morning person,” she says, and her ears tip forward and her tail does its arc and she is looking at him with the expression of someone who is enjoying this conversation, who is finding him, specifically, interesting, and dex stands in his kitchen doorway and looks back at her and thinks about north stars and about the letter in the drawer and about ramirez’s question — do you have people, benjamin — and about the silence that had followed it.

he turns and goes back to the kitchen.

he gets a second mug out of the cupboard before she’s asked.

he is aware of doing it. he is aware of the significance of doing it without being asked. he puts the mug down next to the coffee maker and he does not turn around and he does not say anything, and he hears her come into the kitchen behind him, quiet and warm and present, and he hears the small satisfied sound she makes when she sees the second mug, and he stares at the coffee maker and thinks ninety days and knows, with the flat honest certainty of someone who is very good at assessing situations accurately, that ninety days is not going to be the problem.

the problem is going to be everything after.

“is it good coffee?” she asks, settling at his kitchen table like she’s been there before, her tail curling around the chair leg, her ears in their forward position, her dark eyes on him with their warm direct interest.

“yes,” he says.

“great,” she says, and she sounds like she means it, and dex pours the coffee and does not think about how much he wants her to mean it, and outside the window new york does its saturday thing, entirely indifferent, and the apartment is warm and quiet and no longer, for the first time in a long time, empty.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

it happens gradually, the opening up. or it doesn’t happen, exactly — nothing so deliberate as a door being unlocked — it’s more that she is simply there, consistently and warmly there, and dex finds the edges of himself softening around the fact of her the way ice softens around something warm, slowly and without announcement.

the first week he is precise and professional about it. he makes coffee in the morning, two mugs, says good morning in the flat way he says most things, and she says good morning back with her ears forward and her tail doing its slow arc and her dark eyes bright with the morning in a way that he finds unreasonably difficult to look at directly before eight am. he tells her the schedule — when he leaves, when he returns, what she can and cannot touch — and she listens with the focused attention of someone who is actually going to remember all of it, which she does, which he notices.

she stays out of his files. she keeps the kitchen the way he keeps it. she puts things back exactly where she found them.

he notices all of it. he doesn’t say so.

what he does, without deciding to, is learn her. the way she takes her coffee — more milk than is strictly necessary, he thinks, but he doesn’t say this. the way her ears go soft and low when she’s tired, tipping toward him in the early evenings on the couch in a way that is not quite asking for anything and somehow communicates everything. the way she smells — something clean and warm and sweet that is simply her, that he has catalogued without meaning to and that his brain now uses as a reference point for safe, settled, good. he is aware of doing this and he does it anyway.

she asks him things. not the things ramirez would ask, not the careful clinical excavations of a professional, just — things. what he thinks about the case she can see him turning over in his head. whether he prefers the window open or closed when he sleeps. what he liked as a kid, which is a question he answers more than he expected to, which surprises him, which she receives without making anything of it.

she tells him things back. easy, unguarded things, the way she does everything — what she thinks about, what she likes, what she finds funny. she has opinions about a surprising number of subjects and delivers them with the cheerful confidence of someone who has never been particularly afraid of being wrong. her tail wags when she’s enthusiastic, which is often, and she never seems to notice it doing it.

he notices. every time.

the shopping trip is her idea, which is to say she mentions, with complete casualness, that she noticed his towels are starting to go thin and she’s been looking at some things online and she could do with some bits herself and they could go together if he wanted, and dex says he doesn’t need new towels, and she says okay with the equanimity of someone who has made a note of something and is not in a hurry, and three days later he says fine, saturday, without her having mentioned it again, and she smiles the smile and her ears come all the way up and her tail does the full warm arc and dex looks at the wall.

saturday comes and she is ready at nine, which he respects, wearing a soft cream sweater that has the texture of something very comfortable and her hair doing its usual thing and her ears in their relaxed forward position. she looks — she looks like a saturday morning. like something specifically designed for the concept. dex puts his jacket on and tells himself this is an errand and they leave.

she takes his hand on the stairs.

not dramatically. not as a statement. she takes it the way you take someone’s arm on icy ground, practical and warm, and she says the third step’s loose, watch it, and her hand is in his and they’re at the bottom of the stairs before he’s finished processing it and she hasn’t let go and he doesn’t say anything about it.

he doesn’t let go either.

the city is doing its saturday thing — loud and grey and indifferent — and she moves through it with the easy comfort of someone who has always lived in cities, her ears tracking the sounds, her nose doing its subtle work, and she keeps hold of his hand with the simple uncomplicated warmth of someone who has decided this is where her hand is going to be and has no complicated feelings about it whatsoever.

dex has complicated feelings about it.

they are not bad complicated feelings, which is the complicated part.

she stops at a shop window. looks at something. moves on. he clocks it — a display of throws, soft and thick, in the kind of colours she tends to wear. he files it. they keep walking.

the home goods store is large and warm and she moves through it with her ears forward and her tail doing its slow appreciative sway and dex follows her and learns things. she picks things up to feel them — runs her fingers across fabric samples, turns things over in her hands — and the things she lingers on are soft things, warm things, things with a quality of comfort to them that he is beginning to understand is a consistent preference. she holds up a set of sheets in a deep warm cream colour and her tail wags, just once, genuinely, and she puts them back on the shelf with the expression of someone being reasonable about something.

“do you need sheets?” dex says.

“mine are fine,” she says.

he picks the sheets up.

she turns around. “dex—”

“what else,” he says.

she looks at him. he looks back at her with the flat expression that gives nothing away except that the decision has already been made, which she is learning to read, because she is learning all of him with the same focused patience she brought to his spice rack on the first day.

“you don’t have to—”

“what else,” he says again.

a pause. her tail does the arc. her ears come forward. and then she turns back to the shelves with the expression of someone who has decided not to argue about this, and dex follows her through the store and learns that she likes weighted things and soft things and things in warm colours, and that she has a specific opinion about pillow density that she explains to him in more detail than he expected, and that her tail wags at a particular candle that smells of something warm and she picks it up and puts it back down twice before he takes it out of her hands and puts it in the basket without comment.

she looks up at him when he does it.

he looks at the candle.

“keep moving,” he says.

she keeps moving. but he catches the smile before she turns away, the real one, the open one, and something in his chest does the thing that he has stopped trying to prevent it from doing.

the towels are thick and soft and she holds one against her cheek to test it in the way that should be embarrassing to witness and somehow isn’t, and her ears do the satisfied low tilt of something that is very comfortable, and dex takes four of them and puts them in the basket, and she says dex, four is— and he says cold apartment, cold mornings, which is not a reason, and she looks at him with the warm direct eyes and doesn’t push it, which he appreciates, and they keep going.

they go back past the window on the way home.

dex stops.

“the throw,” he says.

she looks at the window. looks at him. “i don’t need a throw.”

“you sit on the couch every evening and pull the blanket off the back of it,” he says. “you’ve done it every day for two weeks.”

she opens her mouth. closes it. her ears have gone to the soft forward position that means she’s been caught out by something she wasn’t expecting. her tail does a slow, involuntary, entirely honest arc.

“it’s fine,” she says. “the blanket is—”

“which colour,” he says, looking at the display.

a pause that is long enough to be its own answer.

“the dark green one,” she says quietly. “but dex, you don’t—”

he goes into the shop. he comes back out three minutes later with the dark green throw in a bag and he hands it to her and she stands on the pavement holding it and looking at him with an expression that is doing several things and none of them are the warm simple openness she usually leads with — this is something more careful, more surprised, something that goes somewhere deeper and is less sure what to do with what it finds there.

“thank you,” she says, and her voice does something on it that he doesn’t look at too directly.

“you were cold,” he says.

she looks at him for a moment.

“yeah,” she says, softly. “okay.”

they walk back with her hand in his and the bag bumping against her leg and the city doing its loud indifferent thing around them, and dex is carrying everything else — the sheets and the towels and the candle and the three other small soft things he’d put in the basket at various points without announcing he was doing it — and he is looking at the pavement ahead of them and he is not thinking about the smile she’d made or the way her tail had wagged at the sheets or the specific quality of warmth that has been building in the poorly-lit part of his chest since the first morning he put the second mug out without being asked.

he is not thinking about any of it.

they get back to the apartment and she puts the throw over her lap on the couch that evening and her ears go to their soft comfortable low angle and she tucks herself into the corner with her coffee and the throw pulled up to her waist and she looks, in his apartment, in his living room, in the low lamp light of a saturday evening, like something that belongs there.

dex sits at the other end of the couch with his own coffee and his case notes and he reads the same page four times.

he doesn’t say anything.

neither does she.

the apartment is warm and quiet and outside the window new york does what it always does, and the throw is the dark green one, and the candle is burning on the coffee table and it smells exactly like it smelled in the shop, and dex looks at his case notes and does not think about north stars or fixed points or the specific and considerable giddiness of watching someone’s tail wag at a set of sheets he bought for her.

he does not think about any of it.

he turns the page.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

she is, it turns out, very clingy.

not in a way that demands anything — she doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t make a production of it, it’s simply that she gravitates toward him the way warm things gravitate toward warmth, naturally and without apparent self-consciousness, and dex finds himself being gravitated toward at a frequency that he had not anticipated and is not handling as professionally as he’d like.

she sits close on the couch. closer than necessary given the available square footage. she appears at his elbow in the kitchen in the mornings in the way of something that has located the warmest point in the room and decided to be near it. she falls asleep sometimes in the evenings with her legs tucked up and her head tipped toward his shoulder in a way that hasn’t quite made contact yet but has clearly considered it, and dex sits very still on those evenings and reads the same page of his notes approximately fourteen times.

her tail, he has noticed, wags more when he’s nearby. she hasn’t noticed this about herself. he’s not going to tell her.

the food market is her idea. she mentions it on a thursday with her ears forward and her tail doing the enthusiastic arc of something that has already decided this is happening and is extending the courtesy of informing him. there’s a good one, she says, saturday mornings, not far, they have the good bread she likes and she wants to get ingredients for the thing she’s been planning to make, and dex says he doesn’t need anything, and she looks at him with her dark eyes and says i know, but i’d like you to come with the simple directness she applies to most things, and he goes.

saturday. the market is loud and crowded and smells of fifty things at once and dex assesses the crowd density in the first thirty seconds and identifies four potential exit routes and settles into the particular low-grade vigilance that crowds require of him, the noise doing its thing at the back of his skull, and she is beside him with her basket and her soft sweater and her ears doing their continuous tracking work and she is looking at everything with the delight of someone for whom markets are fundamentally good and correct places to be.

she stops at the bread stall. talks to the man behind it with the easy warmth she brings to every human interaction, her tail doing a slow arc, and she comes back with a sourdough under her arm and finds dex precisely where she left him and looks at his face and her expression changes.

“hey,” she says.

“i’m fine,” he says.

“you’re doing the jaw thing,” she says.

he is, apparently, doing the jaw thing. he stops doing the jaw thing. “the jaw thing,” he says.

“when the noise gets too much,” she says, matter-of-factly, filing it away alongside everything else she has been quietly collecting about him since she arrived. “your jaw goes tight and you start clocking exits.” she says it without pity and without making it into anything, just a thing she has noticed and is acknowledging. “there are four,” she adds. “i already checked.”

he looks at her.

“come on,” she says, and she takes his hand.

not like on the stairs, the casual practical warmth of that first time. this is deliberate — her fingers finding his properly, her hand warm and unhurried, and she pulls him forward into the crowd with the confidence of someone who has decided where they’re going and has brought him along, and he follows, because she has his hand and because the noise does do something slightly different when she’s got hold of him, something that he is not going to examine in the middle of a saturday market.

she stops at a produce stall and she does not let go of his hand, she just turns to look at something on the stall and keeps his hand in hers and her tail is doing its warm sway and she is examining tomatoes with the serious focus she brings to things she cares about. dex stands beside her and looks at the crowd and does not clock the exits again because he is looking at her instead, which is better.

“these are good,” she tells him, holding up a tomato with great conviction.

“i don’t doubt it,” he says.

she grins at him. the full one, the open one, the one that does the thing to the poorly lit part of his chest, and then she pulls him toward the next stall, and they go through the market like this — her hand in his, her pulling him gently wherever she wants to go, her tail waving the whole time, her ears forward and bright and interested in everything.

at the olive stall she stops and turns and tilts her head up at him — because he has several inches on her and she is apparently done conducting this conversation at a height that requires her to look up — and she puts her free hand on his arm and pulls him down toward her level, not all the way, just enough that they are no longer conducting a conversation between two different altitude zones, and she says, animatedly, at close range, that these are the ones she wanted, the ones with the herbs, and he needs to try one, and she holds one up and looks at him with her ears forward and her tail wagging with the enthusiasm of someone who has found exactly what they came for.

he eats the olive.

“well?” she says, watching his face with great interest.

“it’s an olive,” he says.

“it’s a good olive,” she says, with great feeling, and her tail does a full arc, and she turns back to the stall with his hand still in hers, and dex stands there and thinks about the olive and about her and about the warm pressure of her hand in his and about the fact that she had pulled him down to her level like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he was something she had access to, like he was hers to reach for.

the thought sits in his chest and he lets it.

then he notices the people.

there are two of them, a couple, standing a few feet back and looking at him and her with the specific quality of looking that people do when they have clocked the ears and the tail and are having a reaction to them that they feel entitled to display openly. the man says something to the woman, low, and the woman does the small smile of someone who agrees with what has been said, and they keep looking.

dex looks at them.

they don’t stop looking.

he puts his hands on her waist.

it’s not a dramatic gesture — not a scene, not an announcement, just his hands finding her waist and drawing her back into him, out of the eyeline of the people staring, out of the immediate radius of the crowd that has been pressing in from the other side. she comes easily, still holding her olives, still mid-sentence about the herb combination, and her back meets his chest and she pauses in what she’s saying for just a moment, and he feels rather than hears the small sound she makes, something warm and settled.

she keeps talking. but her tail, which had been its usual forward sway, wraps slightly toward him, and her ears turn back just fractionally in his direction, and she keeps hold of his hand with hers and gestures with the other one about the olives.

he keeps his hands where they are.

she is talking about the olive oil she wants to find next, and he is watching the people over the top of her head, and the people are still looking, and dex looks at them with the flat unblinking patience of someone who has all day and whose hands are on a person he has decided he is going to be territorial about, and they look away.

but she has noticed too. he can tell by the slight set of her shoulders, the quality of her stillness underneath the continued talking, the way her eyes have tracked briefly to the side and then back. she continues talking about the olive oil. her tail is doing a slow, very controlled sway.

they are sitting in a ceramic pot on the counter of the stall beside it, long and thin and evenly weighted, and dex looks at them with the automatic professional assessment of someone who has been calculating range and trajectory since before it was his job, and then he looks at the couple four stalls down who have been watching her since they walked in, the particular quality of their looking, and then he looks at the bamboo skewers again.

he knows exactly where they would land.

he knows because he knows where everything lands. every time. without exception.

“dex,” she says, from beside him.

“i’m not doing anything,” he says.

“you’re looking at those skewers like you’re measuring them,” she says.

“i’m looking at the olives,” he says.

she looks at the olives too. she looks at the skewers. she looks at the couple four stalls down. she looks back at him. “dex,” she says.

“they keep looking,” he says.

“i know,” she says.

“it’s been ten minutes,” he says.

“i know,” she says, and her hand tightens in his slightly. “don’t.”

“i wasn’t going to,” he says, and he was absolutely calculating it, and she knows, and he knows she knows, and neither of them says so.

his eyes move to the cocktail forks on the counter. he does the calculation involuntarily. he always does. she follows his gaze and makes a sound that is very fond and very exasperated in equal measure and steps closer to him, her shoulder into his arm, her tail doing the slow controlled sway of someone being reasonable against their strong preference.

“come on,” she says, and steers him firmly toward the olive oils, and he goes, and he does not throw anything, and the couple four stalls down remain unharmed, which is a choice he makes consciously and which costs him more than it should.

his hands are still on her waist and she is still warm against his chest and she smells like the clean sweet thing she always smells like and the market is loud and bright around both of them and the people have looked away and she is still holding his hand.

“the olive oil is two stalls down,” she says, returning to the previous topic with the ease of someone changing channels.

“lead the way,” he says.

she leads the way. his hands drop from her waist but she doesn’t let go of his hand, she just turns and walks and brings him with her, her tail back to its warm sway, her ears forward, her basket over her arm, and dex follows and looks at the crowd over her head and thinks about north stars and fixed points and the particular and considerable problem of having found one that does not know it is one and that pulls him through saturday markets by the hand and gets annoyed on his behalf at strangers and eyes up cocktail forks in his defence.

at the olive oil stall she turns and holds a bottle up with both hands — which requires letting go of him, briefly, and she does it and then takes his hand back immediately when she’s done, without looking, without thinking about it, just the automatic returning to where her hand wants to be — and says smell that, dex, smell that and tell me that isn’t the best thing you’ve ever—

he smells it.

“it’s good,” he says.

“it’s the best,” she says, and her tail wags, and her ears come all the way up, and she looks at him with her dark eyes bright and her smile at full width and her hand warm in his, and dex stands at a market stall holding olive oil on a saturday morning and feels, in the specific and poorly-lit part of his chest that he has been managing carefully for weeks, something that is large and warm and has run out of room to be contained.

“we’ll take two,” he tells the man behind the stall.

she makes a sound beside him that is very close to a squeak and is immediately converted into something more dignified. her tail does a full warm arc. he does not look at it.

“dex,” she says.

“one for cooking,” he says. “one for the bread.”

“that’s—” she stops. “okay,” she says quietly.

“is there anything else?” he says.

she looks around the market with her ears forward and her tail swaying and the expression of someone who is going to need a moment before she trusts her voice fully. “the cheese stall,” she says finally. “at the end.”

“right,” he says.

they go to the cheese stall.

she holds his hand the whole way, and at the cheese stall, and at the bread stall again because she wants a second one, and all the way home through the grey saturday city, and dex lets her and looks at the pavement ahead of them and thinks about nothing in particular and everything at once, and the market bag is heavy in his other hand and she is warm at his side and outside his apartment building she stops and tilts her head up at him with her ears soft and her eyes warm and she says, simply and without any performance of it:

“thank you for today.”

“it was a market,” he says.

“i know,” she says, and smiles, and her tail does the arc, and she goes inside.

dex stands on the pavement for a moment.

then he follows her in.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

it happens so gradually that dex doesn’t notice he’s doing it until he’s already done it, and by then it’s too late to pretend it isn’t happening.

the first sign, if he’d been paying attention to signs, is the grocery shopping.

he has always bought for one. efficient, precise, nothing wasted — he knows exactly what he needs for the week and he buys exactly that and the system has worked perfectly well for years. the first week she’s there he buys for one and then remembers and adds her things, separate, deliberate, a conscious addition. by the third week he is buying for two without thinking about it, and by the fifth week he has stopped thinking of it as buying for two at all. he just buys what they need, and what they need includes the specific yoghurt she likes and the bread that makes her ears do the satisfied tilt and the particular tea she drinks in the evenings, and he does not notice that his mental category of what we need has expanded to include another person until he is standing in the cereal aisle one tuesday morning reaching for the one she mentioned in passing two weeks ago that she used to have as a kid, and he holds the box and looks at it and puts it in the basket, and that is the moment he notices, and he puts it in the basket anyway.

by the second month his entire day has quietly restructured itself around her without his authorisation.

he wakes up and his first thought is whether she’s up yet. he makes two coffees — her mug is the wide one, more milk than is necessary, he has her order memorised in the way he memorises things that matter — and the sound of her coming down the hallway in the mornings, the soft footfall and the small sounds she makes when she’s not fully awake yet, her tail doing its slow morning sway, has become something his body orients toward the way it orients toward an exit point. not because of threat assessment. because it is the best part of the morning.

he notices when she’s cold before she says so. he turns the heating up. he notices when she’s tired before she notices, the way her ears tip toward him and her movements get slower and her tail slows its arc, and he turns the television down or says go to bed in the flat voice and she always does, and he sits in the quiet after and is not sure what to do with the fullness of it.

he is aware of all of this. he catalogues it with the same honest precision he applies to everything and he does not lie to himself about what it is. it is what it is and he is going to have to deal with it and in the meantime he is going to turn the heating up when she’s cold.

the couch is where it happens, mostly. the couch is where the walls come down in the incremental way of walls that have been standing a long time and are coming down slowly enough that you can almost pretend they’re not.

she has claimed the left side. this was not discussed. it happened organically in the first week and has not changed. the dark green throw lives there now, folded over the armrest when she’s not using it and across her lap when she is, and dex sits on the right side with his case notes or his coffee or the book he’s nominally reading, and the lamp makes the room warm and the city outside does its thing.

the distance between left side and right side has been decreasing by increments so small that dex has not called attention to any of them.

it starts with her feet tucked up under her on the cushion, taking up more space than the left side technically requires. then the throw spreading slightly further than her lap. then her shoulder finding his arm at some point in the evenings, a warmth that he stops registering as a surprise somewhere in the third week and starts registering as simply where she is. then her head, tipping slowly toward him over the course of an evening until it finds his shoulder and stays there, and he keeps reading and does not move, and her breathing evens out and her ears go soft and her tail stills, and he sits there in the lamplight and turns pages he isn’t reading.

on a friday in the sixth week she falls asleep properly, fully, her head on his shoulder and the throw pulled up and her tail doing the slow rhythm of something deeply and genuinely at rest, and dex sits there for a long time and then, with the careful deliberateness of a decision being made, raises his hand and scratches behind her ear.

she makes a sound in her sleep that is the best sound he has ever heard.

her ear twitches under his fingers. she doesn’t wake up. he keeps going, slow and gentle, the base of the ear where the fur is softest, and her whole face relaxes in a way it doesn’t quite manage when she’s awake, and her tail does one slow, deeply contented arc, and dex sits in his apartment at eleven o’clock on a friday night and scratches behind the ear of his therapy companion who has become his north star without asking permission, and the lamp is warm and the throw is the dark green one he bought for her and outside the window new york is entirely indifferent.

he doesn’t stop until she stirs.

she blinks up at him, not quite awake, her ears soft and her eyes unfocused and her expression unguarded in the particular way of someone caught between sleep and waking where they haven’t put anything on yet, and she looks at him and she smiles, the slow warm real one.

“hi,” she says, sleepy.

“go to bed,” he says.

“mm,” she says, and does not move for another several minutes, and he lets her, and his hand stays where it is.

the nose thing he doesn’t plan at all.

she is sitting at the kitchen table on a wednesday morning with her coffee and her hair doing its thing and her ears in their soft forward morning position, reading something on her phone with the focused interest she brings to everything, and he brings her coffee — refill, she hadn’t asked, he’d noticed the mug was nearly empty — and she looks up at him with the warm eyes and the smile, and he is close because he’s putting the mug down, and she looks up at him and he looks down at her and something in the poorly-lit part of his chest makes a unilateral decision and he presses a kiss to her nose.

brief. warm. entirely unplanned.

he straightens up and goes back to the kitchen.

there is a silence behind him.

“dex,” she says.

“the coffee was getting cold,” he says, which is not a response to anything she said but is the only thing available to him right now.

another silence.

“okay,” she says, softly, and he hears the smile in it, and her tail does a single warm arc that he can feel in the room without looking at it, and she goes back to her phone.

he makes himself another coffee he doesn’t need and leans against the counter and stares at the spice rack and thinks about north stars and about the considerable problem of having found one and about how the problem has, at some point in the past six weeks, stopped feeling like a problem.

he does it again the next morning. and the morning after that. brief, warm, unremarked upon. she tilts her face up for it after the first week, the small automatic adjustment of someone who has incorporated a thing into their morning without deciding to. her ears always do the soft forward tilt when he does it. he always looks away after.

the throw is on the couch and the olive oil is in the cupboard and the cereal she liked as a kid is on the second shelf and her mug is the wide one and he turns the heating up when she’s cold, and dex stands in his kitchen on an ordinary wednesday morning and looks at the spice rack and understands, with the flat honest precision of someone who does not lie to himself about assessed situations, that he has built his entire life around a person who wags her tail at good olive oil and eyes up bamboo skewers in his defence and falls asleep on his shoulder and tilts her face up in the mornings, and that he would not, given the opportunity, change a single thing about it.

he makes the coffee.

he brings her the mug.

she looks up at him.

he presses a kiss to her nose.

she smiles.

her tail wags.

outside the window, new york is indifferent and vast, and the apartment is warm, and that is, more than anything else dex has ever had, enough.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

💬

from the moment the apartment door clicks shut, you’re being kissed.

it’s leon first, his hands cupping your face like you’re made of glass, his lips soft and insistent. he walks you backward until your spine meets the wall, and he doesn’t stop kissing you—slow, deep, tasting every corner of your mouth like he’s memorizing it. his thumb traces your jaw, tilts your head, and he sighs into you like you’re the first breath he’s taken in days.

“missed you,” he murmurs against your lips, and it sounds like a confession. his voice is wrecked, gentle. “so good for me, baby.”

you don’t get to answer, because dex’s hand slides into your hair from the side and pulls you off leon’s mouth.

“enough,” he says, but it’s not harsh. it’s that sharp, amused tone he gets when he’s about to take charge. his blue eyes rake over you, and he licks his lips. “you gonna let him smother you? we’ve got all night.”

he kisses you next. harder. his teeth catch your lower lip, tugging until you whimper, and he swallows the sound. his tongue is commanding, demanding, and his free hand presses flat against your stomach, pinning you to the wall. when he pulls back, there’s a string of spit between your lips, and he wipes it away with his thumb.

“look at you,” dex mutters. “already dripping from a few kisses. you that needy?”

you nod, breathless.

“good girl. pathetic, but good.”

leon steps in again, his chest pressing against your side, and his mouth finds the curve of your neck. he kisses there, soft open-mouthed presses, while dex watches. leon’s hand slides under your shirt, palm warm and gentle on your ribcage.

“she is good,” leon says quietly, almost to himself. “you’re doing so well, sweetheart.”

dex snorts, but there’s no real bite. “don’t spoil her.”

they move you to the bed, and there’s more kissing—leon takes off your shirt with reverent fingers, pressing a kiss to each shoulder once it’s gone. dex pulls your pants off, and before you can react, his mouth is on your thigh, biting down hard enough to leave a mark.

“done being patient,” he says against the reddened skin. “leon, hold her.”

leon climbs onto the bed behind you, pulling you back against his chest. his arms wrap around you loosely, his lips at your ear, soft and steady. “just relax, honey. let him do what he wants.”

dex spreads your legs, kneeling between them. he looks up at you with that cocky half smile, eyes half-lidded. “you’re so wet for us, aren’t you? i can see it. soaking through your underwear, just from kissing.” he shakes his head. “filthy girl.”

“don’t tease,” leon says, but he’s smiling too, pressing a kiss to your temple.

“you love it.” dex slides your underwear aside, and his thumb runs through your slick folds, gathering it. he brings his thumb to his mouth, sucks it clean, and groans. “fuck. you taste like heaven. tell me how much you want it.”

“i want it,” you breathe. “please, dex.”

“please what?”

“please fuck me.”

he grins, sharp and satisfied. “good girl. see? you can be perfect when you try.”

leon’s hand finds yours, interlacing your fingers, his lips moving down your shoulder. “you’re perfect,” he whispers, just for you. “always perfect.”

dex slides inside you in one slow, unbroken push. your mouth opens in a silent moan, and leon catches it, kissing you deeply, cradling your face. you kiss through dex’s first few thrusts, your moans muffled against leon’s tongue. dex fucks you slow and deep, his eyes fixed on where your mouth meets leon’s.

“look at that,” he murmurs. “kissing him while i’m buried in you. you’re so greedy. so fucking pretty when you’re getting what you need.”

leon breaks the kiss to look down at you, his thumb stroking your cheek. “you okay?”

you nod, but your eyes are glassy. dex picks up the pace, and a broken cry escapes you.

“yeah,” dex grunts, his hands gripping your hips. “take it. that’s it. such a sweet little cocksleeve.”

there’s no cruelty in it. his voice is raw with want, and when you reach back for his hand, he takes it, pressing a kiss to your knuckles even as he pounds into you. leon shifts, pressing his cock against your entrance too, teasing.

“want more, baby?” leon asks softly.

“yes,” you sob. “yes, please, leon.”

“you heard her,” dex says, meeting leon’s eyes for just a second before looking back at you. “fill her up.”

leon pushes in alongside dex, and the stretch makes you scream. they move together, leon slow and deep, dex sharper and faster. every thrust rocks you between them. leon’s mouth never leaves yours—he kisses you through it, tender and unhurried, while dex drives into you with single-minded focus.

“you’re so good,” leon whispers between kisses. “taking both of us. so strong. i’ve got you.”

“yeah,” dex pants, his rhythm faltering. he sounds wrecked. “yeah, she’s perfect. she’s ours. fuck—tell me i’m doing good, baby. tell me.”

he never asks for praise. not outright. but here, in the middle of it, his mask cracks.

“you’re so good,” you gasp. “so fucking good, dex. doing so well—please, i need your cum, please—”

he groans, long and low, and spills inside you. the praise hitting him exactly where he needs it. leon follows moments later, his release painting your walls, his mouth still soft on yours.

afterward, they’re kissing you still.

leon on your lips, gentle and admiring. dex on your shoulder, then your neck, then the corner of your mouth, more possessive than tender but no less hungry.

they both kiss you until you’re smiling, dizzy, and floating between them.

you wake up because something breaks.

not glass this time — something heavier than that, something that shudders through the wall and pulls you up out of sleep with your heart already going before your brain has caught up with why. you lie there for two seconds in the dark, blinking at the ceiling, and then you hear the voices and you're up.

dex isn't beside you.

you register the cold empty space on the other side of the bed the same moment you register the voices in the living room — not the low compressed arguing of the past few nights, nothing like that, this is different, this is raised and jagged and punctuated by sounds that have no business being in your apartment at three in the morning — and you're out of the bedroom and into the hallway before you've made a conscious decision to move. the floor is cold under your bare feet and the hallway is dark and the sounds are getting clearer the closer you get, more specific, more awful — impacts with real weight behind them, breath forced out hard through teeth, and underneath all of it the low continuous quality of pain being pushed through rather than stopped for, the sounds of a fight between people who are very good at it and are not holding back for anything.

you stop in the living room doorway.

there are two people in your living room who are not the two people you thought you knew.

the one closest to the window is in red — deep matte red armour, close-fitted and clearly constructed for someone who does this regularly and needs the protection to hold up over time. a helmet with two short horns at the forehead, the chest plate reinforced and bearing the specific worn quality of equipment that has been through this before and come back. the window behind him is open, cold night air moving the curtains, which explains at least some of the sounds you've been filing under probably nothing for the past several weeks. and there is blood at his temple tracking dark and considerable down the line of his jaw, and he's holding his weight fractionally off his left side in the way of someone managing an injury they've decided not to stop for.

the one with his back to you is in dark blue and black.

the suit sits on him the way a second skin sits, the chest plate is matte black over dark blue panelling and across his hips and thighs a utility belt sits with the careful deliberate arrangement of long practice — compartments holding things that catch the apartment light when he shifts his weight, shurikens and kunai fitted with the easy precision of someone who has reached for them in the dark ten thousand times. and on the forehead of the mask, in white, a bullseye.

you know that symbol.

you know it the way everyone in this city who pays attention to its darker geography knows it — from news coverage and the particular hushed way people talk about certain names when they're being honest about what moves through the gaps between what's official and what's real. bullseye. precise, lethal, never misses. the name that comes with words like assassin and untraceable attached so consistently they've stopped being descriptions and become simply part of the definition. you look at the bullseye on the mask and the utility belt full of things with edges, and then you look at the coffee table that has been broken and the crack in the wall that is new and the blood on your floor, and you feel the ground move under you in a way that has nothing to do with the building.

and then you look at the red suit and you do it again.

daredevil. you know that name too, differently, from headlines and arguments about vigilante justice and the specific divided quality of opinion that attaches to someone who operates in the space the law can't reach. the devil of hell's kitchen. and right now both of them are in your living room at three in the morning and neither of them has noticed you yet because they are too busy trying to destroy each other and everything you own in the process.

they haven't noticed you.

"you need to leave," bullseye says, with ful conviction and muscles full of tension, "you have no jurisdiction here. the treaty—"

"the treaty," daredevil says, and his voice is the same too, the new york cadence sitting underneath it exactly as it had been reported by witnesses, something that belongs in a courtroom or a fight and is equally at home in both, "covers registered companions in active placement. which is exactly what i am. you want to argue treaty law with a lawyer. we can do that all night, but i'd think very carefully about whether this is the hill—"

"you're not here as a companion," bullseye says, and the control in his voice has a quality like a wire pulled too tight, vibrating with the effort of staying level. "you have never been here as a companion. you came into my home—"

"her home," daredevil says, immediately, precisely.

"—with a bag full of gear and a cover story and you have been building a case from the inside since the moment you walked through that door, and you will not stand there in her living room and tell me that any part of this was ever about her anxiety—"

"don't," daredevil says, and his voice drops, and something in it sharpens to a point, "tell me what i'm here about." he takes one step forward, he crosses the room with his staff already in motion and bullseye takes the hit across the arm — the crack of it is loud and dense and bullseye doesn't make a sound, just absorbs it and uses the momentum to spin and get inside the reach of the staff and drive an elbow into daredevil's ribs with a force that you feel in your own chest. daredevil makes a sound that is low and involuntary, the sound of something that hurts and has been hurting for a while, and bullseye grabs him by the chest plate and slams him into the wall.

the wall shudders. plaster dust. the framed print you bought at a market two summers ago falls and the glass cracks against the floor.

daredevil gets his legs up between them and kicks bullseye back across the room and bullseye hits the overturned chair — when did the chair get overturned, you didn't see it happen — and rights himself with the reflexive balance of a cat landing on its feet, already moving again before he's fully upright. his hand finds the side table as he passes it and he grabs the cup of pens without looking and he throws one and the speed of it is genuinely, viscerally frightening. it crosses the room before you've fully tracked the motion and embeds itself in daredevil's shoulder and daredevil makes the bitten-off sound of someone who has been hurt and has decided not to stop for it, his staff arm jerking, and bullseye is already reaching for another.

a pencil. daredevil twists and it catches him at the side of the neck — not deep, but the sound it makes when it hits and stays is wrong, it's deeply wrong, and daredevil's hand goes to it for half a second before discipline overrides and he brings the staff up. another pen follows, and another, and daredevil is moving, deflecting what he can, his jaw set and the blood from his temple mixing now with fresh blood from his neck, tracking down into the collar of the red suit.

bullseye picks up your lamp.

the one from the corner, the one with the slightly bent shade, the one that has been on your list of things to replace for eight months and that you've never quite gotten around to because it works and it's familiar and it's the one that dex always adjusts when he walks past, the lamp that matt runs his fingers over, and he picks it up with one hand and he throws it at daredevil like it weighs nothing and daredevil gets the staff up and deflects it sideways and it hits the wall and shatters, the bulb going with a sharp crack that drops the room into the dimmer light of just the hallway behind you.

in the half-dark daredevil lunges.

it's a full body tackle, no elegance in it, just mass and commitment, and bullseye goes down and they hit your couch on the way — the couch goes over, both of them rolling off it, and they land together in the clear space between the couch and the coffee table and the impact is enormous, the floor vibrating under your bare feet, and they're both on their feet again faster than should be possible for people who have been doing this long enough to be bleeding this much. daredevil gets bullseye by the arm and wrenches it behind him and the sound bullseye makes is involuntary and short.

bullseye drives his head back into daredevil's face.

daredevil's grip breaks. his head snaps back and there is a fresh sound of pain from him, and bullseye turns and gets both hands on the chest plate and shoves daredevil with everything he has and daredevil goes backward and hits the coffee table —

the dark wood one. the one that you had picked out when you moved in. it doesn't survive the impact. the sound it makes is final and complete, the sound of something becoming permanently past tense, and there is a half second of absolute silence after it in which neither of them moves.

and that is the half second in which you make a sound.

not a word. not a scream. just a sound, involuntary and small, the sound of someone watching something they cared about become wreckage, and it comes out of you before you can stop it and it lands in the room and everything changes.

bullseye's head snaps toward you.

the green eyes behind the mask find you in the doorway.

and you watch the fight leave him.

not gradually. not in stages. all at once, like a switch, like a door closing, like the moment a tide turns — and the person standing in the wreckage of your coffee table is not the flat-voiced stripped-down thing that had been throwing your pens at daredevil's neck thirty seconds ago. he is something else now. he is something that is looking at you and at the coffee table and at the mop you've picked up from beside the doorframe without noticing you'd done it, and the something that crosses his face behind the mask is large and complicated and does not have a name.

daredevil has gone still too.

you hold the mop out with both hands. it is a mop. it is entirely inadequate. your hands are shaking and you are in your pyjamas and there are two vigilantes in your living room and the darker wood coffee table is in pieces on your floor.

"where are they," you say, and your voice comes out louder than you expected, steadier than you have any right to, tight with something that is fear and anger and hasn't chosen between them yet. you look at bullseye, at the bullseye on the mask, you look at daredevil, at the blood on his jaw and the pens still in his shoulder. "where are dex and matt. what did you do to them. what did you do to them and how did you get into my apartment and why is there blood on my—" your voice does the thing, the thin unsteady thing, and you stop it. "that was my favourite coffee table!"

bullseye takes a step toward you.

you take a step back and your free hand finds your phone in your pyjama pocket and you pull it out and you start pressing buttons and you don't look down because you know where the emergency dial is, you've always known, you've lived alone in this city long enough to know without looking.

daredevil's head turns sharply at the sound of the buttons.

"hey," bullseye says, and his voice — and you are not going to think about his voice right now, about what it's doing, about the register it has shifted into, the register that belongs to early mornings and the right mug already set out and i've got you said into your hair. "hey, wait, just — wait. put the phone down. put the mop down. please. baby, please, just look at me—"

"don't," you say, and your thumb is over the dial. "don't call me that. i don't know who you are. i don't know how you got in here and i don't know what you did to dex and matt but i am calling—"

"please don't call the police." and the voice has shifted again, further, the flatness entirely gone now, replaced by something that is almost desperate, that has an edge in it you've never heard before, something unguarded and genuinely panicked underneath all the armour. "please. i know what this looks like, i know, but you need to put the phone down and look at me and let me — just let me explain. please."

your thumb is on the button.

"please," he says again, quieter, and he looks down at the coffee table, at the pieces of it scattered across your floor, and the look that crosses the green eyes behind the bullseye mask is — it is — you have no word for it. it is the look of someone seeing something they broke that they cannot unbreak and knowing it and having to keep standing in the room with the knowledge of it. "i know," he says, to the coffee table, and the two words carry everything that doesn't fit in them. "i know."

behind him, daredevil has not moved. he is standing very still with his staff at his side and the pens in his shoulder and the blood on his jaw, and he looks like someone standing in a room waiting for a verdict he has already decided he deserves.

you look at both of them.

you look at your phone.

you look at the coffee table.

your hands are shaking. both of them. the one with the mop and the one with the phone, a fine continuous tremor that is not cold and is not going to stop until you have dealt with all of this, which is going to be a very long time from now.

"take the masks off," you say.

nothing.

"right now," you say. "both of you. masks off. and if either of you moves toward me before i tell you to i will press this button and i will not feel bad about it."

a pause.

"now," you say, in the voice that doesn't invite a response.

dex pulls the mask off. he looks exactly like dex beneath it — tired and wary and like a person who has been waiting for this specific moment for a long time and is not finding the reality of it any easier than the anticipation. there is a cut above his eyebrow that has been bleeding considerably more than it currently appears to be. matt removes the helmet, the sunglasses coming with it, and he sits there with his dark hair damp with sweat and the blood tracking steadily down the side of his face and his brown eyes open and directed at your face and his ears making their small careful adjustments to the sounds of the room.

your anxiety companion is bullseye.

your foster dog is daredevil.

they have been fighting in your living room at three in the morning and there is blood on your floor and a crack in your wall and the coffee table is broken and you are wearing your pyjamas and your hands are very steady, which you know from experience means you are considerably further past okay than you currently feel.

they sit. dex at one end of the couch, upright, the utility belt still at his hips. matt at the other end with the staff laid across his knees and his weight fractionally off that left side.

you go to the bathroom. you come back with the first aid kit. you sit down beside the broken coffee table in front of them and you open it and you let your hands do something useful while your head works through the rest of it.

"i know who you are," you say, to both of them, not looking up from the kit. "i know what both of those names mean. i know what comes with them." you find the antiseptic, the gauze, the butterfly strips, and you set them out in a row on the broken table and you take a breath and you look at dex. he looks back at you. his green eyes are doing every complicated thing they know how to do, layered over each other, none of them resolving into anything simple, and underneath all of them something that is just — dex, just the version of him that exists when nothing is being performed, tired and present and waiting for whatever you're going to say next with the patience of someone who has already decided to take it. "i know what bullseye does," you say. "i've read the things they say. i know the words that come with your name." you stop. you breathe. "and i know that you have been in this apartment for a month and you have made my tea every morning and you have folded my laundry and you have never—" your voice does the thing, the slight unsteadiness at the edges that you can't stop, and you stop talking for a moment and press the gauze carefully to the cut above his eyebrow. he goes completely still. "hold that," you say.

he raises his hand and holds it.

"and you," you say, turning to matt, and you begin cleaning the wound at his temple with the same careful focus, and he stays still in the considered way he has, the stillness of someone who has decided how to receive this and will not deviate from it. "you came here with a bag full of gear and a cover story. you sat on my floor. you had a snickers." your voice does the thing again and you stop it. "the whole time."

"i should have—" matt starts.

"i'm not done," you say, and he closes his mouth.

you work in silence for a moment. the apartment is very quiet around all three of you. outside the open window new york does its indifferent three in the morning thing, sirens somewhere distant, the city continuing entirely without reference to what is happening in your living room.

"dex," you say.

"i can explain," he says, immediately, and the words come out with the particular quality of something that has been ready and waiting for a long time. "i know how it — i know what it looks like and i know i should have—" he stops. starts again. his free hand is pressed to his knee, flat, the way he holds himself when he's managing something. "i didn't plan to keep it from you. in the beginning i told myself it was separate — that what i was out there had nothing to do with what i was here, with you. and then it stopped being something i was telling myself and became just — true, somehow, in a way i couldn't account for. you made it true." he says it simply, without dressing it up, and his green eyes are on your face with an intensity that has nothing tactical in it. "i didn't know how to tell you and then the longer i didn't tell you the more impossible it became to find the moment to—" he stops again. his jaw works. "i was trying to protect you. from knowing. because the knowing puts you at risk and i couldn't—"

you hold up one finger.

it's not dramatic. it's barely anything — just your hand, one finger raised between you, your arm slightly unsteady in a way you can't stop, and dex stops mid-sentence like you've cut a wire. he looks at your hand. he looks at your face. he looks at your hand again.

your hand is shaking.

not much. just slightly, just enough to be visible in the low light of the apartment, the small fine tremor of someone who has been holding something very tightly for the last ten minutes and is becoming aware of the effort it's taking. you look at it yourself for a moment, almost clinically, and then you lower it and press it flat against your knee and breathe.

dex's eyes track the movement. something moves through his expression that is large and quiet and does not have a clean name — not guilt exactly, not quite grief, something that sits between them and is heavier than either. his ears, which had been doing their complicated flat-almost-flat thing, settle all the way down. his tail is completely motionless.

"okay," you say, very quietly. to yourself, mostly. just to have said something, just to have put a word in the air that belongs to you. "okay."

matt is very still on the other end of the couch. he has not moved or spoken since you raised your hand and he is not going to until you invite him to, which is either very good instinct or very good discipline, and sitting here in the wrecked living room at three in the morning you find you can't tell the difference between the two and aren't sure it matters.

you pick the antiseptic back up. you go back to dex's eyebrow — methodical, careful, something to do with your hands — and dex sits there and takes it and lets you, and doesn't say anything else, and the apartment holds all three of you in the particular quality of silence that only exists after something has broken open and before anything has been decided about what comes next.

your hand is still shaking, very slightly, when you reach for the butterfly strips.

you put them on anyway.

matt is quiet for a long time after your hand stops shaking.

he sits at the other end of the couch with his staff across his knees and the cleaned wound at his temple and his brown eyes directed at the middle distance with the stillness of someone who is thinking very carefully about what he's going to say and how he's going to say it and whether he has the right to say it at all. his ears are forward and soft, doing their quiet continuous work — tracking your breathing, you've come to understand, tracking the small physiological tells that you can't control and can't hide from him and probably never could. he's been reading you since you walked through the agency door. you understand that now. you understand quite a lot of things now that you didn't an hour ago and the understanding sits heavy and complicated in your chest alongside everything else.

"i owe you an explanation," he says, finally, and his voice is back to the voice you know — the warm low new york cadence, the careful honesty underneath it — except that it carries something tonight that you haven't heard in it before. something that sounds, if you had to name it, like the particular weight of a person reckoning with something they did that they can't make smaller than it was. "not the treaty. not the legal framework. you deserve more than that and i'm not going to insult you with it."

you look at him. you don't say anything.

"i knew who dex was before i came here," matt says, and says it plainly, looking in your direction with those open still eyes that see nothing and miss nothing. "i've known about bullseye for a long time. i knew he'd been placed with you. and i knew that the companion protection statute meant that as long as i was in active placement in this apartment, he couldn't — that it created a situation where i could observe and build a case without him being able to act on it." he pauses. his hands shift on the staff, a small restless movement, the most uncomfortable you've ever seen him. "that was the plan when i flagged your profile. that was the reason i chose you."

the words land in the room and sit there.

dex makes a sound that is not quite a word and is not quite anything else, something low and controlled, and his hand on his knee presses flat and stays flat.

"but," matt says, and the word carries something that the rest of the sentence is going to have to work to justify, "i want to be honest with you about what happened after. because you deserve that and i've — i haven't given you enough of it." he stops. his ears shift slightly, some internal adjustment, and when he starts again his voice is quieter. "i read your profile because it was tactically useful. and then i kept reading it because you sounded like someone i wanted to know. and i told myself those two things could coexist without one of them compromising the other." his jaw tightens. "i was wrong about that. i know that. i knew it probably somewhere around day three and i kept going because the case mattered and because i told myself the case was the point and that everything else was—" he stops again. "i was wrong," he says, simply. no dressing it up, no legal framing, just the plain shape of it. "i used your home and your trust and your good faith to do something that had nothing to do with your good faith, and i'm sorry. i'm genuinely sorry."

the apartment is very quiet.

you look at matt — at the cleaned wound and the battered red suit and the german shepherd ears sitting soft and low in a way that is nothing like their combat position and nothing like their happy position, something entirely in between, something that looks, if you had to name it, like contrition — and you think about him on your floor listening to your music and asking for your hand so he could learn your apartment and bringing a snickers in his bag like some kind of peace offering delivered in advance of a situation he'd already mapped out. you think about the car ride, the easy conversation, the way he'd said i thought i'd like to know you and meant it and also meant something else at the same time, and you think about how both of those things can be true simultaneously and how that doesn't make either of them simple.

"did you—" you start, and stop, and try again. "was any of it real. the floor. the music. the—" you gesture, slightly helplessly, at the general shape of the past week. "any of it."

matt's ears come forward, fully, immediately, the way they do when something matters. "yes," he says, and the word is very clean and very certain. "all of it. that's — that's the part i can't unknot from the rest of it. i came here for one reason and i stayed for something else and they got tangled together in a way i didn't plan for and couldn't separate cleanly, and i handled that badly." a pause. his tail, which has been still, does one slow and genuine arc. "the music was real. the snickers was real." the corner of his mouth moves. "the mat was real."

despite everything — despite the broken coffee table and the blood and the three in the morning and the suits and the entire revealed architecture of the last week — something in your chest does an involuntary thing.

you look away from him. you look at the wall. you look at the crack in the wall that is new and that is going to need to be explained to the building super in a way that is going to require significant creativity.

"the wall," you say.

"i'll fix the wall," dex says, immediately.

"and the coffee table," you say.

"i'll replace it," matt says.

"it was alphabetical," dex says, to matt.

"the mugs?" matt says.

"the table," dex says.

"there wasn't a system for the table—"

"there was absolutely a—"

"both of you," you say, and they both stop.

the apartment settles back into its quiet. dex's mouth closes. matt's ears do a small careful adjustment. you look between them — at the suits, at the blood, at the general comprehensive state of both of them — and you make a decision.

"suits off," you say.

a pause.

"i'm not asking," you say. "they need to be washed. god only knows the last time either of you cleaned them properly and there is blood on both of them which is going to set if we don't deal with it tonight, so. off."

dex looks at matt. matt's ears tilt forward.

"now," you say, in the voice.

they take the suits off.

it's a practical exercise and you treat it practically, turning to gather the first aid kit back together while they work, giving them the dignity of not watching the process even though you've seen both of them in various states of damage over the past month and there is nothing here you haven't already dealt with at close range. you hear the particular sounds of armour being removed — the fastenings, the shift of material, the quiet grunts of people working around injuries they've been ignoring for the past however long this has been going on — and when you turn back dex is sitting in a t-shirt and dark trousers with his utility belt folded neatly on top of the dark blue chest plate like he can't quite bring himself to just leave it anywhere, and matt is in considerably less because the pens are still in his shoulder and you can't get the suit off properly around them.

"i'll deal with those first," you say, and you mean the pens, and matt nods, and you sit in front of him on the piece of coffee table that is still level and you do what needs to be done with the focused efficiency of someone who has been doing this for months and has stopped being shocked by the practical realities of it. matt stays very still throughout, the way he always does, and makes the sounds he makes when something hurts and he's decided not to make a thing of it, small and controlled and honest, and his ears stay at their uncertain low angle and his tail doesn't move.

"sorry," you say, when the second one comes out, because you mean it.

"don't be," he says, quietly.

"i'm going to be," you say. "i can do both at once."

the corner of his mouth moves despite everything. "fair enough," he says.

you finish with the shoulder, clean and dress it properly, and then matt gets the rest of the suit off and you add it to the pile with dex's, and the pile sits on the floor of your wrecked living room looking very much like what it is — two people's secret lives, folded and set aside.

"the washing machine takes delicates on thirty," you say, to no one in particular, picking both suits up. "which is probably as hot as i'd go with whatever these are made of. if they shrink you can take it up with me in the morning."

"they're kevlar-reinforced—" dex starts.

"thirty degrees," you say, and take them to the machine.

you come back and finish the stitching. dex first — the eyebrow, the jaw, the shoulder that is worse than tuesday and tuesday was apparently much worse than he told you — and he sits there and takes all of it and lets you work and doesn't perform anything, just watches your face while you watch what you're doing and the apartment is very quiet around both of you. his green eyes track your hands. his ears stay low. his tail stays still. he doesn't say he's sorry again, because you told him not to, but the shape of it is there in everything he doesn't do.

"okay," you say, when you're done.

"okay," he says.

you turn to matt. he needs more work than dex — the neck, the temple, the shoulder — and you do it all in the same methodical order, and matt stays still in his particular considered way and his ears come up incrementally as you work, degree by degree, like they're recovering from something alongside the rest of him. by the time you're taping the last of it they're almost at their normal forward angle, and his tail has done one slow, careful arc.

"thank you," he says, quietly, when you sit back.

"you can thank me by never doing this in my living room again," you say.

"agreed," matt says.

"agreed," dex says, immediately, which makes matt's ears do the forward tilt and dex's tail do the sharp flick and you watch them almost make eye contact about it and decide not to, which is, you think, probably progress.

you close the first aid kit. you look at both of them — at the stitches you've put in them and the bruising that is going to be considerably worse in the morning and the general exhausted damaged state of two people who have been fighting each other and probably other people and the full combined weight of a very complicated situation for longer than you've fully understood. you look at the wrecked living room. you look at the washing machine that is now running on thirty degrees with two vigilante suits in it and making a sound that suggests it has opinions about this.

"come to bed," you say.

dex looks at you.

matt's ears come all the way up.

"both of you," you say, before either of them can say anything, or decide not to say anything, or have whatever conversation they'd have about it if you gave them the space. "i'm not leaving either of you out here and i'm not staying out here with you and i'm not going to sleep in there alone after all of this, so." you stand up. you pick up the first aid kit. "come to bed."

a pause. a long one.

dex stands up first. he does it carefully, with the weight distribution of someone managing three separate things, and he crosses the room to you and his hand finds your face for a moment — just his palm against your cheek, brief and warm and very still — and then he goes toward the bedroom.

matt stands. he does it the way he does everything, with the considered economy of someone who has made a decision and is following it through, and his tail does one warm arc and his ears are forward and he follows dex without looking at him, which is probably safest for everyone.

you take one last look at your living room.

the couch on its side. the crack in the wall. the pens in the plaster. the coffee table in pieces. the lamp in pieces. the washing machine running in the kitchen with its cargo of kevlar and secrets.

you turn the light off.

you go to bed.

dex is already in his place — behind you, the arrangement that has never required discussion, his arm coming around your waist as you settle with the ease of something practiced down past reflex into pure instinct. his chin finds your shoulder. his tail finds its place. the long slow exhale of him against the back of your neck, all the weight of the night leaving him in one breath.

matt takes the other side.

it's new, the other side. he does it carefully, conscious of the space and what it means, and he settles with his characteristic stillness and his ears in their forward position and his tail doing its slow quiet sway, and for a moment nobody says anything and the bedroom is very dark and the city outside is doing what it always does.

his hand finds yours on the blanket. just his fingers over yours, light and warm and asking nothing.

you turn yours over and hold on.

dex's arm tightens around your waist. just slightly. just enough.

"the suits will be done by morning," you say, to the ceiling.

"i can hang them to dry," dex says.

"they'll drip," matt says.

"i'll put a towel down," dex says.

"they're kevlar-reinforced," matt says. "they'll be heavy."

"i'm aware of how heavy they are," dex says.

"both of you," you say.

they stop.

the apartment settles around all three of you. outside the window new york does its indifferent four in the morning thing, sirens somewhere far away, the city continuing entirely without reference to the three people lying in a bed in hell's kitchen with their stitches and their washing machine and their very complicated arrangement and all the things that haven't been resolved yet and will still be there in the morning.

matt's fingers are warm over yours.

dex's breath is steady against your neck.

you close your eyes.

you sleep.

it's been a month since the night of the broken coffee table, and things are different now.

not easier, exactly. not simpler. but different in the way that things become different when the pretending stops and everyone has to figure out what the truth looks like as a daily arrangement. the suits come and go openly now — dex's dark blue and black folded on the chair in the bedroom when he's back, matt's red hung on the back of his door with a practicality that still catches you slightly off guard when you walk past it in the hallway. the bag that matt had guarded so carefully in those first days sits open on his shelf, and you don't look inside it, and he doesn't offer, and that is an understanding you've arrived at without discussing it, which is how most of the understandings in this apartment seem to work.

you've learned to read them differently now. that's the thing nobody tells you about learning the truth about people — it doesn't just change what you know about them, it changes how you see everything that came before, retroactively, the whole month reassembling itself in your memory into something that makes a different and more complete kind of sense.

you notice things now that you didn't let yourself notice before, or didn't have the framework to name.

you notice when dex has a limp. it's subtle — he's good at managing it, good at distributing his weight so the tell is minimal, but you know his walk now the way you know the sound of his particular footsteps in the hallway, and when the rhythm is off by even a fraction you clock it. you notice when his left shoulder doesn't move the way the right one does, when he reaches for something and there's a hitch in it, a small careful compensation that speaks to something that happened the night before and that he came home and didn't say anything about because he'd decided it wasn't bad enough to mention. you notice the bruising at his jaw that he doesn't quite cover and the way he holds himself differently for a day or two after a bad night, and you don't always say anything, but you notice.

matt is harder to read in the traditional sense — he hides it differently, with the stillness that can mean contentment or management in equal measure, and you can't always tell which. but you've learned his tells too, in the month since everything came out into the open. the way his ears sit slightly lower than usual when he's in pain, not the combat-flat but something subtler, a degree or two below his normal forward angle that he probably doesn't know he does. the way his tail slows its sway when something hurts, going from its usual easy rhythm to something more deliberate, more controlled, like he's rationing the movement. the way he'll find a wall to put his back against and stay there quietly for longer than usual, not mapping the room but resting, in the way of something that has learned to rest in increments.

you've started keeping the first aid kit on the coffee table. the new one, which matt did replace, dark wood and slightly nicer than the original, which dex had observed with the expression of someone who finds this personally offensive but cannot articulate why without sounding unreasonable. the kit sits on it now like a fixture, like the mugs and the coasters and the books that accumulate and never quite make it back to the shelf, just part of the landscape of how the apartment works now.

they come home on a tuesday — both of them, which happens sometimes, the nights when whatever they're each separately doing in the dark of the city happens to intersect in ways they don't fully explain to you. you hear the door, and then the particular quality of the silence that follows it, which is not the silence of one person trying to be quiet but two people managing something together, and you come out of the bedroom with the kit already in your hand.

dex is shrugging off the tactical jacket one-handed, which tells you immediately about the shoulder, and matt is sitting on the new coffee table with his helmet already off and a cut above his brow that has bled through the small amount of gauze he'd apparently applied at some point and not told you about. they both look up when you come in — dex with his green eyes doing their complicated evening calculation, matt with his ears turning toward you with the immediate attention they always give you — and neither of them says anything, because after a month of this you've developed a version of the routine that doesn't require much narration.

"sit," you say to dex, in the same tone you'd used the first night, and he sits, and doesn't argue about it, which is a thing that has changed.

you deal with matt first because the cut is open and because dex's shoulder is something he's going to argue about regardless of the order you approach it in, so you may as well get the uncontested one out of the way. matt stays still in his practised way while you work and his tail does its slow sway and he says, after a moment, in the conversational tone of someone who has decided to attempt normalcy, "there was a deli on the way back that was still open."

"it's two in the morning," you say.

"they had good bagels," he says.

"did you get one?"

"i got three," he says. "they're in the kitchen."

you become aware, without looking, of dex's ears pricking forward slightly. "what kind," he says, from the other end of the couch.

"everything," matt says. "and one plain."

"the plain one is mine," dex says.

"i know," matt says.

you look between them — matt with the gauze at his brow and his german shepherd ears forward and his tail doing its warm easy arc, and dex with his tactical jacket half off his shoulders and his green eyes on matt with the expression he gets when matt has done something he approves of and is not going to say so out loud — and you feel something sit in your chest that is warm and complicated and has been growing in a quiet and unannounced way for a month, deposited in small increments like the books that accumulate on the coffee table without anyone deciding to put them there.

"hold that," you say, pressing the gauze to matt's brow, and he raises his hand and holds it, and you move to dex.

the shoulder is, as you suspected, worse than he intended to present it. you find the damage with careful fingers and he goes still under your hands in the particular way of someone trying not to react, and you work through it methodically and he lets you, which is the thing that has changed most and that you think about sometimes — the way he used to perform unbothered and now just sits there and lets you see the reality of it, lets you work on it without the architecture of pretending it's nothing.

"the wall is fixed," he says, while you work, out of nowhere.

"i know," you say. "you fixed it three weeks ago."

"i just wanted to note that it's fixed," he says. "it looks good."

"it looks exactly like the rest of the wall," you say.

"that's what good looks like," he says, with dignity.

from the coffee table, matt makes the sound. the one that is the beginning of a smile, quickly revised into something more neutral. dex cuts him a look. matt's ears tilt forward with complete innocence.

you tape dex's shoulder and sit back and look at both of them in the low light of the living room at two in the morning — both battered, both cleaned up, both present in the complicated layered way they're always present, which is several people at once and none of them simple — and you think about a month ago when the word companion meant something entirely different and about how much of what you thought you knew has been replaced by something realer and considerably more inconvenient.

"bagels," matt says, into the quiet.

"bagels," you confirm.

you all go to the kitchen.

matt gets touchier gradually, the way he does everything — unhurried, testing the edges of what the room will hold, retreating when it won't hold it and trying again later when it might. it starts small. a hand on your shoulder when he passes you in the kitchen. sitting closer on the couch than he used to, the distance between you closing by increments so slow you don't notice until one afternoon you realise his arm is along the back of the cushion behind you and you can't remember when it got there.

dex notices every single increment.

he doesn't make scenes about it the way he would have in the first week — the running commentary on room ownership is mostly gone, the elaborate territorial positioning has quieted into something more occasional and less performed. but you feel it in other ways. the arm around your waist that pulls you slightly back when matt's hand finds your shoulder. the chin that drops to the top of your head with a deliberateness that has nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with the fact that matt's nose is operational and dex is aware of this. small, constant, present — the language of someone who has accepted a situation and is still, quietly, negotiating its terms.

the first time matt kisses you happens on a wednesday evening when dex is in the kitchen making something that requires his full attention and you and matt are on the couch with the television on and neither of you watching it. it happens slowly, the way things happen when they've been building for long enough that the moment itself is almost quiet — his hand finding yours on the cushion, the turn of his head toward you, the slight forward movement that he pauses before completing, giving you the space to move away, and you don't move away, and he closes the distance and kisses you soft and slow and careful, the way matt does everything when he's decided to be honest about something.

you hear dex in the doorway before you see him.

you pull back and look, and he's standing there with a dish towel in his hand and his green eyes on both of you, and his expression does the complicated thing — layered and unresolved, moving through several things too quickly to name — and then he crosses the room, and he doesn't say anything, and he presses his lips to your neck, warm and deliberate and very present, and then he goes back to the kitchen.

not comfortable. not easy. but not the end of anything either.

matt doesn't kiss you again for a while after that. he doesn't retreat entirely — the hand on your shoulder, the closeness on the couch, the way he angles toward you when you're talking — but he doesn't push past what the room showed him it could hold that wednesday, and you understand, without it being said, that he's giving the situation time to settle around what happened before he asks it to hold anything more.

it's dex who shifts it, in the end, without meaning to.

it's a sunday afternoon, one of the slow shapeless ones that the apartment does well, late light through the curtains and nothing anywhere to be. you're on the bed with dex behind you in the arrangement that has become so habitual it happens without discussion — his legs on either side of yours, your back against his chest, his chin finding your shoulder with the ease of something practiced down to reflex. he's reading over your shoulder and his tail is doing its slow content sway and his arm is across your waist and the whole thing has the quality of something completely at rest.

matt had started on the floor, the way he always used to. but somewhere over the past several weeks the floor had become the edge of the bed, and the edge of the bed had become sitting against the footboard, and today — today he's on the bed properly, cross-legged at first and then shifting, over the course of the afternoon, to sitting on his knees at the foot of it, closer than he's been before, his head tilted toward the music playing from your phone and his ears soft and forward and his tail doing its warm easy arc.

dex had tracked every inch of the migration without commenting on any of it, which is its own kind of progress.

it's a sunday afternoon, one of the slow shapeless ones that the apartment does well, the kind that arrives without announcement and stays until the light goes golden and then grey through the curtains. your phone is playing something soft from the nightstand and the city outside is doing its quiet weekend thing and nobody has anywhere to be.

dex is behind you in the arrangement that has long since stopped requiring any decision — his legs on either side of yours, your back against the warmth of his chest, his chin finding the curve of your shoulder with the ease of something practiced into pure reflex. his arm lies across your waist, heavy and settled, and his tail moves in its slow content arc somewhere near your knee, and he's been reading over your shoulder for the better part of an hour, turning your pages at the exact moment you finish them in the way that still makes you feel slightly known in a way you don't have a clean word for.

matt had started on the floor. he always starts on the floor, or he used to — it had been his place from the beginning, the spot by the wall where he'd sit with his head tilted toward whatever music was playing, building the afternoon the way he builds every room, in layers, through sound and scent and the particular focused patience of someone who takes the world in differently and has made something complete out of it. but the floor had become the edge of the bed, somewhere in october, and the edge had become the footboard, and today he is on the bed properly, close, sitting back on his knees at the foot of it with his hands loose in his lap and his german shepherd ears angled soft and forward toward the music and his tail doing its warm unhurried sway.

dex had noted every inch of the migration. he hadn't said anything about any of it, which is its own kind of distance traveled.

the afternoon goes long and warm and quiet. dex turns your pages. matt listens to the music with his face tipped slightly up, the way he does when something is reaching him, the black sunglasses catching the late light. you exist between them in the way that has become the natural state of things in this apartment — completely, and without remainder — and for a while nothing is required of any of you except to be in the same room at the same time, which sounds small and is not small at all.

and then matt shifts.

it's gradual, the way his movements always are — a small rearrangement of his weight on his knees, a turn of his body toward you that is not quite the angle it was a moment ago. his ears have moved, you notice, from their music-soft position to something more directed, angled toward you with the quiet focused quality they get when he's decided something and is moving toward it in his own time. his tail has slowed its sway to something more deliberate.

he leans forward.

slowly, the way he does everything when it matters — giving the space between you time to decide what it is before he closes it. his hand comes up and finds your jaw with the accuracy that you have never quite stopped catching your breath at, fingertips resting light and warm against your cheek, thumb at the corner of your jaw, and he pauses there, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him, close enough that his ears have angled fully toward the sound of your breathing, and he waits, the way he always waits, giving you the space to be the one who decides.

you don't move away.

he closes the last of the distance and kisses you, soft and unhurried and deliberate, his thumb moving in one slow arc against your jaw. it's careful the way matt is careful — not tentative, nothing like tentative, but considered, the kiss of someone who has thought about what he wants to say and has chosen this as the way to say it. his other hand finds yours on the blanket, covers it loosely, and the music plays on from the nightstand and the late light comes through the curtains and the city outside continues its indifferent sunday and for a moment the afternoon is very still and very full.

behind you, dex goes still.

not the combat stillness, not the tense wire-tight stillness of the early weeks. something different — the stillness of someone setting something down, deliberately, choosing to let it rest instead of picking it up. his arm across your waist stays exactly where it is. his chin stays on your shoulder. you feel the long slow breath he takes, feel it in his chest against your back, feel the deliberate way he releases it, and his tail, after a moment, resumes its sway. one slow arc. then another.

you pull back gently from matt and he stays where he is, close, unhurried, his hand sliding from your jaw to rest at the side of your neck for just a moment before dropping to the blanket. his ears are forward and warm and the corner of his mouth has done the thing — the soft thing, the real one, the smile that has no strategy in it at all.

the room is very quiet.

dex presses his lips to your temple. not rushed — warm and deliberate and held there for a breath longer than a passing thing, his nose in your hair, and you feel the exhale that follows move through his whole chest against your back, slow and real and large.

"still on the same page," he says, eventually, into your hair.

"i know," you say.

as you lie there, sandwiched between them, the air grows thick with heat and the scent of arousal.

you feel their hunger, the way they both want to claim you, but you make the rules. you shift your gaze between them, a playful, demanding smirk on your lips. "if you two want to touch me," you murmur, your voice low and teasing, "you have to kiss and make up first. show me you can play nice."

dex’s expression sours instantly. he lets out a sharp, irritated huff, his lip curling in a grimace of pure disgust at the idea of showing affection to matt, who gives one wag of his tail before he raises an eyebrow at dex. dex rolls his eyes so hard it’s practically a theatrical performance, pulling his head back with a dramatic shudder, ears dropping. but the desire for you outweighs his pride. with a frustrated groan, he leans over and presses a quick, begrudging peck to matt’s bottom lip—barely touching, a mere formality to satisfy your demand, matt is petty and decides to bite down on dex’s lip, almost a punishment for his dramatic behaviour

the moment the requirement is met, dex is on you like a predator. he crashes his lips against yours, his tongue invading your mouth with a fierce, competitive hunger. he wants you to feel how much better he is, how much more intense his passion is. you moan loudly into the kiss, your head tossing back against dex’s shoulder. the lingering taste of matt on dex’s lips, his blood against your tongue—and the scent of both of them surrounding you—sends a jolt of electricity through your core, making your cunt leak a heavy, slick stream of arousal.

"look at you," dex sneers against your mouth, his voice dripping with a mix of praise and degradation. "so fucking wet just because we played a little game."

matt, ever the contrast, moves in slowly. while dex is all fire and aggression for once, clearly spurred on by matt’s presence, matt is a steady, overwhelming tide. he begins marking you, his lips pressing firm, lingering kisses along your jaw, your neck, and your collarbone. he doesn't rush; he savors every inch of your skin, leaving damp, hot marks that claim you as his.

"you're so beautiful," matt whispers, his voice a sweet rumble that vibrates against your skin, even as his hands grip your hips with a strength that borders on bruising.

they quickly strip, the sound of fabric sliding off skin filling the air. dex is the fastest, practically peeling his clothes off in his haste to get started, his black tail lashing with excitement. matt is more methodical, though his wagging tail betrays his eagerness as he tosses his clothes aside before they both start to peel yours off of you, kissing each inch of skin thats revealed to their greedy gazes. 

now naked and flushed, they move in for the kill. matt leans forward, his soft gaze locking onto yours before he dives between your legs. he starts with slow, swirling licks, his tongue broad and warm, tasting you with a gentle precision that makes your toes curl. 

"oh god, matt..." you moan, but dex isn't about to let him win.

dex crawls forward, his chest pressing against your back, his arms wrapping around you to pull you closer. he can't stand the attention being solely on matt. he reaches around, his fingers fluttering against your thighs before he manages to get a grip on your clit from the side, his movements slow, almost teasing as he does the exact pressure u need.

the sensation is overwhelming. matt is working his tongue in deep, rhythmic laps, sucking your clit into his mouth with a soft, vacuum-like pressure that sends sparks shooting through your hips. meanwhile, dex’s fingers work in a fast, fluttering motion that complements matt's suction.

"awh look at her, baby is so close, hm?" his voice is mean and taunting in your ear, "i feel etter don’t i sweetheart? he doesn’t do it like i do."

you are caught in a crossfire of pleasure. matt’s soft, steady devotion and dex’s desperation to be better than matt makes a perfect storm. as you feel the first wave of an orgasm building, dex lets out a needy sound, his tail curling tightly around your leg.

"i'm definitely fucking winning" he groans, his pleasure from yours making him rock hard against the curve of your ass, his movements becoming harder, his fingers vibrating against you.

"just enjoy it, sweetheart," matt murmurs against your skin, his tongue giving one final, powerful flick that sends you spiraling.

you scream into the quiet room, your body arching as a violent orgasm crashes over you. you are shaking, muscles twitching in total sensory overload. matt just smiles softly, his german shepherd tail wagging happily as he licks a stray drop of moisture from your thigh, completely content to let dex have his victory as long as you are satisfied.

the arrangement shifts quickly. matt lies flat on his back, pulling you down so you are draped over him, your middle acting as the bridge between them. dex moves up, positioning himself perfectly. he doesn't wait for an invitationl he slides his thick, rigid cock into your mouth.

your gasp is muffled, your throat tightening around him. dex grunts, his hips thrusting forward to seat himself deep in your throat. he uses his hand to guide your head, forcing you to take more of him, his eyes locked on yours with a mean, triumphant glint. he wants you focused on him, overwhelmed by his size and the way he dominates your breathing.

while you are occupied with dex, matt reaches up, his large hands guiding your dripping pussy over his own erection. he slides in with a slow, deliberate push that fills you completely. for a moment, it's gentle, but as the rhythm picks up, matt’s nature changes. the sweetness remains in his eyes, but his thrusts become punishing. he slams into you with a heavy, rhythmic force, each hit bottoming out deep inside your cunt.

the sensation is an onslaught. between the fullness of dex in your mouth and the brutal, deep pounding of matt beneath you, you are completely overstimulated. your toes curl, and a high, broken keen escapes your throat, muffled by dex’s cock.

"that's it, take it all," dex growls, his voice sounding distorted as he thrusts his hips, hitting the back of your throat. "feel how much better i am. feel how much you need this."

matt’s pace increases, his breath coming in heavy pants. he isn't just fucking youl he's marking you from the inside. every hard slam is a claim. "good girl," matt murmurs, the praise contrasting sharply with the way he's nearly bruising your insides with his power. "such a good, treated us so good."

the sounds fill the room—the wet, slapping noise of skin hitting skin, the guttural grunts of the two men, and the sloppy, rhythmic sounds of you sucking on dex. you are caught in a crossfire of pleasure and degradation, your mind blurring as the friction builds.

dex decides he wants more. he pulls out of your mouth with a wet pop, leaving you gasping for air, and immediately shifts his position. telling matt to stop as he slides himself into your cunt alongside.

the feeling of two cocks stretching you open is almost too much. you let out a loud, sobbing moan as they both fill you, their girths rubbing against each other inside your walls. they begin to work in tandem, a coordinated assault on your senses. dex is fast and shallow, teasing you as his hand presses down on the curve of your ass, forcing you to stay still while matt continues those deep, punishing drives that shake your entire frame.

"look at her," dex pants, glancing down at where they both disappear into you. "stretched wide open for both of us. you love us dont you, sweetheart?"

"so perfect," matt adds, his voice strained as he pushes even harder, his hips snapping forward.

you are shaking, your muscles twitching in a state of total sensory overload. the combination of the marking, the praise, the mean words, and the sheer physical intensity of being double-penetrated pushes you over the edge. you scream into the quiet sunday afternoon, your orgasm crashing over you in violent waves as you feel them both pulsing deep inside you, filling you with their heat.

the aftershocks of the first orgasm are still rippling through your muscles, leaving you limp and trembling in the middle of the bed. you are a mess of slick fluids and flushed skin, trapped between the two of them. for a few minutes, the only sounds are the heavy, synchronized panting of dex and matt and the distant, indifferent hum of the city outside the curtains.

but the peace is short-lived. dex isn't satisfied with a shared victory. he shifts, his body sliding against yours with a wet, suctioning sound as he pulls out of your cunt. he doesn't move far, hovering over you, his eyes dark and predatory. he looks down at your swollen, leaking pussy, then up at your dazed expression.

he reaches down, his fingers digging into your thigh to pull you closer to the edge of the bed. "you're still dripping, you want more baby?"

matt, still lying beneath you, lets out a soft, rumbling huff. he doesn't fight dex's aggressionl instead, he leans up, his lips finding the sensitive skin of your neck. 

"he's right," matt murmurs against your skin, his voice sweet but possessing an underlying edge of hunger. "you're so responsive. i can feel your heart racing."

the contrast is immediate and overwhelming. while matt is worshiping you with his tongue, dex is reclaiming your mouth. he doesn't askl he simply grabs your chin and forces your lips open, sliding his cock back in with a slow, soft thrust. a needy whine escaping his throat, he shuts his eyes at the sensation as he pumps into your throat, forcing you to swallow him over and over.

you moan around dex's girth, your hands clutching at the sheets, your back arching as matt’s tongue finds the exact spot that sends sparks shooting through your nerves and your cunt clenching around matt’s cock.

matt decides he's had enough of the soft kisses and marking of your neck. he shifts, pulling himself out of you, making a needy little whine escape your throat and vibrate around dex. matt rolls out from underneath you and presses you onto your stomach with a firm, effortless strength. he doesn't give you time to adjust before he's behind you, his large hands gripping your waist and pulling your ass high into the air. he enters you in one singular, devastating drive.

"you love this, don't you?" dex whispers, his voice dripping with adoration. "being hammered from behind while i hold your mouth shut. love your companions, hm?"

the overstimulation is peaking. between matt’s brutal, deep pounding and dex’s dirty praise makes your mind begins to fracture. you can't tell where one ends and the other beginsl you are simply a vessel for their desire. the sounds are visceral—the wet squelch of matt’s cock sliding in and out of your drenched cunt, the frantic gasps for air, and the low, possessive growls from both men.

"good girl," matt groans, his voice strained as he increases the pace, his thrusts becoming almost violent in their intensity. "take it all. take every inch."

as the second climax builds, it's more violent than the first. your cunt clamps down on matt's cock in tight, rhythmic spasms. you feel dex's hand tighten on your jaw, his own breath hitching.

"cum for us, been so good for us" dex commands.

you shatter. your orgasm hits like a tidal wave, your entire body shaking as you cry around dex’s cock. at the same moment, matt lets out a guttural groan, his body stiffening as he pumps his cum deep into your cunt, filling you to the brim with a squelch. dex follows suit, pumping into your mouth with a fierce, competitive energy, grinning when you swallow with a hum. 

you collapse into the bed, completely spent, leaking from every orifice, the scent of sex and sweat heavy in the air. as they both slide out of you, leaving you open and trembling, dex leans down to press a final, sweet kiss to your lips, his tail wagging behind him.

dex slides into bed beside you, shuffling so your head rested under his bicep while matt grabbed a warm cloth, wiping you down with soft words to shush your whines as you cling to dex. once matt and dex have cleaned themselves off, matt climbs behind you, hands gripping your waist as his nose buries itself into your hair, not caring for the scent of sex and sweat that takes up the bedroom. they both agree that the smell of you is the best thing to have graced their noses. 

its silent for a second.

“i think i won.”

the last sound you heard is your hand connecting with dex’s chest and matt’s laughter in your hair. 

The library closes at nine. He knows this because he has been here every night for six weeks, sitting in the car across the street with the engine off and his hands folded in his lap, watching the lights die floor by floor. Third floor first, periodicals, local history, the reading room with the big leather chairs where old men doze over newspapers they aren't really reading. Then the second. Then the long, slow amber bleed of the ground floor, where you are always the last thing moving before the dark takes everything. He times it. Of course he times it. The interval between the last patron leaving and your silhouette crossing the lobby for the final walk-through is four minutes and thirty seconds, give or take twelve, and the give or take twelve is data he is still refining, still narrowing, because precision is the only thing that has ever made him feel like the world is a place that can be understood rather than a place that simply happens to him.

He sits very straight in the driver's seat, it is a fact of his body now, the way the Cogmium running along his spine holds him upright with a rigidity that is absolute and permanent, a steel architecture fused into the architecture of him. He has been through a great deal since the Riviera Psychiatric Institute, since the mental institution with its heavy medication and its stripped cell and the moniker they gave him there that he has chosen to keep. He has been through a great deal and he has come out of it with metal in his spine and his name cleared and his badge back and a very clear understanding of what he is, which is something he could not have said a few years ago.

Benjamin Poindexter. Dex, to the people at the office. Bullseye, to the city at night, though the city doesn't know that yet. FBI agent by day, by the rigid structure that has always been the thing that keeps him functional, keeps the frequency at a tolerable volume, keeps the version of himself that he has chosen to present to the world intact. And then, after the shift ends and the badge goes in the drawer, something else. Something that has always been there underneath, that he has stopped pretending isn't.

He has been acquitted. He has had his record cleared and his career reinstated and a very well-compensated attorney who argued very convincingly that everything he did, he did under psychological duress and the manipulation of Wilson Fisk, and the jury agreed, which he found interesting. He is not sure he agrees. He does not think what he did was Fisk's fault, exactly. He thinks it was more like Fisk opened a door that was already there, already ajar, and Dex walked through it because that is what you do with open doors. But the jury's version of events gave him his freedom back, and he is not going to argue with the outcome.

The point is: he is different now. Cleaner. More settled in the particular truth of himself, which is that he needs structure and he needs a North Star and without both of those things the corpse keeps walking and the insects get loud and the world becomes something that simply happens to him rather than a place he moves through with intention. He has the structure. He is currently in the process of acquiring the North Star.

She runs the library.

He discovered her by accident, the way he discovers everything that matters, not through planning but through the particular attentiveness he brings to the world at all times, the way everything registers whether he wants it to or not, the way his eyes and ears and the whole hyper-calibrated instrument of his nervous system collects data continuously and without his permission. He was driving past. She was visible through the ground floor window, moving through the amber light of the building's close, and something in the frequency of the world adjusted, just slightly, just enough, the way tinnitus breaks when the right sound cuts through it. The insects went quiet. His foot came off the accelerator. He pulled over and sat for a long time with the engine running and his hands still on the wheel and watched your silhouette move through the building until the last light went out.

He tells himself he is doing reconnaissance. The word reconnaissance is load-bearing in ways he cannot afford to examine, because if he examines it he will have to examine what comes after it, and what comes after it is just the raw, structureless truth: he cannot stop. He has not been able to stop since the first time he saw you, and the not-stopping has a momentum now, a mass, something that presses against the inside of his ribs every night as the lights go out floor by floor and your shape moves through the lobby toward the door.

He has been sitting in this car every night since.

He is not the man he was the last time he had a North Star. He knows this with clean certainty, he’s been taken apart and put back together with better materials. Julie was bright, genuinely bright, and he had needed her in the desperate, clawing way of a man with no other options, the way a drowning person needs a specific piece of driftwood, not because the driftwood is the right thing but because it is the thing that is there. He knows this now. He can see it clearly from the other side of everything that happened, from the vantage point of a man with metal in his spine and his name on a badge and a cleaner understanding of his own architecture. Julie was bright. You are something else. You are not a candle or a guttering thing he has to cup his hands around to keep alive. You are the North Star, fixed, and bright, and true, and the difference between the two is the difference between surviving and being saved.

He is not going to make the same mistakes.

You wear your hair up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The rest of the week it falls loose, tucked behind your left ear when you're shelving, tipping forward when you're bent over the return cart. You park in the northeast corner of the staff lot, always the same spot, under the broken sodium light the city hasn't fixed in the six weeks he's been watching, you walked today. You carry your keys in your right hand from the moment you step outside, every single time, without exception, and this detail does something complicated to him. The fact that you've learned, at some point, to be careful. That someone or something taught you that particular lesson. He respects it. He also catalogs it, the way he catalogs everything: the way you move through a crowd like you've already mapped it, the way you check the lock twice before you leave, the way you tilt your head when you're thinking, chin down, eyes up, the expression of a person who gives problems the weight they deserve and not a gram more.

He knows the interval between your arrival and your first coffee. He knows you take the stairs on days when the lift is slow and the elevator on days when you're carrying something. He knows your shoes by sound, low heel, leather sole, the particular crisp click of someone who has never once shuffled, and the sound of them on tile has become, over six weeks, the metronome by which he organises his own heartbeat when nothing else will cooperate. He knows the way your whole face changes when the after-school children come through the doors on Tuesdays and Thursdays, how the professional composure doesn't disappear exactly, but softens at the edges, becomes something warmer and more unguarded, a version of you that you don't seem to know you're showing. He has watched you crouch down to a child's eye level to talk about a book with the same seriousness you'd bring to any adult conversation, watched you gesture at the shelves with the enthusiasm of someone sharing a personal secret. 

He has heard you, on two separate occasions from his position in the 500s, tell a small group of children that superheroes always come to libraries. That they are, without exception, readers. Knowledgeable. That the library is where they come to stay sharp. He watched a small boy with a Captain America backpack go very still at this information, and he watched you lean in with a conspiratorial expression and tell him, quietly, seriously, with the particular delivery of someone sharing classified intelligence, that Steve Rogers himself had come to this very branch after he was defrosted, because this was where the good books were. The boy's face had done something extraordinary. You had watched it happen with a smile that he has filed separately from everything else, in a part of him he does not have a clinical designation for, because it is the smile of a person who genuinely, simply loves the thing they are doing, and it is the most undefended thing about you, and it costs him something every time he sees it from the wrong side of a windshield.

He tells himself he is still in the surveillance phase. He has been telling himself this for three weeks longer than it was supposed to last, but he has rebuilt the plan twice now, and each time it has contingencies for everything except the shaking. Which is new. Which is not something he has ever had to account for, because he is not a man who shakes. He was cured of shaking a long time ago, along with several other inconvenient pieces of factory wiring, somewhere in the long corridor between the boy in the group home and the FBI agent who could put a round through the left orbital socket of a moving target at four hundred yards and feel, in the moment after, something very close to peace. He is precise. He is controlled. He does not shake. And yet, sitting in the car with the city moving around him and the amber light of the ground floor making your silhouette a long warm shape through the glass, his palms sweat against the steering wheel, and he has to press them flat against his thighs and breathe, four counts in, four counts out, the method that has never once made him feel better but gives the inside of his skull something to do while the rest of him waits to be functional again.

It is an operation. That is what he tells himself. Risk assessment. Variable mapping. Pre-mission reconnaissance. The language helps. It gives the shape of a framework to something that has no framework. The raw, terrible, organism-level need to not be alone in the particular way that he is alone. Not the ordinary kind of alone that other people mean when they use the word, but something more like a frequency. A specific pitch of isolation that hums behind everything and makes the insects start when the silence gets too complete.

He tells himself he is simply a man who uses the library. This is not a lie, exactly. He does use it. He has developed, over the course of three weeks, a genuine and slightly terrifying command of the 500s, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, because it is the section closest to the circulation desk without being at the circulation desk, which means he can occupy the proximity without the exposure of being obviously, helplessly near you. He has read forty pages of a book on mycology. He understands, now, more than he ever wanted to about the way fungi colonise a host, the patience of it, the slow chemical conversation between the organism and the thing it has chosen, the way the colonisation is already complete long before the host has registered it as anything other than ordinary contact. He finds this funny, privately. 

What he does instead, every Wednesday and Friday and twice now on a Tuesday when he could not keep himself in the car any longer, is watch the way you run the building. The staff orient toward you when you enter a room without you doing anything to cause it, no performance, no theatrical authority, none of the particular displays that mediocre people use to remind everyone they're in charge. You don't remind anyone. You simply are, and the room reorganises around it, and you seem entirely unconscious of this, which is the part that gets him every time, the part that makes it very difficult to maintain a reading pace in the 500s. You laugh easily. You argue cheerfully with the senior archivist about periodical cataloguing in a way that suggests this argument is ongoing and beloved by both parties. You bring coffee to the front desk without being asked, and you remember how everyone takes it, and you do not make a thing of remembering. He watches all of this with the focused, cataloguing attention of a man who is building something in his chest from whatever materials you unknowingly provide, and the thing he is building does not have a name yet but it is large and it is structural and it is, he understands in the quiet of the car on the long watching nights, the only thing in him that has ever felt like it was built to last.

The plan, in its current form, is elegant. He rebuilt it from scratch after the second version failed at the contingency level, specifically at the contingency he had labeled involuntary physiological response to proximity, which is the clinical designation for the fact that thinking about the moment of first contact makes his hands stop working the way hands are supposed to work. The new plan is simple. The east wing, where the returns cart parks on Wednesdays. A plausible approach angle. A routine accident, a stumble, a collision, the ordinary clumsiness of a large man in a narrow aisle, followed by the recovery: immediate, useful, apologetic. Harmless.

The 'Dex' persona is good. He has been refining it for years, the pleasant, slightly disarming version of himself that people find unthreatening and easy to be around in equal measure. He is pretty, in the way that makes people trust him before they have decided to, the kind of face that reads as open and a little earnest, that makes the intensity in his eyes look like attentiveness rather than what it actually is. He knows this. He has used it the way he uses everything, deliberately, efficiently, without sentiment. He smooths the mask into place now, sitting in the car, and he breathes, and he tells himself with the deliberate weight of a man talking himself down from a ledge:Wednesday. East wing. Return cart. A simple operation. You have run more complex operations than this with less preparation. He does not let himself think about what the stakes actually are, because the stakes are everything. If she looks at him like he is something to run from, the insects will never stop. If she says no, there is no contingency. He has not written a contingency for that because he cannot make his hands write it.

He gets out of the car.

The library is warm. It smells like old paper and something faintly chemical, cleaning solution, the particular preservation spray used on the leather-bound historical texts in the archive room. He moves through the entrance with the easy, unhurried gait of a man who belongs here, which is not a performance so much as a decision, he belongs anywhere where you are. He takes up a position in the 500s, pulls the mycology book from the shelf by muscle memory, and opens it to a page he has already read four times. His ears do the work instead of his eyes, mapping the building by sound, the soft percussion of keyboards at the reference desk, the particular drag of the returns cart wheels on the east wing tile, the low exchange of voices near the periodicals stairs, and underneath all of it, moving through the ambient noise of the building the way a signal moves through interference, the sound of your footsteps.

Low heel. Leather sole. Even pace. Never rushed.

East wing.

He closes the mycology book. He puts it back with the spine flush to the shelf edge, the way it was when he took it. His pulse is a problem. He is aware of it in the way he is aware of a weapon malfunction mid-mission — the knowledge arriving clean and cold, without panic, but with the particular weight of a variable that has just gone outside acceptable parameters. He tries the military cadence. It does not cooperate. His heart is running its own rhythm, something frantic and uneven that has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with the fact that the east wing is right there, and the returns cart is right there, and you are —

You are right there.

Your back is to him. You are sliding a book onto a high shelf with the economy of someone who has done this ten thousand times, your arm raised, your chin tilted slightly, and the warm amber light of the east wing does something to the shape of you that he does not look at directly. He has learned, about certain things, not to look directly. He reaches for the nearest book without looking, his hand finds the spine by proximity, closes around it, and he makes himself stand in the posture of a man who came here for books and is having a perfectly ordinary Wednesday evening, while every nerve he has orients toward you with the fixed, unblinking precision of a targeting system that was never designed to be aimed at something like this.

He takes a step. He is calculating the approach angle, rechecking the variables, telling himself the mask is holding and the plan is intact and all he needs to do is execute the intersection — and then his shin finds the returns cart and the whole thing tilts and the books go everywhere.

Not the planned stumble. Just a stumble.

Fuck.

The silence between your turning and your first word is the longest interval he has ever counted. He is crouched on the floor with a stack of perfectly aligned books held against his chest like something he is protecting, his breath coming too short and too shallow, making himself swallow it, making himself take up less space in his own ribcage, waiting for the first word, the first signal, the first indication of whether he has ruined everything or whether there is still —

He hears you turn.

He goes still.

The silence between your turning and your first word is measured automatically, the way he measures everything. He is crouched on the floor with the books held against his chest, his breath controlled and even, he does not hyperventilate anymore, he does not do a great many things he used to do, the stillness goes all the way down now, and he waits for the first word with the particular patience of a man who has learned that patience is not the absence of wanting but the discipline to let the wanting be what it is without letting it run the operation.

"Oh my god, are you okay?"

Your voice hits him somewhere below the sternum — a clean, precise impact, the kind that doesn't announce itself until after, like a blade that finds the gap before the body knows the blade is there. It is warm. Immediately, genuinely warm, the warmth of someone whose first instinct when a stranger goes down hard in her library is uncomplicated concern, who is already moving toward him before the question has finished leaving her mouth, and he was prepared for a great many things but he was not prepared for toward. He has been running the variables for six weeks and he did not adequately weight this one — that you would simply, immediately, without calculation, come toward him. He was prepared for a great many outcomes. He weighted this one at fifteen percent. He adjusts.

He rises slowly, straightening to his full height — all six feet and one inch of it, the weight and the reach and the particular physical fact of him that he has spent years learning to make less visible, and he makes himself small in the only way he knows how. The soft voice. The open hands. The slight rueful tilt of the head that says clumsy, harmless, a little embarrassed about it. He has a good face for this. He has always had a good face for this — something in the arrangement of his features that reads as open and trustworthy before he has done anything to earn it, the kind of face that makes people lean toward him rather than away, and he is using every inch of it right now while his pulse does something frantic and uneven that has nothing to do with the fall.

"I'm fine," he says, and his voice comes out warm and a little self-deprecating, with just enough sheepishness to be disarming. "I'm so sorry. I didn't see the cart."

He is blinking too much. He knows he is blinking too much. He cannot make himself stop. His eyes when they lock onto your face have an intensity he cannot fully manage, a laser focus that sits badly against the apologetic register of everything else, and he is aware of this and cannot do anything about it and is standing here with a perfectly stacked set of library books held against his chest like a holy relic waiting for you to decide what he is.

You look at the books in his arms — perfectly stacked, spines out, ordered by height with a neatness that has nothing to do with the accident that produced it — and then you look at his face, and he watches you take in the blinking and the too-quick apology and the white-knuckled care with which he is holding what he has gathered, and he waits for the recalibration, for the professional distance to come down like a shutter —

You reach out and gently lift the top two books from the stack. Not all of them. Just two, redistributing the weight, freeing his arms slightly, the practical instinctive gesture of someone who has looked at a person holding too much and responded to that specific thing without making anything of it. "You really did stack them perfectly," you say, and there is something in your voice that is dry and kind at the same time, the specific combination of a person who has noticed something a little unexpected and chosen to respond to the part of it that is charming. "Most people would've just shoved them back any which way."

The 'Dex' mask is still there but the seam is showing and underneath it is something that is not the performance at all — just the raw, stripped-back fact of a man who braced for a door closing and has found it still open. "I didn't want to make more work for you," he says, and it is true, and it is one of the more honest things he has said to another person in a long time, and the honesty of it sits on his face for one unguarded second before he gets it back under control.

You try not to smile. He watches you try. "You can put them on the cart," you say. "That's what it's for."

He looks at the books in his hands. He does not put them down. "I'd rather help put them back, if that's okay. I knocked them over." He lets the smile come through properly now, easy, a little rueful, the smile of a man who knows he's being slightly ridiculous and is comfortable enough in his own skin to own it. "It's only fair."

You look at him for a moment, really look, the assessing look of a woman who is careful by habit, and he stands very still and lets you do it, because being looked at by you, even carefully, is something he has been looking forward to for six weeks; your eyes don't linger on the scar across his cheek, skipping over it like it was as natural as his lips or nose.

You are already repositioning the cart against the shelf, glancing back at him over your shoulder with an expression that is entirely open, entirely unafraid. "Come on. You can help me put them back since you clearly know where they go."

He follows you.

His boots make a soft sound on the library carpet and he keeps an easy, non-threatening distance, close enough to be useful, calibrated to the inch, and he is hyper-aware of everything: the back of your head, the way you move through the aisle, the specific quality of the air in this narrow space between the shelves which is warmer than the rest of the building and smells like old paper and something faintly floral that he files with everything else. He hands you books, spine out, author's name forward, and the rhythm of it establishes itself without either of you deciding it should.

"Do you need help with the higher ones?" His voice comes out lower than intended and he adjusts, tries again, deploys the slight self-deprecating tilt of a man who knows he is being a little much and is offering to be useful as a form of apology for it. "I can reach almost anything. Just — whatever you need. I'm right here."

There is a lot of I'm right here in that sentence in terms of what it is doing underneath the words. He is aware of this. He does not think you are.

You glance back at him, and you are trying not to smile — he can see the effort of it, the slight press of your lips — and the effort is somehow worse than the smile would be. "The top shelf," you say. "I usually hold onto the unit to climb up, which is definitely not approved." You hand him a book, spine out, and then another, and the rhythm of it establishes itself without either of you deciding it should — you handing, him reaching, the warm quiet of the east wing settling around you both — and he lets out a breath that he has been holding, in some form or another, for six weeks.

You talk while you work. Not the composed, head-of-the-building version of talking but the easier version, the version that comes out when you are at ease in your own aisle with your own books and the evening is winding toward its close and you have provisionally decided that the man beside you is fine. You tell him about the biography section — the gap on the third shelf you've been trying to fill for six months, the ongoing argument with the acquisitions budget that you are clearly winning on points if not on funding. You hold up a battered donated hardback with a library sticker half-peeled from the spine, showing him the annotations in the margins, the dog-eared corners worn soft with handling. "Somebody loved this very much," you say, with the expression of a person genuinely moved by the evidence of someone else's devotion. "Which means I can't be annoyed that they wrote in it. I can only be a little annoyed."

"Only a little?" he says.

"I'm a professional," you say, and you slot it onto the shelf with a tenderness that entirely contradicts the exasperation, and he watches you do it and feels something move in his chest that he is going to have to examine later, alone, in the car, where it cannot reach his face.

You tell him about the children's reading programme on Tuesday afternoons with the specific delight of someone describing the best part of their week. The way the kids come in already certain of what they want, six years old and completely decided, the most refreshing thing. The small boy last week who had informed you with great authority that sharks could not stop swimming or they would die, then asked if there was a book about sharks, then asked if sharks came to the library, and you had told him very seriously that sharks were avid readers but found the revolving door difficult. You tell this with the expression of someone reliving genuine joy and he watches your face while you tell it and he thinks: there it is. There is the smile from the window. There it is from three feet away.

He watches you stack the books from the trolley in groups of four before you begin shelving — a small unconscious order imposed on the task before the task begins. Four books. Set them down. Four more. He watches it happen twice before he understands what he is seeing, and when he understands it the breath moves through him in four counts without him deciding to breathe.

He does not say anything about it. He hands you the next book, spine up, author's name forward, and says nothing about it at all.

"Do you always tell the kids that superheroes read?" he asks, because he knows the answer and wants to hear you say it from here rather than through a windshield.

You look at him with an expression that is partly surprised and partly pleased that he asked. "Always," you say, without a trace of self-consciousness. "Because it's true. And because a kid who thinks Captain America goes to the library is a kid who thinks the library is worth going to." A beat, the beat of someone deciding whether to say the next thing, and then deciding to. "I may have told a child last month that Steve Rogers came to this specific branch after he was defrosted. Because of the collection."

"Did he?" Dex says.

"The collection is excellent," you say, very seriously, and he laughs — a real one, a short surprised sound that gets out before the mask can review it, and the surprise of it is on his face for one full second before he gets it back, and he watches you notice it, watches your expression do something small and warm in response, and he files it carefully in the part of him that keeps the things he cannot look at directly.

The trolley is empty.

He realises it at the same moment you do. You look at the bare cart, then at your watch, and a small crease of surprise appears between your brows. He knows what you are calculating. He calculated it four minutes ago.

"That was quick," you say.

"You're efficient," he says.

"We're efficient," you correct, and the we is nothing, is a casual inclusion that means exactly what it says, and it lands in him like a key finding a lock it was not made for and turning it anyway. He holds out the last book. Your fingers close around the other end before he releases it, and for one fraction of a second the book is held between you both, and the distance between his hand and yours is three inches, and he is acutely, devastatingly aware of every millimetre of it, the warmth of that gap, the weight of the book as a shared object, and he lets go before the moment becomes a moment.

"Thank you," you say, book tucked under your arm, already turning. "For the help."

"Anytime," he says. The word comes out steady. It costs him.

He is almost at the exit — almost through the door and back into the cold city air, almost clean away with everything he came for and nothing he cannot account for — when he stops. He stops because something has occurred to him, something the 'Dex' mask had filed as inadvisable and which the thing underneath the 'Dex' mask has apparently decided to do anyway, because the laugh got out and the we undid something that had been carefully constructed, and he is at the door with his hand on it and he turns back.

You are at the circulation desk, already bent over something, the particular quality of your focus when you're alone with your work even more concentrated than when people are around. He watches you for two seconds. He makes himself stop after four.

"I feel like I should apologise more formally," he says, and his voice carries across the quiet ground floor with the warmth of a man entirely comfortable making conversation, the easy confidence of someone who has nothing to hide and knows how he reads. "For the cart. I cost you time and made you do the same work twice."

You look up. Mildly puzzled. Mildly amused. "You helped put everything away," you say. "We're even."

"We finished thirteen minutes early," he says, and he lets the smile come through fully now, the disarming one, the self-aware one, the one that reads as charming without trying too hard. "Which means I actually saved you time. Which means technically you owe me."

Something in your expression recalibrates. The look of a person who has just discovered that the man from the east wing aisle is also, unexpectedly, a little funny. "Is that the logic you're going with," you say.

"I'm open to a different interpretation," he says. "But I think the maths holds."

The corner of your mouth does something that is not quite a smile and is considerably more dangerous than one. You reach for the notepad on the desk. You pick up the pen. And you write your number down with the expression of a person who has made a decision and is at peace with it, tearing the page from the pad with a clean neat motion and holding it out across the desk.

"Next time you cause a shelving incident," you say, "you can call ahead."

He crosses the lobby. He takes the piece of paper from your hand, the distance between his fingers and yours smaller than three inches, registered and filed, and folds it once along a clean crease and puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket, close to his chest, where it immediately becomes the most significant object he is currently carrying. More significant than the badge. More significant than the weapon at his hip that you do not know about.

"Goodnight," he says.

"Goodnight," you say, and you are already turning back to the desk, and he walks to the door and through it and out into the cold city air and he does not look back.

He makes it to the corner before he has to stop walking.

He stands with his back against the wall of the building next door, eyes closed, hands flat against his thighs, and he breathes — four counts in, four counts out — while the city moves around him and the insects, for the first time in longer than he can remember, are completely, entirely silent. Not manageable. Not reduced to a tolerable volume. Silent. The paper is in his inside pocket and it is the first thing he has chosen to keep close to his chest in longer than he can accurately calculate, and the warmth of it is either the warmth of a folded piece of notepaper or it is something else entirely, and he is not going to examine which one it is tonight.

He opens his eyes. Through the library window he can see your silhouette at the desk — bent forward, focused, the particular quality of your attention when no one is watching. He checks his watch. Eight forty-seven. Thirteen minutes earlier than your usual closing routine. He helped with the shelving and the shelving went faster and you are thirteen minutes ahead of yourself and he did that. That small, measurable, entirely deniable difference in the shape of your evening — he did that. He is already, in the most practical and ordinary possible way, useful to you.

He is going to be so much more useful than this.

He gives you four minutes. Then he follows.

The window is lit.

You are there.

Your coat is off. You move through the apartment and he can see it properly now — the accumulated warmth of it, the specific living-in of a space that belongs to a person who cares about where she is. There are plants everywhere — on the windowsill, trailing from shelves, a large one in the corner that catches the lamplight and turns it green at the edges. He counts seven from this angle and suspects more. They are not neglected. They are the plants of someone who tends things, who notices when things need water, who has the patience to keep something alive over time. The lamps are warm-toned, two of them visible from here, the specific amber quality of someone who has thought about the light she wants to live in rather than simply accepting the overhead. There are blankets on the couch — he can see the edge of one, the particular softness of something used regularly, something reached for at the end of days like this one. The fire escape runs along the outside of the east-facing window and even in the dark he can make out the shape of another plant out there, something in a terracotta pot, and the edge of what might be a folded chair. A person who uses her fire escape as an extension of the apartment in warmer months. A person who makes the most of every space available to her. He files this. He files all of it.

You make something to eat. He watches the sequence of it, counter, stove, the practiced back and forth of someone who has made this particular thing enough times that the movements are their own kind of order, their own ritual. He wants to know what it is. He wants to know what you eat on a Wednesday evening after close, whether it is the same most nights or whether it varies, what the logic is. He wants to know everything about the shape of your ordinary life with the comprehensive, slightly terrifying hunger of a man who cannot tolerate a gap in the data when the data is you.

You make coffee. He can tell by the choreography of it. Then you open the refrigerator, and even at seventy metres through a rifle scope he can see the particular carton you take from the door shelf, the size and shape of it, the way you shake it once before you open it — and it is not milk. The colour is wrong for milk, the consistency when you pour it is slightly different, and he has been watching you long enough and carefully enough that the difference registers cleanly. Coconut milk. You take your coffee with coconut milk, at the end of a Wednesday evening, standing at your kitchen counter with the lamp on and the coat off and your hair loose, and this detail — this small, specific, entirely ordinary detail — lands in him with the weight of something he has been given rather than taken. Like you handed it across a desk. Like you held it out and said here.

He wants to know if it is always coconut milk or only sometimes. He wants to know if you have a particular brand, if there is a reason for it or if it is simply what you prefer, if you ever run out and substitute something else or if running out means a trip to the corner store regardless of the hour. He wants to know this with an intensity that he recognises as disproportionate to the information itself and does not care, because the disproportionality is the point, the disproportionality is the whole truth of what this is — that there is no detail about you that is too small, no variable too minor to matter, no piece of the complete picture of you that he does not want to hold.

You eat at the counter. Standing, one hand braced against the surface, looking at something he cannot see from this angle — your phone, maybe, or the middle distance where people look when they are processing a day and deciding what to keep. He wonders what you are keeping from today. He wonders if any of it is him.

The insects do not start when he wonders this. That is the thing that undoes him, quietly, on the cold rooftop with the scope at his eye. Usually the wondering is precisely when they start — the not-knowing, the unconfirmed variable, the gap in the data where something could go wrong. But they stay silent. They stay silent because the silence is not about certainty. It is not contingent on the variable being resolved. It is contingent only on you, on the simple fact of your existence in his field of vision, on the coconut milk and the counter and the loose hair and the window you pause at without knowing you do it, and he understands with the particular clarity of a man who has spent a very long time learning to read his own warning systems that this is different. That you are different. That none of the others — not one of them, not Eileen Mercer with her careful structured sessions and her yellow notepad, not any of the guttering candle-light people he has tried to orbit before — none of them did this. None of them made the corpse feel like it might not be a corpse at all.

You rinse the plate. He watches the way you do even this — efficient, unhurried, no wasted motion, the same economy you bring to the library shelves. He watches you pause at the counter after, your hands braced on the edge, looking at something he cannot see, and the stillness of it is different from the stillness of the library, looser at the edges, the specific looseness of a person who has put down the weight of being in charge and is simply existing inside the space that belongs to her.

Then you water the plants.

You move from plant to plant with a small watering can that you fill at the kitchen sink, and you do it with the unhurried attention of someone who knows each one individually, stopping longer at some than others, touching a leaf here and there, the particular way you handle them telling him things about you that he could not have extracted from the parking lot or the 500s or any amount of watching from the wrong distance. You talk to them. He is almost certain you talk to them. He can see the slight movement of your mouth at one point, bent over the large one in the corner, and the realisation of it does something to the quality of his attention that he does not have a clinical designation for and is not going to look at directly tonight.

You love them. This is not data. This is a fact about you that has no operational relevance and that he is going to carry with him regardless.

You move away from the window, deeper into the apartment, and the kitchen light goes off. A new light appears — warmer, lower, the bedroom lamp — and the specific quality of it tells him you are winding down. He watches the light. He watches the shadows it makes at the edge of the window frame. He watches the brief silhouette of you passing across the room once, twice, the particular unhurried movement of someone with nowhere to be and no performance left to give, and he thinks: this is it. This is the version that exists when no one is watching.

He is watching.

The bathroom light comes on from behind your bathroom, he can see the glow of the light that bleeds into the bathroom. He watches the warm glow of it and he waits with the particular patience that is no longer the white-knuckled patience of a man holding himself back but something cleaner than that, something that comes from understanding that the waiting is part of it. That every minute of this is a minute he is building something. She is in there and she is going through whatever she does at the end of a day, the small private rituals of a person alone in her own space, and he cannot see it from here and he does not need to see it because the fact of it is enough. The fact that she exists in there, moving through those rituals, is enough for tonight. He will learn the rest gradually. He will be patient.

He thinks about the faint floral quality of the air in the east wing aisle, which he catalogued this evening for the first time at close range, which means it is something she wears on her skin rather than her clothes — a lotion, maybe, or a perfume applied at the pulse points, the specific places where the warmth of the body carries it. He wants to know what it is. He wants to know the name of it and what it smells like described and whether she has worn it for years or whether it is new, whether she bought it for herself or whether someone gave it to her once, and the thought of the latter produces a response in him that he does not examine.

He will find out. He has time.

The bathroom light turns off.

The bedroom lamp is still on. He watches your silhouette pass the window again — your hair down, something softer on than the work clothes, the private version of you that the library never sees — and you stop at the bookshelf. He can see it from here, the dark shape of it against the warmer interior, and he watches you run your fingers along the spines the way you run your fingers along the library spines — with the quick, certain touch of someone who knows what she is looking for before she finds it. You pull one out. He cannot see the title from seventy metres in the dark and this is the specific gap in his data that bothers him most acutely tonight, more than the food, more than the perfume, because books are the thing he can talk to you about. Books are the territory you share. He wants to know what you read at the end of a Wednesday when you come home from the library and water your plants and make coconut milk coffee and pull something from the shelf before bed.

He’d have ask for a recommendation and see what you suggest

You settle. He watches this for a long time. There is nothing to see, technically — only the warm square of the window and the faint suggestion of the light inside it — but the watching is not about seeing. The watching is about the knowing. About the fact that she is in there, reading, in the warm lamp-glow with the plants on the windowsill and the blankets and the coconut milk coffee going cold on the nightstand probably, and the world outside her window is moving and indifferent and she has no idea that someone is lying on a rooftop seventy metres away in the cold thinking about the way she shook the carton before she opened it and talked to her plants in the dark.

He watches the light for a long time.

He watches it begin to dim — not all at once, but gradually, the particular dimming of a lamp being turned down by degrees, or of someone who has fallen asleep with it on and whose hand has slipped. He watches the quality of it change and change again until it is barely there, the faintest warm edge at the window frame, and then it is gone.

She is asleep.

He stays on the rooftop for a while longer. Long after the window is dark, long after there is any operational justification for remaining in this position in this cold. He stays because the insects are quiet and the cold air is clean and the paper is in his inside pocket and he is not ready to go back to the version of himself that exists without this. The version that sits in an apartment where everything is in its correct place and the photograph on the wall is level to the millimetre and the absence of a North Star is a sound that fills the whole room.

He does not put on the Bullseye costume tonight. He thinks about it — there is work to be done, there is always work to be done, the city does not run out of things that need his particular kind of attention — and he decides against it. Not because he can't. Because tonight is a different kind of night. Tonight is the night of the first brick, and the first brick requires a kind of attention that does not have room for anything else. He wants to sit with it. He wants to carry the paper in his inside pocket and the coconut milk and the plants and the eleven minutes behind the frosted pane all the way home without putting anything else on top of it.

Eventually he disassembles the rifle. In the dark, by feel, in the time it takes most people to tie their shoes. He replaces it in the bag. He zips it closed. He looks one more time at your window — dark now, the city moving quietly behind it, the plants dim shapes on the sill, the fire escape empty, the whole apartment sealed and dark and interior and hers — and he lets himself have it for four counted seconds.

Then he stands. 

Then he goes and his only thoughts are of his north star. 

He walked back to his car at the library and drove over to your apartment, sitting outside with a clear view of your window. He sits in the car for a long time. Your building stands quiet and brick-dark, your window a small dark square on the sixth floor, and he watches it the way he has watched the library window for six weeks — hands on the wheel, engine off, the particular stillness of a man who has found the only fixed point in a dark map and is not going anywhere.

You are the North Star.

He has had others before. People he tried to orbit, fixed points he built his survival around, the bright and guttering things he mistook for stars because they were the brightest lights available at the time. He has had them and he has lost them and each time the dark closed in a little wider and the buzzing got a little louder and the corpse kept walking because that is what corpses do. He knows what loss does to him. He knows the shape of the dark on the other side of it and he is intimately, precisely acquainted with the cost of losing a North Star and he is not going there again.

He has her number in his inside pocket. She said next time like it was already decided. She waters her plants at night and takes her coffee with coconut milk and reads in bed and the lamp goes out gradually rather than all at once, which means she falls asleep with it on, which means she is a person who reads until sleep finds her rather than reading until a decided hour and then putting the book down. He is going to learn the rest. He is going to learn all of it, one layer at a time, with the patience of a man who understands that this is the most important operation he has ever run and who is going to get it right.

He breathes. Four counts in. Four counts out.

Next Wednesday he will have coconut milk in his coffee, in the car, while he watches the lights die floor by floor. It seems like the right thing. It seems like the beginning of a correspondence that only he knows is happening, a conversation that is entirely his until he is ready to let it be shared. He will sit in the car with the coconut milk coffee and watch the amber light of the ground floor and think about the plants and the blankets and the eleven minutes behind the frosted pane and the book he could not see the title of, and he will wait, and he will be patient, and he will be so careful.

He will be back

dex finds out the same way he finds out about everything he doesn't want to know — you tell him casually, without preamble, without any of the softening that the information genuinely warrants, like it isn't going to detonate quietly in the middle of an otherwise perfectly acceptable monday afternoon.

"the agency called," you say, not looking up from your phone, thumb scrolling through something with complete serenity. "apparently there's a companion who hasn't been placed. blind. they said he's been waiting a while and nobody's come forward and i just thought—"

"no," says dex.

"i haven't finished."

"you don't need to." he sets down the fitted sheet he'd been folding — sets it down with rather more force than linen requires, smoothing it once with his palm in a way that is not entirely about the sheet — and turns to look at you with his arms crossed over his chest and his tail already doing the low, slow sweep that means the situation has been assessed and found wanting. "the answer is no. whatever comes after i just thought — no."

"dex, he has nowhere to go."

"then the agency will find him somewhere. that is, presumably, what the agency is for." he says it reasonably, which is to say he says it in the voice he uses when he wants credit for being reasonable while also being completely immovable. "this apartment is not a shelter."

"he has nowhere to go," you say again, softer this time, setting your phone down and giving him the full weight of your attention, which is exactly the thing he'd been hoping you wouldn't do. "he's been in the facility for months. nobody's come forward because of the disability and i just — i couldn't see the listing and do nothing, it didn't feel right."

dex looks at you. you look back at him. his tail does one long, deliberate arc and settles.

"it's a trial," you say carefully. "just to see if it works. a few weeks, completely low pressure, and if it doesn't work then we reassess. that's all."

"a trial," he repeats, tasting the word like it's something he's not sure he wants to swallow. "so not even a decision, it's a process — a process you've already set in motion, that i'm finding out about now, this afternoon, while i'm doing the laundry." he picks the sheet back up because his hands need something and the sheet is there and he folds it with the focused, meticulous care of a man who is being very grown up about everything and would appreciate if someone noted that. "how long has this been happening."

"it wasn't really a plan, it was more — i saw the listing last week and i enquired just to get more information and then they called back and things moved a bit faster than i expected and—" you stop. you do the face. he has a whole internal catalogue of your expressions and this one — open, a little sheepish, softly certain — is the one that has preceded every argument he has ever lost. "he's a puppy, dex. just a little blind dog. he's been in that facility since he was born and nobody wanted him because they took one look at the disability and decided it was too much trouble and i just — his name is matty." you say the name like it's a closing argument, like something called matty is simply impossible to refuse, like you know exactly what you're doing and you do. "i couldn't leave him there."

dex stands in the middle of the living room with the fitted sheet in his hands and says nothing for a long moment. his jaw is set. his broad shoulders, already carrying the particular tension of a man who had been having a perfectly fine afternoon, draw back slightly like he's bracing himself against something he can already feel the shape of. "matty," he says.

"matty."

"a blind puppy called matty who is going to live here."

"just for the trial—"

"and this is the first i'm hearing of it." he doesn't shout. dex never shouts, he considers it beneath him, but the careful flatness of his voice communicates the shout perfectly well without it. he takes the sheet to the bedroom because the laundry needs finishing and also because he needs a different room, and you follow him, which he expected, materialising in the doorway while he opens the wardrobe with perhaps slightly more force than necessary and begins stacking things inside with architectural precision.

"baby," you say, and he feels his ears move toward the word before he can stop them, a small involuntary tilt that he corrects immediately and hopes you didn't notice. you noticed. "talk to me."

"i'm talking." he smooths a pillowcase flat against the shelf. "i'm saying that i think it would have been reasonable to be included in this decision before it became a fact. that's all. i'm not making a scene." he closes the wardrobe, picks up the empty basket, moves past you into the hallway and then into the bathroom because there is always something to be done in the bathroom and right now he needs a task more than he needs to be right. the bathroom is already clean — he cleaned it thursday, he cleans it every thursday — but the mirror could be polished and he finds the cloth under the sink and starts on it, working in slow, firm circles, his reflection watching him from behind the smear he's clearing away.

you appear in the doorway behind him, arms folded, shoulder against the frame. "your tail is doing the thing," you say.

"my tail is fine."

"dex, it hasn't stopped since i put my phone down."

he glances at it in the mirror. it is, in fairness, still doing the low, measured sweep of something working through feelings it hasn't fully processed yet. he makes a conscious effort and it stills, mostly. "i simply feel," he says, returning to the mirror with great dignity, "that a decision involving a living creature coming into our home — a dog, specifically, a dog that will require things and make noise and take up space — might have warranted more than a conversation that started with apparently and gave me no opportunity to respond before it was already decided." he polishes a section of mirror that is already perfectly clear. his reflection looks back at him, jaw tight, the muscles in his shoulders shifting under his shirt as he works. "that's a reasonable thing to feel."

"it is," you say, which throws him slightly because he'd been braced for an argument. "it's completely reasonable and i should have told you sooner. i know that."

he keeps polishing the mirror. there is nothing left to polish. he polishes it anyway. "how much stuff has already arrived," he says.

the small pause that follows tells him everything before you even speak. "just the essentials," you say carefully.

he puts the cloth down and goes to the hall cupboard and opens it, and stands there in the hallway taking in the evidence of a decision made without him. two ceramic bowls, pale blue, paw prints printed on the side in white — two of them, sitting on a mat shaped unmistakably like a bone, which he finds completely unnecessary as a design choice. behind the bowls, folded with some care, a round dog bed in a soft cloud print that is frankly more thoughtfully chosen than anything dex owns, thick and cushioned in a way that suggests someone spent real time in the shop deciding. he stands there with one hand on the cupboard door and the other braced against the frame, the breadth of his shoulders filling the hallway, and he looks at it all for a long, quiet moment.

"the mat is shaped like a bone," he says.

"it's cute."

"the bowls have paw prints on them." he reaches out and picks one up, turns it over in his hands, sets it back down exactly where it was. "there are two of them."

"water and food, that's just standard—"

"i know what two bowls means," he says, and there is something in his voice that is not quite anger anymore, something lower and more complicated than that, and he closes the cupboard and walks to the kitchen and turns on the tap. he rolls his sleeves up to his elbows and begins doing the dishes. the dishes that are done. he did every one of them this morning, washed and dried and stacked with his usual care, but he runs the hot water and picks up the sponge and starts again from the beginning, working through the glasses first, then the mugs, then a plate that absolutely does not need attention, his broad back to you and the line of his shoulders rigid and deliberate, every movement controlled in the way that means the control is doing a lot of work right now.

you come and stand behind him. you don't say anything for a moment, just exist at his shoulder, close enough that he can feel the warmth of you, and he scrubs a mug that was already clean with the focused energy of a man who has redirected everything into limescale that does not exist.

"dex," you say softly.

he scrubs the mug.

"baby," you say, softer, and you reach up — and he knows what you're going to do and he almost moves away, almost, but your fingers find the base of his left ear and scratch, slow and deliberate, right at the spot where the fur is softest and where every single thing he's been holding tightly in his chest simply — loosens, without his permission, without any input from him whatsoever, his body making unilateral decisions as it always does when you do that. the long breath that leaves him is embarrassingly involuntary. his shoulders, which had been up around his ears, drop a full inch. his hands slow in the water.

"that's not fair," he says, but the edges have gone out of it.

"i know," you say, still scratching, working slow circles, and he stands at the sink with his wet hands and his eyes half closed and his tail doing one long, reluctant, settling sweep behind him like it's giving up on being angry independently of him. you step closer and he feels you rise up and then your lips press to his cheek — warm and unhurried, a proper kiss, not a peck — and something in the last of his resistance simply folds.

"he's just a puppy," you murmur, your cheek against his. "i promise you, dex. just a little blind puppy who needed somewhere to go, that's all this is."

he stares at the water in the sink for a moment. then he says, "saturday," in a voice that has mostly just accepted the situation.

"saturday," you confirm, gently.

"fine." he picks the sponge back up, and you stay at his side a moment longer, your hand trailing from his ear to his shoulder and then away, and he listens to you pad back down the hallway and stands in the kitchen and finishes the dishes, all of them, slowly and with great thoroughness, until the water goes cold and the rack is full and there is absolutely nothing left to clean.

saturday comes the way saturdays do when you've been dreading them all week — suddenly, with too much light coming through the curtains and no amount of willpower sufficient to make it not be saturday.

dex is up before you. you find him in the kitchen at half past eight, already dressed in dark trousers and a clean shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, already making tea, already occupying the space with the specific energy of a man who has decided that today is going to be completely fine and has been up since seven constructing that decision. the flat is immaculate in a way it wasn't when you went to bed. he has reorganised the kitchen cupboards — you can tell because the mugs are alphabetical now, which they have never been — and the surfaces have the particular gleam of someone who has been cleaning since before sunrise. you decide not to mention any of this.

"morning," you say, and your voice is still soft with sleep.

"morning." he doesn't look up from the kettle immediately, but when he turns to hand you your mug — the right one, the wide one with the slightly chipped handle that you always want on saturdays, without being asked, without any discussion, just handed to you because he knows — his green eyes move over your face in that careful, cataloguing way and then settle into something neutral. his ears are doing the barely-there low tilt at the tips, the almost-imperceptible flatness that only happens when he's managing something internally and doesn't want you to see the effort it's taking. "what time are you leaving," he says.

"around ten. i want to get there early so he has time to settle before the journey back." you wrap both hands around the mug and lean against the opposite counter and watch him. he has his own tea but he's not drinking it, just holding it, thumb moving in a slow absent arc against the ceramic. "you could still come," you say.

"i'm busy," he says, with the pleasantness of someone who has prepared this answer.

"dex, it's half eight on a saturday."

"i have things i want to get done." he says it in a way that is perfectly calm and perfectly final and leaves no opening, and you look at him for a moment — at the pressed shirt and the alphabetical mugs and the too-still tail and the ears he can't quite convince to sit right — and you make the decision not to push it. he's here. he's making your tea. he reorganised the cupboards at some point in the small hours because he needed to do something with all of it, and that is, in its own dex way, a form of acceptance.

"okay," you say simply, and he blinks, just slightly, like he'd been braced for more resistance and isn't entirely sure what to do with the absence of it. you finish your tea and go to get dressed, and when you come back through he's moved to the couch with a book open across his knees, legs stretched out, reading with the focused attention of a man who is absolutely not counting down the minutes.

you gather your bag and your keys and your jacket and you stop in front of the couch and look down at him, and after a moment he looks up. his green eyes meet yours and stay there, and for a second all the composure and the careful neutrality goes very quiet and it's just him looking at you, all that complicated warmth he carries around and never quite says out loud sitting right at the surface.

you reach down and scratch behind his ear, slow and proper, the way that works, and his eyes close before he can decide not to let them. you lean down and press a kiss to his cheek, hold it there for a moment, your hand still in his hair.

"i'll be back by noon," you murmur. "he is just a puppy, baby. i promise you. just a puppy."

"go on," he says quietly, after a beat. "you'll be late."

you straighten up and go, and the door clicks shut behind you, and the flat settles into a quiet that feels slightly different from the usual saturday morning quiet — fuller, somehow, or perhaps just heavier. dex sits on the couch with the book open to a page he stopped actually reading some time ago, and one hand raised almost to the cheek you kissed, hovering there for a moment before he registers what he's doing and sets it back down on the cushion. his tail moves once, slowly, and then is still. outside the window the city is doing its ordinary saturday activities.

the drive over is fine. perfectly fine. you have the address pulled up on your phone, the windows cracked just enough to let in the cool of the morning, and a bag of supplies sitting on the back seat that you'd packed the night before with the careful optimism of someone who has done their research. treats, a soft blanket, a little collar tag with your address on it that you'd had engraved at the pet shop on the high street while the man behind the counter made small appreciative noises about what a responsible owner you were. you'd felt good about that. you'd felt prepared. you'd spent the whole week reading about blind dogs — about scent mapping and sound cues and the importance of consistency, about never rearranging furniture without warning, about how they were just as capable and loving and full of personality as any sighted dog, just navigating the world differently. you felt ready. you felt, if anything, slightly over-ready, which was the most comfortable place to be.

it's only when you pull into the car park and cut the engine and look up at the building that the ready feeling starts doing something odd and complicated in your chest.

you sit there for a moment with your hands still on the wheel, looking at the logo above the entrance. the clean lettering, the small emblem beside it. you know that emblem. you know it the way you know your own address or the sound of your own front door — intimately, without having to think about it, because you have been looking at it on paperwork for a month now. it's on the welcome pack in your kitchen drawer. it's on dex's placement forms, filed neatly in the folder you keep on the second shelf. it's on every piece of correspondence the agency has ever sent you, always in the top left corner, always the same.

it is the same agency.

you sit with this. your very reasonable brain offers a very reasonable explanation — companions come from agencies, matty is a companion, this is the agency, and that is simply what logistics means and there is nothing strange about it whatsoever. they probably have an entirely separate department for animals. a different floor, different staff, a completely distinct operation that happens to share a building and a logo because that is how large organisations work. you are here to pick up a blind puppy and take him home and everything is going to be completely straightforward. you pick up your bag and get out of the car.

the receptionist is the same woman who processed dex's paperwork a month ago, sitting at the same desk with the same efficient warmth, and she looks up when you push through the glass doors into the cool hush of the reception and her face does the immediate, genuine thing of recognition, which is both nice and faintly destabilising.

"hi," you say, with the confidence of someone who has done this before, shifting your bag onto your shoulder and crossing to the desk. "i'm here for the foster pickup — matthew. matty. we spoke on the phone last week."

her whole face softens with the particular relief of someone for whom matthew has been a prolonged source of collective office concern. "of course, yes," she says, typing quickly. "we're so glad someone came forward, he's been with us for a while now." she glances toward the corridor that runs behind the desk and then back at you with a warm, faintly amused expression that you don't yet have the context to interpret correctly. "he was in one of the prep rooms this morning — last i saw him he was just getting his suit on. he's very punctual, so he shouldn't be long at all."

you look at her.

"his suit," you say.

"mm." she says it with the total ease of someone stating a simple and unremarkable fact about matthew, the way you might say he prefers the window seat or he takes his coffee black. "he always dresses properly for first meetings. very particular about first impressions."

you stand at the desk and feel the bottom of something drop out, quietly and then completely, like a lift whose cable has given way. the word suit is sitting in the air in front of you and the receptionist is looking at you with a pleasant open expression and giving no indication whatsoever that a dog wearing a suit is an unusual thing to have said. the listing, you think suddenly. the listing had no photograph. no age. just the sparse careful language of it — companion, blind, long wait, no current placement — nothing that would have told you anything concrete about who was actually behind it. you had filled in the blanks yourself, helpfully, with the image of something small and warm and four-legged, and the listing had let you.

you are about to say something — the question is fully formed and pressing urgently at the back of your throat — when you hear footsteps in the corridor behind the desk.

they are even and unhurried, with the particular intentional quality of someone who knows precisely where everything is and is moving through the space with quiet confidence, each step placed deliberately. underneath the footsteps, a soft rhythmic tap against the floor. and then the door at the end of the corridor opens, and matthew murdock walks in, and every version of this morning that you'd imagined evaporates completely and simultaneously.

he is tall. considerably taller than anything you'd been picturing, and broad through the shoulders in a way that his very well-fitted charcoal suit does nothing to conceal. his hair is dark and neatly kept, and sitting on top of it, rising to sharp alert points, are a pair of german shepherd ears — black tipped, the inner fur a warm tan, angled forward with immediate attentive precision as he steps through the door, scanning the room the way ears do when they are doing all the work that eyes usually do. his tail, the same black and tan colouring, sweeps in a single slow arc behind him as he enters — not the frantic uncontrolled wag of excitement but the careful measured movement of someone whose tail is registering feelings that the rest of him is doing its best to manage professionally. he has a white cane in his right hand, the tip sweeping a short practised arc across the floor in front of him, and he is wearing a white shirt with a deep red tie knotted cleanly at his throat, and over his nose sit a pair of black sunglasses, dark and opaque, giving nothing away. his face beneath them is open and calm, angled in your direction with the careful attentiveness of someone who is listening to the room rather than looking at it. his eyes, just barely visible above the frame of the sunglasses when he tilts his head, are a warm brown, and completely, perfectly still.

he smiles. it is an easy smile, genuinely warm, with a self-deprecating quality at the edges that suggests he has walked into rooms and produced this specific reaction in people many times and has built his entire approach around making it as painless as possible for everyone involved. "hi," he says, and his voice is low and warm with a new york cadence underneath it that sounds pleasantly incongruous in the grey london morning. "you must be the foster placement." his cane hand stills. he extends his other hand toward you — toward the exact location of you, with an accuracy that prickles the back of your neck in a way you can't quite account for — and his tail does one more careful, hopeful arc. "matt murdock. really glad to meet you."

you look at his hand. you look at the ears, tall and pointed and swivelled precisely toward the sound of you. you look at the tail. you look at the sunglasses. you look at the suit, which is, objectively, extremely well fitted, and you think about the bag in your car with the treats and the blanket and the little engraved collar tag from the pet shop on the high street that says matty in a cheerful rounded font with your home address underneath it.

you shake his hand. "hi," you say. your voice sounds surprisingly normal. "it's really good to meet you."

his ears angle forward a fraction and something shifts in the quality of his attention — sharpens, imperceptibly — and you have the sudden uncomfortable feeling that your heartbeat is currently providing him with a great deal more information than you are consciously offering. "the agency mentioned you've already got a companion at home," he says pleasantly, his tail settling into its slow sway. "that's a real relief to hear. the settling-in period is so much easier when the placement already understands how things work."

"yes," you say. "dex. he's been with me about a month." something moves across matt's face at the name — very quick, very small, smoothed back into pleasantness before you can name it. his ears shift, a fractional backward tilt before they correct themselves forward again, and he nods in the easy way of someone filing information carefully away.

"great," he says, and moves on without making anything of it.

the receptionist slides the paperwork across the desk with the expression of someone who considers what has just occurred to be entirely above her pay grade to comment on. you sign everything. your hand moves through the boxes on autopilot while your brain performs rapid and not particularly successful calculations about the journey home and what comes after it. matt stands a polite distance away, cane in hand, ears making their small constant adjustments to the sounds of the building around him, tail doing its patient measured sway, and you look at him — the suit, the sunglasses, the german shepherd ears — and think about the bone-shaped mat in your hall cupboard, and sign the last box, and pick up your bag.

"ready?" you say.

"been ready," he says, and smiles, and reaches down for his duffel bag with the clean immediate confidence of someone who has never needed to search for anything in their life.

the car is very quiet for the first thirty seconds.

matt is in the passenger seat with his duffel at his feet and his cane resting between his knees and his hands folded in his lap, doing the thing you will come to recognise as distinctly matt — head slightly tilted, those tall pointed ears angled forward, taking in the sounds and smells of new york through the cracked window with the focused patience of someone building a picture of it carefully from scratch. his ears track the sound of the indicator as you pull out of the lot. they shift sharply toward a cab that leans on its horn two lanes over, then settle again. he is quiet but not uncomfortably so. it is the quiet of someone paying very close attention rather than someone who has run out of things to say.

you make it to the end of the block before you say, "so," and he turns his face toward you and smiles, and his tail — curled carefully around the base of the seat, doing its best to be considerate about the limited space — does a small warm movement.

"so," he agrees, in that low new york cadence that is somehow both completely at home in this city and entirely new to you.

"i feel like i should apologise again about the bowls," you say.

"please don't," he says, with complete sincerity. "it means you care. that's honestly the part that matters." he says it simply, without any hint of condescension, and somehow that makes it worse and better simultaneously. his ears swivel slightly toward the road ahead — some quiet monitoring function running underneath the conversation — and then return to you. "can i ask what made you reach out? the listing said you weren't actively looking."

"i wasn't," you say. "i saw it on the agency's website and i couldn't stop thinking about it. it said he'd been waiting a while and nobody had come forward and i just kept coming back to it every time i picked up my phone." you check your mirror, switching lanes. "it didn't feel right to scroll past and do nothing."

something in matt's expression shifts, softens quite considerably, and he turns his face forward. his tail does a slow genuine sweep against the side of the seat. "that's kind," he says quietly, in a way that sounds like he means it as something larger than a pleasantry. "that's genuinely kind."

"i also now own a bone-shaped mat that serves no conceivable purpose," you say, and he laughs — a real one, low and sudden, his head ducking in a way that makes both ears tilt forward charmingly. you find yourself smiling before you've decided to.

"i'll try to find a use for it," he says, and the laugh settles into something easier. he shifts in the seat, the careful prep-room formality loosening noticeably, and a comfortable silence sits between you for a moment, easy and unforced, the sounds of the city filling the gaps. and then he says, quite casually, "there's already someone at home."

"dex, yeah," you say. "about a month."

matt nods, and there is something in the quality of the nod — unhurried, unsurprised, considered — that makes you glance at him sideways. "feline," he says. not a question.

"how did you—"

"i could smell him on you," matt says, with the complete matter-of-factness of someone reporting a simple observable fact, the way another person might mention noticing a colour. "from the moment you walked into the reception." he says it without any particular weight, like something he has been holding in his pocket since you shook his hand and saw no reason not to mention now that it's come up naturally. "cat, definitely. been around you long enough to be well settled into your clothes, your hair." the corner of his mouth moves slightly. "whoever he is, he was pretty thorough about it this morning."

you think about dex pressing his face to your hair before you left, the slow deliberate way he'd rubbed his cheek against yours, the arm that had stayed around your waist a beat longer than necessary, the low satisfied sound he'd made when he'd finally stepped back. you think about him at the kitchen sink the week before saying i'm fixing it with total seriousness, working his scent methodically back into your skin after the date. "that's — yes," you say. "that's one word for it."

matt's ears angle forward with the quality they get when he finds something interesting and is being carefully diplomatic about the extent of his interest. he doesn't push. "how's he settling?" he asks instead. "with you, i mean. a month is still early days."

"he's good," you say, and find you mean it in a way that's considerably bigger than the word. "he's very much at home. possibly more at home than i am, honestly. he reorganised my kitchen in the first week. alphabetically." you pause. "i found out this morning he'd done it again sometime before seven."

matt is quiet for a moment. "he was anxious," he says simply. "about today."

"you got all that from alphabetical cupboards?"

"i got all that from four layers of him on you and the fact that the most recent one was very fresh," matt says, with absolute calm, and your hands tighten slightly on the wheel. "he was thorough. and recent. and—" he adds, with the careful precision of someone choosing exactly how much to share, "stressed. felines do that when they're worried about something leaving." he leaves it there, and you have the impression he is being quite selective about the full extent of what his nose has been telling him since you walked through that reception door, and that you should probably be grateful for the restraint.

you think about dex on the couch with the upside-down book. about the alphabetised mugs. about the way he'd held your face for just a moment before you left, like he was making sure he had it right.

"right," you say.

"i want to be upfront," matt says, shifting slightly to angle himself toward you, hands easy in his lap, "that i have every intention of being respectful of that. i knew there was already a companion in place when i read your profile and i still wanted to come because—" he pauses, considers. "i thought i could be useful. and i thought i'd like to know you." he says it plainly, without dressing it up or walking it back. "but i'm not going to make his life difficult."

"he might make yours a little difficult," you say honestly.

"i've handled worse," matt says, with the quiet certainty of someone whose definition of worse would probably genuinely alarm you, and his tail does one slow arc against the seat. they fall into easier conversation after that — you talk about the neighbourhood, about the building, about how long you've been in the city — and somewhere in the natural back and forth of it you say, "the agency didn't tell me much about you. the listing was pretty sparse."

"mm," matt says, in the tone of someone who is aware of this and finds it reasonable.

"no photo," you say.

"no."

"no age."

"no."

"very convenient," you say.

"very practical," he corrects, mildly, and his tail does one slow unrepentant arc. "i find people make better decisions when they're not working around assumptions." he says it with the measured ease of a man who has thought carefully about this and landed on phrasing that is both honest and strategically incomplete. you are beginning to understand that this is simply how he operates.

"so what should i know about you?" you say. "that wasn't on the listing."

"i'm a lawyer," he says, and says it the way he says everything — simply, without any performance of it. "criminal defence. i have a practice here in the city." he shifts the cane slightly between his knees. "the companion work is separate. i do it through the agency voluntarily, when there's a placement i think i can genuinely help with. i review profiles and reach out directly if i think there's a good fit. i don't do it often."

you look at him — the suit, the cane, the sunglasses catching the midmorning light, the tall sharp ears swivelling almost imperceptibly toward the sound of a siren a few blocks over. "you're a criminal defence lawyer," you say, "who does therapy companion work in his spare time. voluntarily."

"when you say it like that—"

"i'm building the picture," you say. "i'm not criticising."

the corner of his mouth lifts. "i find it useful," he says, more quietly. "the legal work gets heavy. spending time with someone who just needs a calm presence — no case, no argument, no outcome to fight for — it straightens me out. probably helps me as much as it helps them, if i'm honest." a pause. "you could argue it's selfish."

"i wouldn't," you say, and he smiles, and his tail does a small warm movement.

"i read your profile," he says then, the conversation turning naturally, "and i thought i'd like to meet you. so i flagged my interest with the agency and asked them to reach out. i wanted to see if you'd feel the same way in person." a beat. "i hope that's not too forward."

"you're already in my car," you point out.

"fair," he agrees.

"i should say," you tell him, "that i wasn't looking. i want to be clear about that. i saw the listing and i felt for him — for matty—" you say, and hear the name land differently now, carrying new and complicated weight, "and i acted on it. but i wasn't in the market for another companion."

"i know," he says. "it said so on the listing." a small pause, and then, with the calm of someone who considered this outcome and came anyway: "i came anyway."

you look at the road. "that's a very lawyer thing to do," you say.

"probably," he agrees, pleasantly, and says nothing else about it.

the conversation drifts after that, comfortable and unhurried, moving through easy territory — the city, the neighbourhood, the particular character of hell's kitchen where he grew up, which he describes with the particular affection of someone who has a complicated relationship with a place and has made peace with the complexity. his ears are a constant quiet presence, tracking and adjusting, occasionally pricking sharply at something in the street before settling. he is easy to talk to in a way that sneaks up on you, the kind of easy that doesn't announce itself.

and then, somewhere in the middle of it, your brain does the thing it's been quietly constructing toward for the last several miles, and offers you, without warning, the image of dex. not the dex of this morning, performing unbotheredness at the kitchen counter with his reorganised cupboards and his upside-down book. an earlier one. the dex who had turned up at your door a month ago in the rain with a duffel bag and introduced himself with that smooth certain formality and said think of me as your personal therapy companion — grown-up edition, who had made himself so completely and immediately part of the fabric of your days that you had never once stopped to look at the seam.

you think: dex must have had a job.

the thought, once arrived, won't leave. of course he did. of course he had something before your door — a practice, a career, a whole professional existence he'd either set aside or simply walked away from to come and live in your apartment and fold your laundry and hover in your kitchen insisting you weren't to stress about dinner. matt is a lawyer with a practice, who does this in the gaps of a whole full life, who made a deliberate choice and still has everything he had before. and dex had shown up with a duffel bag and stayed, and you had taken it entirely for granted, the way you take for granted all the things that are simply always there.

you wonder, for the first time, what he left at the door.

"what does he do?" matt asks then, conversationally, as though he has been following the shape of your silence and has decided to hand it back to you. "dex. does he work, or—"

"i don't know," you say, and the admission sits in the car between you and feels considerably heavier than it should. "he hasn't mentioned it. i've never asked."

matt is quiet. he is very good at being quiet in a way that isn't empty.

"he's just always there," you say, and you hear it as you say it — the shape of it, what it holds and what it leaves out — and something quiet and unexpected opens up in your chest. not guilt exactly. something gentler than guilt and more complicated, a small retroactive ache for a version of dex you'd never thought to look for, sitting right alongside the warmth that's always there when you think about him, and you don't quite know what to do with the combination.

"you could ask him," matt says gently.

"yeah," you say.

"might be a good conversation to have."

"yeah," you say again, quieter, and stare at the road, and think about dex in the apartment at the end of it.

you are so far inside your own head by the time you park that you barely register the walk from the car to the building. matt follows you — easily, unhurriedly, his cane sweeping the familiar rhythm, his ears tracking the sounds of the street and the lobby with the quiet focus of someone building a new map — and you hold the door and he thanks you and you cross the lobby and hit the elevator button and stand there in the kind of silence that happens when someone is thinking very loudly.

matt stands beside you. he doesn't say anything. his ears are angled forward, attentive, and his tail does one slow patient arc behind him.

the elevator opens. you get in. you hit your floor on autopilot. the doors close.

"you've gone quiet," matt says, in the elevator.

"i'm fine," you say.

"your heart's been doing something interesting since about twelve blocks back," he says, not unkindly.

"that's a very personal observation."

"sorry," he says, and sounds mostly like he means it. "habit."

the elevator opens on your floor and you walk — still mostly on autopilot, keys already in your hand, the particular muscle memory of coming home engaged and operating independently of your higher functions — down the hallway toward your door. you are thinking about dex. you are thinking about what you're going to say when the door opens. you are thinking about the bone-shaped mat. you are thinking about what dex did before your door, and whether you should have asked sooner, and what matt is going to make of the paw-print bowls in the cold light of your actual kitchen, and whether dex is going to smell matt before you've even got the key in the lock, and whether —

"hey," matt says, from just behind you.

you stop.

you turn around. he's a pace back from you, cane stilled, head tilted very slightly. his ears are pricked high and sharp and forward, angled toward your door with an attention that is not casual. his nose has lifted, just fractionally, and the expression on his face is unreadable behind the sunglasses but his tail has gone very still.

"he's right on the other side of that door," matt says, quietly.

you look at your door. you look back at matt.

"i can smell him," matt says, in the same quiet, even tone. "clearly. he's close." a small pause, and then, with the careful delivery of someone choosing their words: "and he already knows we're here."

you stare at your door. behind it, the apartment is silent. perfectly, completely silent, in the way that is not the same as empty — the particular held quality of a silence that is listening.

you think about dex's nose. about what he's been doing since you left this morning, about the fresh air coming under the door, about whatever his extraordinary senses are telling him right now about the person standing in the hallway next to you.

you grip your keys.

"okay," you say, mostly to yourself.

"take your time," matt says, with the easy patience of someone who has genuinely got all day and would like you to know it.

you take a breath.

before you can even get the key in the lock the door swings open from the inside, and dex fills the frame.

he must have heard the elevator. or smelled you coming down the hallway. probably both — you've learned over the past month that very little happens within a reasonable radius of dex without dex knowing about it, and right now every one of those senses is working overtime. his green eyes go to you first, quick and assessing, and for one single second there is naked relief in them — you're home, you're back, you're here — and then they slide to matt, standing just behind your shoulder, and everything changes.

his whole body changes.

the relief closes off like a door swinging shut. his shoulders, already broad, seem to draw back and widen simultaneously. his ears, which had been tilted forward toward you, flatten at the tips in a way that has nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with something considerably more territorial. his tail stops moving entirely. he goes very, very still in the specific way of a cat who has assessed a situation and found it wanting, and his green eyes move over matt with a slow, deliberate attention that takes in everything — the height, the shoulders, the suit, the cane, and the ears, especially the ears, those tall sharp german shepherd ears that are angled with calm and alert interest back in dex's direction — and his jaw tightens.

you watch dex's nostrils flare, very slightly.

you watch something flicker in his expression that you can't entirely name — recognition, almost, the particular quality of someone who has encountered a scent before in a different context, a scent that is pulling at the edges of a memory he hasn't filed under this — and then it's gone, smoothed over by the much more immediate and pressing business of the stranger standing in his hallway.

matt, for his part, has gone quite still. not tense — nothing about matt reads as tense exactly — but still, in the considered way of someone who has just clocked something and is being thoughtful about his next move. his ears are forward. his tail has stilled to a slow, careful sway. his face is politely, serenely unreadable behind the sunglasses. he is angling himself very slightly away from dex in the manner of someone who understands body language and is doing their best to communicate that they are not a threat, which is either instinct or training and possibly both.

the two of them exist in the hallway for approximately three seconds of complete silence.

then dex reaches out, gets one hand around your arm with the easy proprietary certainty of someone who has never once questioned their right to do this, and pulls you firmly past the threshold and into his chest, wrapping an arm around your shoulders in a way that is warm and is also very clearly a statement of position. his chin comes to rest on the top of your head. his green eyes, over your hair, stay fixed on matt.

"who," dex says, in a voice that is extremely pleasant in the way that a warning can be pleasant, "is this."

you are pressed against dex's chest listening to his heart beat at a slightly elevated rate and staring at matt in the hallway and you are trying very hard to locate the right words in the correct order.

"and," dex continues, in the same pleasant and deeply dangerous tone, "where is the puppy."

matt's ears do a very small forward tilt. his tail, briefly, wags once. he schools it immediately.

you close your eyes for one single moment.

"benny," you say.

"don't call me that," dex says, automatic, tightening his arm.

"dex," you say. you feel him look down at you. you look up at him. his green eyes are doing the full complicated thing — possessive and worried and already deeply, instinctively suspicious of the man in the hallway — and you hold his gaze and say, as clearly and calmly as you can manage, "this is the puppy."

a pause.

"this," dex says, "is not a puppy."

"the listing said—"

"the listing," dex says, with a quiet and focused intensity, "said puppy."

"the listing said companion," matt offers, helpfully, from the hallway, in his low new york cadence, and dex's eyes cut to him with the speed and precision of something very well aimed.

"i don't remember asking you," dex says.

"dex—"

"his name is matthew," you say, pressing on before this can develop further, "matthew murdock, he's a demi-human, the listing — there was no photograph, there was no age, i didn't know, i genuinely did not know, and i know that this is—" you gesture between the three of you, which encompasses a significant amount of situation, "not what either of us were expecting but he had nowhere to go and i'd already signed the paperwork and—"

"you signed the paperwork," dex says.

"before i knew—"

"you signed paperwork for a man," dex says, with great precision, "to live in our apartment."

"it's a foster placement—"

"and brought him home," dex continues, looking back at matt with the expression of someone building a case, "in your car, on a saturday morning, without telling me that this was—" he stops. something moves across his face. he looks down at you again, then back at matt, then back at you, and his nostrils do the thing again, that brief barely-there flare, and his eyes narrow very slightly at the edges. "you smell like him," he says, quietly. "you've been in a car with him for — how long have you been in a car with him."

"twenty minutes," you say.

dex makes a sound that is not quite a growl and not quite a word and is somewhere between the two.

matt clears his throat, very gently. "i could wait in the hall," he offers.

"you could go back where you came from," dex says pleasantly.

"dex," you say.

"i'm just saying—"

"you're being rude."

"i'm being accurate," dex says, and looks down at you with his arm still firm across your shoulders and his tail still completely motionless and his green eyes doing the wide, slightly wounded thing underneath all the territorial posturing, and you can see it — the thing underneath — the same thing that had been there all week in the alphabetised mugs and the pre-dawn cleaning, the four layers of himself he'd worked into your hair and your clothes this morning before you left. he hadn't been preparing the apartment. he'd been bracing himself. "you said a puppy," he says, quieter, just to you. "you said a small blind puppy called matty."

"i know," you say.

"that," he says, with a slight incline of his head toward matt, "is not a small blind puppy called matty."

"no," you agree. "he's a tall blind lawyer called matthew."

dex stares at you.

"murdock," matt supplies, from the hallway, in the tone of someone who has decided that being helpful is the correct strategy and is committed to it. "matt's fine."

dex closes his eyes briefly. he opens them. he looks at matt standing in the hallway with his cane and his suit and his german shepherd ears angled with patient and attentive calm in dex's direction, tail doing its careful measured sway, and something moves through his expression that is deeply complex and ultimately lands somewhere that looks a great deal like a man confronting a situation he cannot fold or reorganise or clean into a manageable shape.

his arm stays around your shoulders. it tightens, fractionally.

"come in then," he says, in the voice of a man making the worst of a situation with as much dignity as he can locate, and steps back from the door, taking you with him.

matt steps inside.

his ears are high and forward, building the apartment in the quiet way he does everything, and his tail is doing its careful hopeful sway, and dex watches every inch of it with the focused green-eyed attention of a cat who has just been told, against all reasonable expectation, that the dog is staying.

you stand in the middle of your apartment between a criminal defence lawyer with german shepherd ears and a therapy cat who has been alphabetising things since before dawn, and you think about the paw-print bowls in the kitchen cupboard, and the bone-shaped mat, and the little engraved collar tag that says matty in a cheerful rounded font.

"so," you say brightly, to no one in particular.

neither of them says anything.

"so," you say again, into the silence, and then decide that standing in the middle of the apartment achieving nothing is not a viable long term strategy. "let me show you around, matt. it's not a big place but i want you to know where everything is."

matt smiles, easy and grateful, and shifts his cane. "i'd actually — if it's okay, it helps me more if someone walks me through it directly. holds my hand, shows me the space. builds the picture faster than the cane alone." he extends his free hand toward you, open, palm up, the simple uncomplicated gesture of someone making a practical request.

you take it. it's a perfectly natural thing to do. you do it without thinking about it.

the sound dex makes is very quiet and completely involuntary and communicates an enormous amount of information.

you look at him. he is standing with his arms folded across his chest and his tail doing a single sharp disciplined flick, and his green eyes are fixed on your hand in matt's with the focused intensity of someone doing advanced mathematics about something that is making them furious. his expression is pleasant. it is the pleasantness of a man who has decided to be civilised about this if it kills him, and it may kill him.

"kitchen's this way," you say, and lead matt forward.

the kitchen is small and well-organised — alphabetically, currently, in a way that matt obviously cannot see but dex clearly feels deserves acknowledgment. matt runs his free hand along the counter as you walk him through it, light and methodical, cataloguing edges and surfaces and distances with the quiet efficiency of someone for whom this is simply how you learn a space. he asks a few questions — where the mugs are, which way the tap turns — and you answer them and it is all perfectly practical and entirely reasonable.

"our kitchen," dex says, from the doorway, conversationally. "mine and hers. we have a system."

"it's alphabetical," you say, to matt.

"i didn't do it alphabetically," dex says. "i did it logically. the alphabet is logical."

matt makes a small sound that might be the beginning of a smile, very quickly retired. "makes sense," he says pleasantly.

"yes," dex says. "it does."

you show matt the bathroom next, walking him through the layout, his hand still in yours, and dex materialises in the hallway just outside the door with the air of someone on a self-appointed supervision detail. "bathroom," he says, before you can. "one bathroom. we share it."

"is there a schedule?" matt asks.

"there's an understanding," dex says.

"what's the understanding?"

"that it's our bathroom," dex says, with great clarity. "mine and hers. it works the way it works because there are two of us and we know each other's routines and adding a third—" he gestures, briefly, at the general concept of matt. "it's a small bathroom."

"i don't take long," matt says pleasantly.

"wonderful," dex says.

the living room goes similarly. you walk matt through it — the couch, the coffee table, the layout, the window and which direction it faces — and dex stations himself by the bookshelf and watches with his arms folded and his ears at the particular angle that means he is performing casual observation while actually cataloguing every single detail with absolute precision. his eyes track matt's free hand as it moves along the edge of the coffee table, along the back of the couch, building the room by touch, and something in dex's expression tightens in a way that isn't quite jealousy and isn't quite suspicion and is uncomfortably close to both.

"nice space," matt says, turning his head slowly, ears doing their quiet sweeping work.

"we think so," dex says. "it took time to get right. we've arranged it the way it works for us."

matt nods as though this is useful practical information. his tail does one brief controlled wag that he shuts down immediately, and you are fairly certain that underneath the sunglasses something is happening that dex would find deeply provoking.

you lead matt toward the bedroom and dex is ahead of you somehow — you genuinely did not see him move, he is profoundly unsettling when he chooses to be — standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, looking for all the world like he just happened to end up there.

"and this," you say, "is the bedroom."

"our bedroom," dex says, immediately, with the emphasis of a man who prepared this and has been waiting to deploy it. "mine and hers." he pauses, and something shifts in his face — something that doesn't quite make it all the way to the surface — and he adds, quieter and with considerably less performance in it: "i don't always sleep in here. sometimes i'm on the couch. when it's — when i need the quiet. but it's still our room. that's not — it doesn't change the arrangement."

you look at him. he doesn't look back at you. his jaw is set and he's looking at a point somewhere past matt's shoulder, and you know better than to say anything about it, so you don't.

matt, for his part, has gone very still in the way he does when he's received a piece of information he's choosing to handle carefully. his ears have stilled. "i understand," he says, and says it simply, without any weight on it, which is exactly the right thing to say and you notice that he knew that.

"good," dex says, and the word comes out slightly less sharp than he intended.

you walk matt back to the living room and he settles on the far end of the couch, naturally and without fuss, cane leaning against the cushion beside him, hands in his lap. his tail curves around the base of the couch in a way that is polite about the territory it occupies. he takes up space comfortably without apology, and dex watches all of it from across the room with the focused, calculating attention of a cat who has decided something is wrong and cannot yet prove it.

"you can put your things somewhere if you like," you say to matt, looking at the duffel at his feet. "i can help you unpack, get you settled—" you reach for the zip and matt's hand closes over yours, very gently and very quickly, before you get there.

"no," he says, and then, immediately, recovering the ease: "no, thank you. i have a system for how things are packed. it helps me find things. easier if i do it myself." he smiles, warm and open, and settles the bag back against the side of the couch with a naturalness that is just slightly too practiced. just slightly too considered. "i really appreciate it though."

you straighten up. "of course," you say.

there is a small silence.

dex, from his position by the bookshelf, is looking at the duffel bag. not glancing at it — looking at it, with the fixed, narrow-eyed attention of someone who has noticed something and is deciding what to do about having noticed it. his tail is completely still. his head is tilted at the precise angle of someone running a very fast and very quiet calculation.

"system," he says, after a moment.

"sorry?" matt says.

"you have a system," dex says, pleasantly. "for how your bag is packed. that's interesting."

"i'm blind," matt says, equally pleasantly. "systems help."

"of course," dex says. "of course they do." a beat. "what's in it."

"dex," you say.

"friendly question," dex says, without looking at you. "we're getting to know each other. what's in the bag, matthew."

matt smiles. it is an excellent smile — open, easy, giving nothing whatsoever away. "clothes," he says. "toiletries. a couple of work files in braille." he tilts his head very slightly. "and a snickers, if anyone wants one."

"we're fine," dex says.

"i'll have one," you say, mostly to be contrary.

dex looks at you. you look back at him. matt produces a snickers from a front pocket of the bag — not the main compartment, you notice, the front pocket — and holds it out in your direction with the accuracy that still catches you slightly off guard, and you take it, and dex watches this transaction with an expression that has moved beyond territorial into something more focused and considerably more dangerous underneath the pleasantness.

the room settles into a silence that has a great deal of texture to it. you look between the two of them — matt, composed and unhurried on the far end of the couch, the duffel bag sitting against his calf with his hand resting on top of it with the ease of something positioned rather than placed — and dex, arms folded, green eyes doing their sharp and unrelenting work, ears just slightly forward in the way they go when he's listening very carefully while pretending to do something else entirely.

something is happening in this room that you don't have the frequency for.

you'd seen it in the hallway — the flicker in dex's expression when he'd first clocked matt, that quarter-second of something beneath the territorial displeasure. and matt, who had been calm and easy and open in the car for twenty minutes, had gone fractionally too still in the doorway when dex appeared. just for a moment. just long enough.

two people meeting for the first time who react like people who are remembering something.

you don't know what to do with that so you don't do anything with it.

"i'll put the kettle on," you say, into the silence.

"great," dex says, not looking at you.

matt's hand stays resting lightly on top of the duffel bag, and dex's eyes stay on the bag, and the room hums with something quiet and unresolved, and you go to put the kettle on and decide that however this afternoon goes, you are going to need the tea.

you come back from the kitchen with two mugs of tea and a glass of water for matt — you'd remembered, from the car, that he hadn't said anything about tea and you weren't sure — and set them on the coffee table and distribute them and the whole thing takes maybe forty-five seconds during which dex has apparently been busy.

"the bowls are in the kitchen," dex is saying, when you tune back in, in the pleasant conversational tone that means he is being absolutely deliberate about every word. "ceramic ones. pale blue. paw prints on the side." he pauses. "she picked them out herself. spent time on it."

matt has his hands around the glass of water and his expression is serene. "that was kind of her," he says.

"there's a bed as well," dex continues. "in the hall cupboard. cloud print. orthopedic." another pause, weighted and precise. "for a puppy. which is what she was expecting." he lets that sit for a moment like a stone dropped into still water. "there's also a mat."

"dex," you say.

"shaped like a bone," dex says.

"i'm aware of the mat," matt says pleasantly.

"just making sure you had the full picture," dex says. "given that you can't—" he gestures, vaguely and insufferably, at matt's sunglasses.

the silence that follows is very brief and very pointed.

"dex," you say, in a different voice this time. the voice that means you are not asking.

dex looks at you with the expression of a man who feels entirely justified and is choosing not to say so out loud, which somehow communicates it more clearly than if he had. his tail flicks once. his ears stay at their carefully neutral angle.

"i'm being informative," he says.

"you're being rude," you say. "again. stop."

something moves across his face — not quite chastened, not quite apologetic, something more complicated than either — and he looks away, jaw shifting, and does the thing where he picks up a mug that was already exactly where he wanted it and puts it somewhere slightly different for no reason, just to have something to do with his hands.

matt, for his part, takes a sip of water and says nothing, which is either very mature or very strategic and possibly both.

the trouble is that dex's idea of stopping is relative.

he doesn't mention the bowls again. what he does instead is migrate, gradually and with apparent casualness, from the bookshelf to the armchair to, eventually, the couch — not the far end where matt is, but the middle cushion, which puts him considerably closer to you than he started, and he sits there with his tea and his carefully neutral expression and his tail doing its slow sway, and every few minutes he does something small and deliberate. his arm along the back of the couch behind your shoulders. his knee pressing lightly into yours. his fingers finding your elbow when you reach for your mug, a brief touch that has no practical purpose and is entirely about the fact that matt's nose is approximately fifteen feet away and fully operational.

"you've been in the city long?" matt asks, at some point, of both of you, the way someone does when they're navigating a conversation with more than one person and being polite about the navigation.

"she has," dex says, before you can answer. "i've been here a month." a beat. "we've been here a month. together. it's been good. we have routines." he says routines the way someone else might say roots. the way someone might say mine.

"dex makes dinner," you say, in the spirit of contributing something normal to the conversation.

"every night," dex confirms, immediately. "i know what she likes. i know what she needs." he looks at matt with the open pleasant expression that is doing the most work of anything in the room. "she has anxiety. that's why i'm here. i know her tells. i know when she needs space and when she doesn't and i know—" he pauses, and something shifts in it, something that is less performance and more just true, "— i know how to help. it took time to learn that. it's not something you can just—" another pause. "it's not transferable."

matt turns his glass between his palms. his ears are forward. his tail has stilled. "nobody's trying to transfer anything," he says, gently.

"i know that," dex says.

"do you?" matt says, and says it without any edge at all, which makes it land considerably harder than if he'd sharpened it.

dex looks at him. it is a long look, and a complicated one, and for a moment the pleasantness drops away entirely and they are just two people regarding each other across a coffee table with the focused attention of two people who are each, in their own way, very good at reading rooms and finding them wanting.

you sit between them and eat your snickers.

"i'm just saying," dex says, eventually, and picks up his tea.

"i know," matt says.

and then dex's hand finds yours on the couch cushion between you — not dramatically, not as a statement, just quietly, his fingers closing over yours with the easy certainty of someone who has done this a hundred times and will do it a hundred more — and he holds on, and looks at matt, and matt cannot see the gesture but his nose tells him everything the gesture contains and his ears do one small, almost imperceptible tilt.

his tail wags, once, very gently.

"you have a nice home," matt says, to you specifically, his voice warm and genuine and directed with that unnerving accuracy at the place where you're sitting. "i mean that. it feels like somewhere that's been taken care of."

you look around the apartment — the alphabetised kitchen, the gleaming surfaces, the carefully arranged living room — and then down at dex's hand over yours, and you feel something sit warmly and sadly and complicatedly in your chest all at once.

"yeah," you say quietly. "it has been."

dex's fingers tighten, very slightly, around yours.

he doesn't say anything.

for approximately forty-five seconds, nothing in the room is performing anything.

and then matt sets his water glass down and his ears do their small adjusting sweep and he says, conversationally, "so. the bone-shaped mat. where exactly did you end up putting it?"

"hall cupboard," dex says immediately, with tremendous feeling, and the room cracks open with something that is almost, almost, the beginning of a normal afternoon.

the first few days are fine. mostly fine. the kind of fine that requires some active maintenance but holds together reasonably well on the surface.

matt is easy to have around in the practical sense — he's tidy, he's quiet, he doesn't take up more space than he needs to, and he has the particular self-sufficiency of someone who has been navigating the world alone for a long time and is very good at it. he learns the apartment quickly, the way he'd learned the car, building it in layers — the distances between furniture, the sounds the pipes make, the exact number of steps from the couch to the kitchen doorway. within two days he's moving through the space with a confidence that makes you forget, occasionally, and then remember, and feel briefly guilty for forgetting.

dex watches all of this with the focused, unblinking attention of a cat who has decided something is wrong and is waiting patiently for the evidence to present itself.

they are polite to each other. elaborately, architecturally polite, the kind of politeness that takes considerable effort to construct and maintain and communicates, underneath, a great deal of information that neither of them is saying out loud. matt asks dex about dinner with genuine interest and dex answers him with genuine pleasantness and you sit between them at the kitchen table and eat and think about how a room can be completely quiet and completely full of noise at exactly the same time.

it's on the third night that it starts.

you're most of the way asleep when you hear it — the soft, careful sound of the front door, opened slowly and closed with the deliberate quiet of someone who doesn't want to be heard doing it. you lie there for a moment, blinking at the ceiling, processing. you think about getting up. you decide it's probably nothing — matt going for air, maybe, or dex taking himself to the couch when the noise in his head gets too loud. you've learned not to ask about the couch. it's not your question to push.

you go back to sleep.

the second night, you hear voices.

not loud — never loud, nothing that would wake a normal person, but you're a light sleeper and the apartment isn't big and at two in the morning the quality of silence is different enough that even the suggestion of sound registers. two voices, very low, with the particular compressed tension of people who are arguing while trying not to argue. you can't make out words. you lie there and listen to the shape of it — the rhythm of it, the way it rises slightly and then pulls back, controlled, and then rises again — and then it stops, completely, and the apartment is silent.

you get up.

the living room is empty. the kitchen is empty. the hallway is empty. dex's blanket is on the couch in the particular arrangement that means he's been lying there, but he isn't there now. matt's door — you'd given him the small room you used for storage, cleared out in an afternoon while dex supervised with the expression of someone watching something he disapproves of and is being mature about — is closed. no light under it.

you stand in the hallway in the dark and listen.

nothing.

you go back to bed and lie there for a while looking at the ceiling.

the third night is the glass.

you hear it clearly — the sharp, distinct sound of something breaking, glass on a hard floor, and you're up and out of bed before you're fully awake, pulling the door open, padding barefoot into the hallway with your heart doing something quick and unpleasant in your chest.

the kitchen light is off. the living room is empty. you turn on the kitchen light and stand in the doorway and look at the floor.

nothing. not a shard, not a glint, not a single piece of anything that shouldn't be there. every glass in the kitchen is exactly where it was, sitting in its alphabetically organised cupboard — the door is slightly open, you can see them — whole and undisturbed.

you stand there for a long moment.

you check the hallway. you check the bathroom. you stand outside matt's door and listen and hear nothing and then stand outside the living room and look at the couch and dex's blanket is there but dex isn't, and every surface in the apartment is exactly as it was, nothing moved, nothing broken, nothing out of place.

you go back to bed.

in the morning dex makes breakfast with the focused pleasantness of someone who slept perfectly well and has nothing to report, and matt sits at the kitchen table with his hands around a mug of coffee and his ears in their neutral forward position and his tail doing its careful sway, and neither of them says a word, and you sit between them and eat your toast and decide, for now, not to ask.

you glance at the clock, figuring matt's out for his lawyer business—door clicked shut ten minutes back, his ears perked like always before he bolts into the street. apartment sits quiet now, empty vibe settling in until dex's soft steps trail you toward the bedroom. those vivid green eyes lock on yours, his grin splitting wide, teeth glinting as his tail sways in lazy arcs—pure pleasure lighting his face at the chance to finally touch you without interruption.

he steps close as you turn, body heat radiating, and you meet him halfway. lips brush soft at first, a gentle press that deepens quick—your tongue slips past his teeth, tasting the warm salt of him, drawing a low rumble from his chest. his hands slide up your sides, palms warm and careful, thumbs tracing slow circles over your ribs through fabric. 'been dying for this,' he murmurs against your mouth, voice gravel-thick with want, nipping your lower lip before sucking it tender.

you melt into the kiss, fingers threading through his hair, tugging light to angle his head better. dex groans soft, a needy whine threading the sound, his body pressing flush—chest to chest, hips aligning so you feel his cock hardening against your stomach. soft touches turn insistent but still gentle; his fingers dip under your shirt hem, skimming bare skin, sending shivers racing. he breaks the kiss to trail his lips down your jaw, sucking marks into your neck—wet pops and sighs filling the air as he marks you slow, deliberate.

'more,' you breathe, hands shoving his shirt up and off, exposing the hard planes of his chest. dex's hands cup your face, pulling you back for another kiss, tongues tangling sloppy now, saliva slicking chins. he walks you backward to the bed, easing you down gently, body following to hover above.

his lips wander lower, kissing a path down your throat, collarbone, then latching onto your chest. teeth scrape over the swell of one tit, tugging your shirt aside to bare skin—sucking hard enough to bruise, tongue swirling the pebbled nipple in lazy circles. 'so perfect,' he whispers, voice muffled as he switches sides, marking up your chest with blooming purple bites, hickeys dotting the curves. each suck pulls a gasp from you, your fingers clenching in his hair, hips rocking up instinctive.

dex's grin flashes again, green eyes dark with hunger as he peels your pants down slow, kissing every inch of exposed thigh. 'gonna taste you proper,' he promises, settling between your legs, shoulders nudging thighs wide. his breath ghosts hot over your cunt, folds already slick and swollen, and he dives in soft—tongue flat and broad, lapping from entrance to clit in one unhurried stroke. the wet drag pulls a whine from your throat, body trembling as he settles into a slow rhythm.

he eats you out like it's worship—tongue circling your clit gently, dipping inside to curl against walls, tasting your arousal with deep hums that vibrate straight through you. fingers join soft, one thick digit sliding in easy, pumping languid while his mouth suctions light on the nub. obscene slurps fill the room, mixed with your breathy mewls and his pleased growls—'fuck, you taste so good, dripping for me.' he adds a second finger, scissoring slow, tongue flicking endless as your hips buck, chasing the build.

front door creaks open down the hall—matt's back too soon, boots thudding heavy on the floor, nose likely twitching at the thick scent of sex wafting out. dex pauses a beat, ears flicking, but his grin only widens against your thigh. 'don't stop,' you whine, hands pushing his head back down, and he obeys eager—tongue plunging deeper, fingers curling to hit that spot relentlessly but soft, drawing out your pleasure in waves.

matt's steps falter near the bedroom door, low growl rumbling through the wood, his huff audible as he scents everything—the musk of your pussy, dex's precum-heavy arousal. his back is pressed against the bedroom wall, tail a low thump as he listen to the slick sounds that he is coaxing out of you, but dex ignores it all, lost in you. his free hand strokes your inner thigh softly, thumb rubbing soothing circles while his mouth works magic—sucking your clit slow, tongue lashing tender until you're mewling loud, thighs quivering around his head.

your orgasm builds lazy under his patient assault, cresting soft and shattering—your cry pitches high, walls clenching his fingers as you gush over his tongue. dex laps it all, humming approval, not stopping until you're twitching oversensitive. 'good girl,' he purrs, kissing your pussy gently before crawling up, lips shiny with your juices. another deep kiss shares the taste, his cock—thick, and pretty, with veins pulsing along the shaft. you stroke it firm, thumb circling the head, and he bucks up with a strangled whine, hips jerking, tail thrashing against the mattress. 

you pull him closer, soft touches roaming his back, nails dragging light as lips meet again—kissing messy, full of tongue and teeth. dex's hands roam your marked chest, pinching nipples tender, drawing gasps into his mouth. 'need you now,' he whines, voice breaking needy, green eyes pleading. you nod, legs wrapping his waist, and he shifts—hands gripping your thighs, folding you into the mating press, knees pinned to your chest, pussy splayed wide and dripping.

his cockhead teases your folds, before he thrusts in slow—inch by stretching inch burying deep, bottoming out with a wet squelch. you both moan loud—your mewl high and broken, his growl feral rumbling through his chest.

'fuck, so tight,' dex sobs, forehead to yours, green eyes locked intense as hips piston relentless. each plunge batters your cervix, cock dragging against your g-spot ruthless, pussy gushing around him—splattering juices on his thighs with lewd slaps. your whines fill the apartment, mewls pitching desperate—'dex, yes, harder!'—nails raking his shoulders, urging deeper. he marks your chest more, teeth sinking into soft flesh above your heart, sucking bruises while pounding frantic.

matt's stinks of arousal, taking deep smells of your scent, head tilted to listen to every cry and whine you let out, his hand squeezing his cock to each thrust of dex’s hips—sick fucking freak.

'mine, gonna fill you,' he groans, voice cracking with devotion, leaning in for a sloppy kiss—tongues battling wet as an orgasm rips through you. walls spasm wild, milking him as you wail, body locked in the press shaking.

he lets out a cry as hot cum erupts in thick ropes, flooding your tight cunt, cum squirting with each sloppy thrust of dex's hips. dex collapses half onto you, panting ragged into your neck, soft kisses peppering sweat-slick skin. 'staying forever,' he murmurs tenderly, hands stroking your sides gently, even knotted deep.

matt slips away, walking to the front door to slam it, acting as if he just came inside, announcing himself with a shout, “i’m back!”

dex just nuzzles closer, grin pleased and sated, utterly unrepentant as you panic underneath him.

it's about a week in when it happens.

you're on the couch with your feet tucked under you, phone in hand, and matt is at the kitchen table with a pile of papers in braille that he's been working through for the past hour, fingers moving across the pages with a speed that you find quietly extraordinary every time you notice it. dex is in the kitchen making something that smells like it's going to be very good, and the apartment has settled into the particular comfortable rhythm of a saturday afternoon that has nowhere to be.

"matty," you say, without looking up from your phone, "do you want tea?"

the kitchen goes very quiet.

not the quiet of nothing happening. the quiet of something stopping.

you look up. matt has gone still at the kitchen table, papers under his fingers, head tilted very slightly, and there is something in the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile but is adjacent to one. his ears have done a small involuntary forward tilt.

from the kitchen, nothing. and then the sound of a spoon being set down on the counter with a care that is very deliberate and very controlled.

dex appears in the kitchen doorway.

he looks at matt. he looks at you. he looks back at matt, at the almost-smile at the corner of matt's mouth, at the ears that are still slightly more forward than they were thirty seconds ago, and something happens in dex's expression that moves through several stages very quickly — confusion, recognition, displeasure, and then something beneath all of those that is considerably more complicated and considerably less nameable.

"what did you call him," dex says.

"matty," you say, and then hear it, hear the way it sounds out loud in the apartment, and look at matt, who is now fully and helplessly smiling at the papers in front of him in a way he is doing his absolute best to contain. "it's — i just said it, i didn't—"

"matty," dex repeats, and the word comes out like he's tasting something he didn't order and finding it deeply offensive.

"it just came out," you say.

"you call me benny," dex says, "and i hate it. i have told you repeatedly that i hate it." he points at matt, briefly, with one precise finger. "you've called him matty inside of a week."

"benny is—"

"i hate benny," dex says.

"you always come when i say it," you point out.

"that is a reflexive response and does not indicate—" he stops. his ears are doing the flat-tipped thing. his tail has gone to its slow ominous sway. he looks at matt again, who has composed himself back to neutral with some effort and is sitting with his hands flat on the papers and his face arranged into an expression of peaceful non-involvement. "you think that's funny," dex says.

"i'm not laughing," matt says.

"you were," dex says.

"i was smiling," matt says. "there's a distinction."

"there really isn't," dex says.

you set your phone down and pull your feet off the cushion and sit up properly and look at dex in the kitchen doorway — the flat ears, the still tail, the green eyes doing their complicated work — and you know, because you have been learning him for a month, that the thing underneath the territorial performance is not actually about the name. it is about the way a name sounds when someone says it without thinking. the way matty had come out of your mouth the same way dex does — easy, automatic, already fitted into the shape of your daily life without you noticing it get there.

dex has noticed.

"dex," you say, gently.

"i'm fine," he says.

"come sit down," you say.

"i'm making dinner."

"it's three in the afternoon," you say.

"i'm preparing dinner," he says, with dignity, and turns back to the kitchen, and you listen to him pick the spoon back up and resume whatever he'd been doing, and the rhythm of it is just slightly more forceful than it was before.

matt turns his face toward you from across the room, and his ears are forward and his expression is gentle and he doesn't say anything, which is the correct response, which he knew without being told.

"matty," you say, quietly, just to him.

his tail wags. he can't help it. it does one full, warm, involuntary arc.

from the kitchen, dex says nothing, which means he heard everything, which means he heard the tail too.

you pick your phone back up.

the apartment settles back into its saturday afternoon quiet, and from the kitchen comes the sound of dinner being prepared at three in the afternoon with great feeling, and you sit on the couch and think about odd sounds in the night and broken glass that wasn't there and two people who are elaborately, architecturally polite in the way of people who already know each other, and you look at the ceiling, and you think.

it's late afternoon by the time dex decides he's done being in the kitchen.

you hear him finish — the particular sequence of sounds that means everything is covered and the stove is off and the kitchen has been left in the precise condition he requires — and then his footsteps in the hallway, and then he appears in the bedroom doorway and looks at you on the bed with your book and says nothing, just takes in the scene with his green eyes and his slightly less stormy expression, and then crosses the room and gets on the bed behind you with the easy certainty of someone who has decided this is happening.

he's done this before. it's become, without any formal discussion, a thing that happens — you reading, dex arranging himself behind you, long legs on either side of yours, your back against his chest, his chin finding the top of your head or the curve of your shoulder depending on his mood. he runs warm. he always has. and he reads over your shoulder with a focus that would be slightly unnerving if you weren't used to it, occasionally making small sounds of opinion about whatever you're reading that you've never asked for and have come to find quietly indispensable.

he settles around you now — one arm across your waist, the other braced against the headboard — and his tail finds its comfortable place and his chin drops to your shoulder and you feel the tension of the afternoon begin to drain out of him by degrees, slow and reluctant, the way it always does when you're close enough.

"better?" you say.

"i was fine before," he says.

"mm," you say, and turn a page.

he reads over your shoulder. you can feel the movement of his eyes, the occasional almost-imperceptible shift of his chin when he reaches the bottom of a page before you do. he'd never admit to that either. the music you'd put on earlier is still going — something soft, something with a low easy melody that fills the room without demanding anything — and the late afternoon light is coming through the curtains at the particular golden angle that makes the apartment feel like somewhere outside of time, and for a few minutes everything is genuinely, quietly fine.

and then matt appears in the doorway.

he doesn't knock — he'd heard you, presumably, or smelled the room, or both, and had come down the hall and stopped in the open doorway with his cane and his careful face and his ears angled forward in the direction of the music. "sorry," he says, immediately, accurately locating both of you with the ease that still catches you slightly off guard. "i heard the music. i can leave."

"you don't have to—" you start.

dex's arm across your waist tightens. not dramatically. just enough.

"there's a living room," dex says, pleasantly.

"the speaker's in here," you say, to matt. "you can come in if you want. it's fine."

matt considers this for a moment — you watch his ears do their small assessing work — and then he comes in, which is the correct call because it is his home too, at least temporarily, and dex knows that, and the slight sound dex makes communicates that he knows that and finds it deeply inconvenient.

matt leaves his cane by the bedroom door.

you notice because it's the first time you've seen him without it since he arrived, and there's something different about him without it — not lesser, nothing like that, just different, more settled somehow, like a tell he's put down because he doesn't need it in a space he's already mapped completely. he moves to his spot by the window without any hesitation whatsoever, not a fingertip on the wall, not a pause to orient himself, just crosses the room and sits down with the fluid unhurried ease of someone who knows exactly where everything is and has done for days.

dex notices too.

you feel it — the slight shift in his chest against your back, the quality of his attention changing, sharpening, the way it does when something has confirmed a thought he'd already been having. his tail, which had been doing its slow claiming sway, stills for just a moment and then resumes, more deliberately.

matt settles against the wall and tilts his head back toward the music and his ears go soft and forward and his tail does its content slow sweep and he looks, to all appearances, like a man who is simply enjoying a quiet saturday afternoon.

dex puts his lips to your neck.

it's soft. unhurried. just a press of his mouth to the curve where your neck meets your shoulder, warm and deliberate, and his arm pulls you closer into his chest at the same time, a seamless simultaneous movement that has the practiced quality of something that knows exactly what it's doing. his tail shifts, finding your ankle, curling around it with a gentle and absolute certainty.

you keep your eyes on your book.

you are not fooled for a single second.

you know exactly what he's doing — the same thing he'd done after the date, working his presence back into your skin with methodical patience, except that this time there's an audience and he knows there's an audience and the audience has a nose that is, if anything, more sophisticated than dex's own. dex knows that too. that's rather the point.

he presses another kiss to your neck, slightly higher. his arm adjusts around your waist, drawing you more firmly into him. his chin comes to rest against your temple and he exhales slowly, warm and content, the picture of a creature entirely at home.

across the room, matt's ear twitches.

just the one. just slightly. and then it returns to its forward position and his face stays exactly as it was — peaceful, tilted toward the music, giving nothing — except that the very corner of his mouth has done the thing, the barely-there thing, the suggestion of something he has decided not to let become anything.

"you're doing it again," you say to dex, quietly.

"i'm not doing anything," he says, against your temple.

"dex."

"i'm comfortable," he says. "i'm allowed to be comfortable."

"you're comfortable very loudly," you say.

his tail tightens fractionally around your ankle. he says nothing. he turns your page — the right page this time, you were done — and resettles his chin and presses one more soft, unhurried kiss just below your ear with the absolute serenity of someone who has no agenda whatsoever.

on the floor by the window, matt clears his throat very gently.

dex's arm tightens around your waist.

"something wrong, matthew?" dex says, pleasantly, into your hair.

"not a thing," matt says, with equal pleasantness, his eyes — behind the sunglasses, toward the ceiling — utterly, serenely unbothered. his tail does one slow easy arc. "great music."

"she has good taste," dex says.

"she does," matt agrees.

you sit between them with your book open and dex wrapped around you like a very determined proof of ownership and matt on your floor being extraordinarily calm about the entire situation, and you think about saying something — about addressing it, naming it, pointing out that you are a person and not a territory and that both of them are being faintly ridiculous — and then dex's lips find your neck again, soft and warm and completely without shame, and his tail pulls your ankle gently toward him, and you decide that the book is very good actually and you're going to keep reading it.

matt's ear twitches again.

he says nothing. he is a lawyer. he is very good at saying nothing and meaning a great deal by it.

dex knows this. his mouth curves against your neck, and it isn't quite a smile and it isn't quite a warning and it is very specifically meant for an audience of one who can't technically see it and absolutely knows it's there.

you turn a page.

the music plays.

the light goes golden through the curtains and the afternoon goes nowhere in particular, and the room holds all three of you in its complicated equilibrium, and nobody says anything about any of it, and that is somehow the loudest the apartment has ever been.

soft morning light seeped through half-drawn blinds, painting faint gold streaks across the rumpled bed. you roused gradually, body heavy with lingering sleep, a warm ache blooming low in your belly. wetness already gathered between your soft thighs, pussy slick and puffy from dreams of him. blinking haze from your eyes, you glanced down—bucky's head nestled between your legs, breath hot through the thin cotton of your sleeping shorts. he'd changed you into them last night, fingers so gentle sliding away the clothes you hated for bed, flesh hand tugging the waistband now while his metal palm pressed flat and steady on your hip, plates hushed.

his tongue dragged slow through the damp fabric, whining softly against you. "this okay? you taste so sweet even like this..." voice muffled, unsure, blue eyes peeking up all wide and needy. giggles bubbled from you, hand threading into his messy hair, he tugged the shorts down your thighs quick, cool air kissing your soaked cunt. you were all wet and soft, arousal glistening on puffy lips. he stared a second, shaking a little, then dove in—tongue flat and broad lapping from hole to clit. "fuck... so slippery, so warm," he whimpered, nose bumping your clitas he sucked gently. vibrations from his whines shot through you, hips wiggling playful.

"circle it slow," you giggled, guiding his head. he swirled tentative around your clit, then firmer, flicking the tip before sealing lips and sucking soft. teeth grazed light, sparking tingles. you bucked, soft moans mixing with laughs. "fuck me with your tongue.. please!"

he plunged in, pointed thrusts into your dripping hole, slurping every drop. flesh hand squeezed your thigh soft, spreading wider, metal fingers tracing cool swirls up your inner thigh. pleasure built lazy, your body undulating into his face, hips rocking subtle to meet each slurp. "good... bucky, so good," you praised, voice breaking on a whine, pulling him closer. he groaned into your core, shaking harder—the vibration shattering you. orgasm washed soft and prolonged, walls fluttering as fresh slick flooded his mouth. he lapped devotedly through it, eyes never straying, awe softening his gaze at your trembling release.

Laughter spilled as you tugged him up, his face shiny with your juices. he crawled over you, lips hovering slick and swollen. you yanked him into a giggly kiss, tongues dancing sweet, tasting your sweetness on him. his cock throbbed heavy against your thigh, thick and leaking, veins pulsing under soft skin.

"want you inside, bucky," you whispered bubbly, hand wrapping his girth—stretching your fingers wide. "slow okay?."

he nodded, forehead to yours, breath shaky. "feels too much... you're so wet and soft around my fingers already," he whined, nudging your entrance. you guided him in inch by inch, pussy stretching plush around him, hugging every ridge. both of you gasped at the snug fit, his hips trembling bad. bottomed out, balls snug to your ass, he froze—metal arm bracing light beside your head, flesh hand lacing yours.

you rocked first, grinding clit on his base all slow and teasing. he thrust shallow, whining, "gonna cum already... you're squeezing me so tight, fuck—shaking me up." giggles shook you both, you clenching playful on purpose just to see how far you could push the winter soldier.

his mouth found your neck, teeth nipping soft purple blooms, sucking hickeys that'd bruise sweet. you arched giggly, nails scratching light welts down his back. "harder thrusts? please?" he snapped hips tentative, flesh hand cupping your breast, thumb rolling nipple to peak. pinched gentle, then sucked the bud deep, teeth nibbling till you squealed.

metal fingers circled your clit in tandem, cool whirs adding buzz. tension crested measured, thrusts fractionally firmer yet yielding—skin meeting in hushed slaps, slick sounds obscene and cherished. "bucky... yes, there," you mewled, angling to deepen the drag. he chased it flawlessly, fingers slipping to circle your clit—learning the whirl that buckled your thighs. your pussy fluttered, squeezing him rhythmic. 

he cried out, shaking hard, “stop squeezing—gonna cum, please, too good…” climax unfurled velvet around him, pulsing rhythmic, drawing his own with hot, flooding pulses—groan muffled into your neck, hips stuttering prolonged through the shared waves. cum spilled deep, mixing with your wetness.

he stayed seated, both giggling breathless. kisses lazy and sweet, tongues exploring while hands roamed tender. "more? wanna try on top," you bubbled, pushing him back. Straddling him as his slick cock slid back into your cum-dripping pussy with a wet squelch. you rode him slow, your hands on his chest, nails digging soft crescents into pecs. he whined, bucking up unsure, "too deep like this... shaking again, your pussy so plush sucking me in."

flesh hand gripped your hip light, fingerprints blooming faint bruises. metal arm hugged your waist, pulling down gentle on each bounce. you leaned, sucking hickey on his collarbone, teeth scraping shoulder till he yelped giggly. "mark you too," he pleaded whiny. you bit his chest soft, throat next—leaving pretty bruises like love notes. his cock twitched wild inside, spurred by the ache.

he surged, metal arm flipping you effortless to all fours, ass up. hands spread cheeks, thumb circling your ass while his cock slammed back in—deeper angle bullying your spot. smack—flesh palm tapped your ass cheek lightly, a pink print forming. you pushed back on his cock, whining as he went deeper and deeper inside —  he spanked each side of your ass until tender and bruised, gripping your hips with careful bruises, yanking onto him slowly.

leaned over, chest to back, teeth nipping your shoulder blade as he fucked steady. pussy gushing more, dripping down your thighs with cum mix. he shook violent, whining loud, as he came inside again, his thrusts making you quake through your peak

after a few moments, he pulled out gently, flipped to the side-spoon. leg over hip, and he slid back in lazily. his flesh hand kneading your breast, pinching your nipple until you let out a cry of his name. metal vibrated faint on your clit, whirring with friction making you whine. twisting for a kiss, you bit his lip until swollen. 

one last climax hit, his seed warm as you milked his cock for everything he could give. he was shaking as he wrapped you in his arms possessively, lips brushing your marked neck.

laughter swelled in the aftermath, his arms loosening to brace as he rolled playful, but his footing slipped on the edge—sheets tangling, momentum betraying. with a startled yelp, he tumbled sideways off the bed, metal arm flailing for purchase that wasn't there. his skull met the bedframe's unyielding edge in dull crack, body crumpling limp to the floor. silence crashed suddenly, your laughter dying to a gasp—eyes wide on his slack form, heart lurching cold as he lay motionless, passed and out cold.

you grabbed a pair of shorts you kept out and threw on a t-shirt, bucky’s nakedness hidden by the sheets as you said his name.

you said it again. your hands were on his face, the jaw and the cheekbone and the place the bedframe had caught him, already darkening, and his face was completely slack in a way it never was, not in sleep, not in anything. even asleep he held things. even in the deep boneless sleep of those corridor nights, the jaw stayed set and some quality of him was present below the surface. this was different. this was the lights off.

you screamed.

you didn't decide to. the sound came out of you before you'd gotten to the part where you decided anything, raw and loud and aimed at the door, and you were still saying his name between the screaming, bucky, bucky, your hands on his face and his chest, he was breathing, you could feel it, the slow rise and fall, but he wouldn't wake up and the sound that the bedframe had made was still inside your ears and you screamed again.

the door came open.

steve's voice first, what happened, and then he was in the room and he looked at bucky on the floor and you watched something enormous hit him, watched it land behind his eyes and get contained in the same second, and he was down beside you saying buck, hey, come on, buck, the voice he used for bucky that came from somewhere older than all of this. he put two fingers to bucky's neck and looked at you. "he's got a pulse, it's strong." and his voice was controlled in the specific way of someone working very hard to be controlled.

"he hit his head," you said. your voice didn't sound like yours. "we were — he fell, he hit the bedframe, he just — he won't wake up, steve."

"how long," steve said, already on his comms.

"i don't — a minute, two minutes, i don't know, i called for you as soon as—"

"okay," steve said. "okay, you did right." into the comms: medical to floor fourteen, concussion, unconscious, we need a team now. and then back to you: "what did he hit? where?"

you pointed. the temple, the same side, the scar you'd been looking at for weeks, and steve looked at it and looked at you and the control on his face got a degree more effortful.

"the same side," you said.

"yeah," steve said. "i see it."

"steve—"

"he's going to be okay," steve said, and the way he said it had the quality of something he was saying for both of you. "he's breathing, his pulse is strong, he's going to be okay."

the medical team came through the door and you moved back and let them work and you stood against the wall with your arms wrapped around yourself and watched them work on him, and steve stood beside you and said nothing, and the room was full of people doing things and bucky was still slack and still on the floor, and you stood there with the taste of him still on your lips.

the waiting room outside the medical bay had a quality of quiet that you were aware of without being able to do anything with. you were in a chair. steve was in the chair beside you. the overhead light was too bright and it cast everything in a flat white that made the walls look like they were slightly the wrong colour and you sat in it and you breathed and you tried to locate yourself in the room and kept failing. your hands were in your lap. you looked at them. you looked at the door at the end of the hall. you looked at your hands again.

you kept hearing the sound.

it was just there, sitting at the back of your ears, the dull crack of it, replaying at random and each time it replayed something in your chest did the same lurch it had done the first time, the cold drop of it, and you'd breathe and try to put it somewhere and it would replay again. you kept seeing his face on the floor. the specific slackness of it. the absence. you'd been with him long enough to know every quality of his stillness and this was not one of them, this was something else, and the knowing of that sat in you like something very heavy and very cold and you breathed around it.

steve was talking.

you knew he was talking because you could see his mouth moving and because you could feel the vibration of his voice somewhere, low and careful, the particular register he used when he was trying to be useful in a situation where being useful was difficult. but the words weren't arriving. they were going somewhere between his mouth and your ears that wasn't you, your blood too loud in your own skull, the sound of it a kind of white noise that turned everything else into texture rather than meaning. you looked at his mouth and you tried to find the words in it and you couldn't, and then you stopped trying and just breathed.

you kept thinking about whether you could have stopped it.

that was the loop your mind had found and was running, over and over, the specific inventory of every moment leading up to the sound. if you hadn't turned over. if you hadn't laughed. if you hadn't been there at all, in that room, in that bed, if you'd kept the distance that you'd kept for weeks and hadn't let the herding take you where it took you, if you'd been sitting in your chair in your office at a reasonable distance from james bucky barnes like someone with professional composure. the sheet had been tangled. you'd tangled the sheet. you'd been in the bed. you'd been the reason the sheet was there to be tangled in the first place and you kept circling back to that and it kept not being a thought you could finish because finishing it required following it somewhere you couldn't follow it right now.

steve's hand came to your shoulder.

you felt the weight of it and you looked at it and you looked at his face. it was close, his face, turned toward you with the expression of someone who was very specifically trying to reach you through something, and you realised he'd been trying for a while and the words were still not quite arriving but the expression was, the careful determined concern of it, and you focused on the details of him the way you focused on details when you needed something to hold onto. the line of his jaw, different from bucky's, cleaner, less dark, the gold stubble where bucky's was almost black. his eyes, the specific blue of them that was not dark at all, not the grey-blue dark that you'd been reading for weeks, just blue, bright and earnest and worried. his hair too light and too short and his hand too warm on your shoulder, none of the faint coolness at the edge of it that came with the metal arm, no quiet sound of plates shifting when he moved. he smelled different. he was too warm, too even, too solid in the uncomplicated way of a body that had only ever been one thing.

you thought, with a clarity that was almost painful: if you tried hard enough you could almost imagine he was bucky.

but steve was too warm. too tan. too much gold in him and not enough dark, and there was no metal arm beside you, no quiet mechanical adjustment of plates, no particular way a room changed when he entered it. he was steve and not bucky and the knowing of that sat in you alongside everything else.

"are you with me?" steve said, and the words arrived this time, clearly, close.

"yes," you said. your voice came out from far away.

"okay," he said. he kept his hand on your shoulder. "you don't have to talk. you don't have to do anything. just stay here."

you looked at the door at the end of the hall.

"the same side," you said, after a while. you didn't mean to say it out loud and then you had.

"i know," steve said.

"the same place as the building."

"i know," he said, quiet and careful and not looking away from you.

you sat there. the loop kept running. the sheet tangled. the sound. his face slack and the lights off and the specific cold of knowing something was wrong before you had the words for it. you pressed the heel of your hand against your sternum and breathed. steve said your name once, not a question, just your name, and you looked at him and he was still there and his hand was still on your shoulder and his face was still careful and worried and trying to reach you.

"is it my fault," you said.

he didn't answer straight away, which was the honest version of saying no, the version that acknowledged the question had weight and wasn't going to dismiss it. "no," he said. "it was an accident. it was just an accident."

"if i hadn't been there—"

"it was going to happen eventually," he said it evenly and without making it into an argument, just putting it in front of you. "you called for me. you stayed with him. that's not fault, that's the opposite of it."

you looked at your hands. the palm of your right hand had a faint mark in it from the carpet, the pressure pattern of kneeling on the floor beside him, and you looked at it and tried to decide what to do with it and couldn't, and just sat there with your hands in your lap while the overhead light was too bright and the blood was still too loud in your ears and the loop kept running.

shuri came through the doors.

you were on your feet before you'd decided to stand and she looked at you and then at steve and she said: "he's stable. the concussion is significant but it's not the worst outcome. he's going to wake up."

you breathed out.

"but," she said.

you looked at her.

she sat down in the chair across from you and laced her fingers together the way she did when she was about to say something that required precision. "the impact was to the same site as the original injury," she said. "when someone has a pre-existing neurological disruption and sustains another impact to the same area, there are a few things that can happen. one of them is that the brain resets. not fully, not in a way that can be predicted. but there's a possibility that the impact has knocked the baseline back, further than where we were, or somewhere different." she looked at you directly. "there's a possibility, and i want to be clear this is a possibility and not a certainty, that bucky may be more present when he wakes up than the winter soldier has been."

you sat with that.

"meaning bucky wakes up," steve said slowly.

"meaning something closer to the bucky we know, yes," shuri said. "the pre-conditioning personality that we've been hoping would resurface." she paused. "but if that's the case, his continuity from the past weeks may not be intact. he may not remember the progression. he may not remember—" she stopped, and she was looking at you when she stopped.

the sentence didn't need finishing.

you sat very still.

"he may not remember me," you said.

shuri held your gaze. "he may not remember the specifics of what has developed between you," she said. "yes. that's what i'm telling you."

the room was very quiet.

"how likely," steve said.

"i don't know," shuri said. "i won't know until i talk to him. i wanted you both to be prepared before he woke up."

you nodded. the nod was the only thing you had.

they let steve go in first.

you sat in the chair and looked at the floor and you thought about the grey morning light and the laughter and the fact that his laugh had surprised him as much as it had surprised you, low and brief and caught off guard, and you thought about the tin of tony's biscuits and the elevator and hi said quietly against you in the corridor, going nowhere, and you thought about all the weeks that had built to that morning and the specific warmth of waking up with his arm across your waist and his face in your hair.

you sat with it in the careful way you'd been holding things all morning.

steve came out.

you looked at his face. you read it the way you read most things, quickly and without wanting to, and what you read was careful. not devastated. careful.

"he's asking for you," steve said.

you stood up. you went in.

he was sitting up in the hospital bed with the overhead light too bright and the bruise at his temple new and dark and wrong-looking, and his hair was a disaster and the metal arm was on the bed beside him and he looked at you when you came through the door with eyes that were clear and present and entirely, completely unfamiliar in their clarity, like looking at a window that had been cleaned of something you hadn't known was on it.

he said: "what are you doing here?"

four words. even and direct and without any texture in them, without the roughness of someone who knew exactly who you were to each other, without morning in them or warmth in them or any of the weeks of things that had accumulated between six feet in a room on the sixth floor and this morning.

you looked at him.

"i was there when it happened," you said. your voice was steady. you were very proud of your voice.

he looked at you with those clear eyes, assessing. "you called for help," he said.

"yes."

he nodded once. "thank you," he said. measured and polite and aimed at a stranger.

you stood in the doorway and you looked at him and he looked back at you with the dark eyes that were his eyes, entirely and completely his eyes now in a way they hadn't fully been for weeks, and there was nothing in the looking that was the looking you knew. no warmth underneath it. no awareness of anything.

"i'm glad you're okay," you said.

"thank you," he said again.

you nodded.

you left the room.

the door made a soft sound closing behind you and steve was in the corridor and you looked at him and something happened in your face that you had no ability to stop, and steve opened his arms before you'd moved toward him and you walked into them and pressed your face into his shoulder and your hand came up over your mouth, hard, pressing hard, because the door was right there. right there. six inches of wood and he was on the other side of it and he would hear you and you could not let him hear you.

you shook.

you could not help that either. it started in your hands and moved through the rest of you and you stood in steve's arms in the corridor with your face in his shoulder and your hand pressed hard over your own mouth and you breathed in pieces, small and ragged and as quiet as you could make them, and steve held you with both arms and said nothing because there was nothing and he knew there was nothing and he just held you. his arms were around you and his hand came up to the back of your head and you shook and you breathed and the door was right there and you pressed your hand harder over your mouth when it wanted to make a sound.

he didn't know.

he was on the other side of that door right now with his clear eyes and his measured voice and he didn't know, and he'd looked at you with bucky's eyes, finally, fully, the eyes you'd been told about and had spent weeks watching change and warm and learn the colour of your coffee mug and the sound of your name, and they'd looked at you like you were a stranger who had done a kind thing and deserved a polite thank you for it. and you'd stood in the doorway and looked back at him and said i'm glad you're okay and he'd said thank you like you'd held a door open for him on the street.

you pressed your hand harder over your mouth.

you breathed.

steve's arms were around you and you focused on the details of him the way you focused on things when you needed to stay inside your own body. his arms, both of them, the warmth of them even through your clothes, no difference in temperature between left and right, no cool metal edge, no quiet sound of plates shifting when he adjusted his hold. his hand at the back of your head, warm and still, no mechanical weight to it. when you pressed your face further into his shoulder he was just solid and warm and human-warm, the uncomplicated warmth of a body that had only ever been one thing, and you breathed him in and he smelled like steve, clean and too-warm, none of the leather-and-something-cold that you knew without thinking about it now, the smell that came with bucky entering a room, that you'd learned the way you'd learned everything about him, without deciding to. steve's hair where it touched your forehead was too short and too light. you could feel the gold of it without seeing it. you thought, with a clarity that was almost unbearable: if you tried hard enough, if you pressed your face further into his shoulder and closed your eyes and stopped paying attention to the details, you could almost make yourself believe.

but he was too warm. there were two arms, both the same, both just warm, and there was no metal, and there was no sound, and his hair was too short and too gold and his skin too tan and none of the sounds that had become the background noise of your life were there, not the low quiet adjustment of plates, not the particular way a corridor sounded different when he was in it.

he was steve and not bucky and you stood in his arms and shook and pressed your hand over your mouth and breathed in small ragged pieces and the door was right there and you could not make a sound.

after a long time steve said, very quietly, just above your hair: "i've got you."

not it'll be okay. not he'll remember. just that. just i've got you, simple and present and true, and you breathed around it and you shook and you stayed there.

the building hummed around you. the corridor was dim. the city was outside doing its indifferent morning thing. and the door was right there, solid and closed, and on the other side of it was bucky, all of him, finally all of him, and none of it knew your name.

steve pressed his cheek to the top of your head.

you breathed.

you stayed there a long time.

three weeks.

you knew it was three weeks because you'd been counting missions and there had been four of them, back to back, each one requested by you through the appropriate channels with the appropriate reasoning attached, threat assessment and field experience and availability, all of it technically correct and none of it the real reason. the real reason was that the tower was a specific size and bucky was in it and the size was not large enough for both of you to exist in without the proximity becoming something you had to manage, and you were very tired of managing things.

the first week you'd tried to stay. you'd told yourself that it was fine, that you were a professional, that whatever had happened and whatever had been lost was something you were capable of sitting beside in the ordinary way of someone who had their feelings organised and their life in order. you'd lasted four days before you'd walked into the commissary in the early morning, your commissary, the quiet one that had been yours since the beginning, and he'd been there. just there, at a table with a coffee mug and that quality of stillness, and he'd looked up when you came in and looked at you with bucky's eyes, clear and present and entirely without recognition, and you'd turned around and walked back out and gone to find fury's office and asked for whatever was available.

there was always something available.

you took a job in berlin and then one in prague and then two weeks of surveillance work in a city that didn't require you to be anywhere near a tower or a floor or a commissary that had once been yours before it became something else. you were good at the work and the work was good to you, filling the hours in the specific way that physical and tactical problems filled hours, occupying the parts of your brain that might otherwise have been doing something else. you slept in safe houses and hotels and once in the back of a car, and you were tired in the functional way of someone who was working hard, and you did not think about grey morning light or the sound a bedframe made or the word thank you delivered to a stranger.

you were very good at not thinking about it.

the pitying looks had started before you'd even left.

sam had found you in the corridor on the second day and looked at you with that specific quality of his, the one that saw things and was sorry about what it saw, and you'd said i'm fine before he could say anything and he'd said okay and hadn't argued, which was worse than arguing would have been. natasha had knocked on your door on the third evening and sat in the chair across from your desk and said nothing for a while and then said how are you doing, and you'd said fine, and she'd looked at you the way natasha looked at people when she knew fine was not the accurate answer and wasn't going to call you on it right now, and that look had stayed with you on the plane to berlin and on the train through prague and in the back of the car and you were very tired of being looked at like something that needed to be handled carefully.

steve was the worst.

not because he was unkind. because he was steve, and because steve knew, and because every time you'd been in the same space as him in those four days before you'd left he'd had that expression on him, the one that was feeling something enormous and containing it on your behalf, and you'd wanted to tell him to stop, to just stop, that you didn't need him to feel it for you and you didn't need the careful way he spoke to you and you didn't need the expression, you just needed everyone to behave normally because normal was the only thing that was going to get you through this.

nobody behaved normally.

so you took the missions.

what you came back to, three weeks later, was exactly what you'd left, which was the thing you'd been afraid of. the tower was the same tower. your floor was your floor. the commissary on your level was the commissary on your level and the chair you'd always sat in was the chair you'd always sat in and none of it had changed into anything that was easier to be inside. you put your bag down in your room and you stood there and you looked at the chair by the window, the chair you sat in with your tea in the evenings, and you thought about him standing behind it with his mouth pressed to the top of your head, and you went to get a shower instead and stood in it until the water went cold.

the first time you saw him it was the corridor.

you'd been coming back from a debrief and he'd been at the end of the hall and you'd both stopped, and he'd looked at you with the clear dark eyes and you'd looked back, and you'd nodded, the small professional nod, the nod that costs nothing and asks for nothing in return, the nod you'd been giving him for eight months before any of it started, and he'd nodded back, measured and polite, and you'd walked past him and kept your pace even and your face neutral and you'd made it to the elevator before your hands did the thing they'd been doing, and you'd ridden up to your floor and stood in your room for a while.

it was exactly like before. that was the thing. it was exactly like the eight months of the commissary and the briefing rooms and the managed distance, except that now you knew the weight of his arm around your shoulders and the way his thumb moved and the sound of him saying morning in the rough low voice and all of that was just inside you now with nowhere to go.

people were careful around you.

you hated it. you hated the careful way sam spoke to you and the careful way natasha didn't speak to you about it and the way steve's face did the thing it did when you were in the same room. you hated the commissary moving slightly around you, the particular way people found somewhere else to be when you sat down, leaving you the table and the quiet and the early morning the way it had always been yours, except that you were aware now of the courtesy in it, the awareness of you as something that needed to be given space, and the awareness felt like something you couldn't shed.

you took the missions because on a mission none of that was there. on a mission there was only the job and the parameters and the decisions that needed making and the physical and tactical reality of being somewhere with a specific purpose, and you were good at that, you had always been good at that, and the goodness of it was the only clean feeling you had access to right now so you lived inside it as much as you could.

and every time you came back it was exactly the same.

the tower the same size. bucky in it. the distance between you the specific calibrated distance of two people who did not know each other and were coexisting professionally in the same building. him with his clear eyes and his measured voice and none of the warmth underneath it that had been building for weeks and was just now, just at the moment it had fully arrived, gone.

you nodded to him in corridors.

he nodded back.

you sat at your desk and wrote your reports and drank your coffee and took your missions and you were fine in the specific functional sense and you did not sit by the window in the evenings because the chair was right there and you could not look at the chair, so you sat at your desk instead, and the city was outside, and the building hummed, and you were fine.

you were fine.

you were very good at fine.

the balcony on the fourteenth floor had a quality of outside that was different from the city below. the city was noise and movement and the indifferent churning of a place that did not know you existed, and the balcony was a thin cold ledge between that and the building at your back, and at two in the morning it was yours in the way the commissary had once been yours, which was to say: nobody else wanted it at this hour. you'd found it by accident three nights after coming back, the not-sleeping having gotten to a point where lying in the dark was no longer a neutral activity and your room had started to feel like a place that was holding you rather than containing you, and you'd walked the corridors until you found a door that opened onto cold air and the city spread out below like something spilled, and you'd stood there in your socks for a long time and found that it was better. marginally. enough to come back to.

tonight you'd brought a glass of wine. it was a small concession, the kind of thing that looked like self-pity if you named it directly and looked like coping if you didn't, and you'd decided not to name it and to sit in the low chair someone had left out here and drink slowly and look at the city and be very precisely nowhere in your own head for as long as you could manage it. the city did its thing. lights moving far below, the red and white rivers of traffic that never fully stopped, the lit windows in the buildings opposite where other people were having their own entirely separate midnights, lives happening in lit rectangles at a distance that made them bearable to look at. you watched it all and drank and let your mind go somewhere flat and textureless and it almost worked, the way these things almost worked, right up until it didn't.

the sound came back. it always came back eventually, that was the thing you'd learned about it, that you could keep it at a distance for a certain number of hours and then some small thing would let it in — the edge of a chair, a particular quality of light, the word morning said by someone in a corridor who wasn't him — and then it was there again, sitting at the back of your skull, the dull crack of it replaying at a frequency your body responded to before your mind had time to intervene. the cold drop in your chest following it. his face on the floor, the specific slackness of it, the absence that had no name except that you'd known it immediately, before you'd had words for anything, before you'd decided to scream. you pressed your free hand flat against your sternum and breathed through it the way you'd been breathing through it for weeks, slow and deliberate, the way you'd learned to manage things you couldn't put down and couldn't carry easily, and after a moment it receded enough. enough to breathe around. enough to sit with.

the door opened behind you.

you didn't turn around. you knew the footstep, the particular weight of it, the way steve rogers occupied space even when he was trying to be quiet about it, and you'd half-expected him, in the vague way you half-expected things you'd stopped letting yourself think directly about. he came and settled into the other chair — someone had left two out here and you'd never thought about why until now — and he didn't say anything for a while, and you didn't say anything, and the city moved below you in its indifferent way and the cold came in off the buildings and the silence between you was the specific silence of two people who had been through something together and were sitting on the other side of it and didn't need to fill the air to prove they were present.

"couldn't sleep either," he said eventually. it wasn't a question.

"no," you said.

he had a mug with him, something warm, the faint ghost of steam visible in the cold air. he held it in both hands and looked out at the city the way you'd been looking at it, and for a while that was all there was. then he said, in the low careful voice he used when he'd been thinking about something for long enough that it had worn a groove: "i want you to know something." you waited, your glass held loosely, your eyes on the lights below. "what you did for him," he said. "those weeks. the commissary and the floor and all of it — the patience of it, the specific patience of just showing up every day and not asking him for anything he didn't have to give yet. i've known him his whole life and i watched what you did and i don't know if i could have done it the way you did it." he paused, and you could hear him choosing the next part carefully, the way steve chose things when the thing he was trying to say was larger than language could straightforwardly accommodate. "every time he was near you something in him settled. something that didn't settle for anyone else, not me, not sam, not natasha. i watched it happen over weeks and i don't think he knew it was happening and i'm not sure you knew how much it mattered but i knew. i was watching and i knew." his voice had gone quieter. "and if he knew — the him we've got back now, if he knew what had been there, what was building between you in those months, he'd be glad. he would be so genuinely glad that he hadn't hurt anyone, that the person he'd been closest to in all of that was someone who—"

"steve."

he stopped.

you weren't looking at him. you were looking at the city, the lights, the moving rivers of red and white far below, the lit windows of other people's entirely separate midnights, and your voice had come out quiet and even and from a place quite far down, the place where you kept things that needed to be said without falling apart in the saying of them.

a pause. he was looking at you. you could feel the specific quality of his attention, patient and careful and waiting.

"don't tell bucky what happened," you said. "those months. whatever you think he'd want to know, whatever you think would be good for him to know." you took a breath that was steadier than it had any right to be. "don't tell him."

the silence that followed had weight to it, a density, the kind that came from someone absorbing something they wanted to argue with and choosing not to.

"okay," steve said. quiet and certain and without argument, and it had the quality of a promise in the way that steve's okays sometimes did, the ones that came from somewhere below his ribcage rather than just his mouth. you nodded once, very slightly, and looked at your glass, and he didn't push further and he didn't qualify it and he didn't ask you to reconsider, just said it again, softer: "okay." and he meant it both times.

you sat there. the city did its indifferent thing below you and the cold settled around your shoulders and steve drank from his mug and you drank from your glass and neither of you spoke again for a long time, and it was the most bearable the nights had been since you'd come back, which you noted without letting yourself look at directly, the way you'd learned to note things.

eventually you stood up. steve looked up at you, the question in his face that wasn't quite a question, and you looked back at him for a moment in the dark with the city behind you and his face lit faintly by the lights of it, and something passed between you that didn't need language. "goodnight," you said. "goodnight," he said. you went inside, and the door closed behind you, and you slept with no sheets on—you couldnt get the smell out of them. 

the nightmare came on a tuesday.

you didn't always remember your nightmares but you remembered this one, which was the specific cruelty of it. it wasn't dramatic in the way nightmares sometimes were, announcing themselves with impossible geography and horror-film logic, the kind you could dismiss on waking because nothing in them had the texture of real things. this one had the texture of real things. it was just the morning. just that morning, exactly as it had been, the grey light coming through the half-drawn blinds and the specific quality of the warmth and then the laughter, his laugh, low and brief and surprised by itself, and you in the middle of it with your whole chest open in the particular way it had been open that morning, unguarded in the way you only got to be unguarded when you'd stopped expecting anything to go wrong. and then the sound. and then his face on the floor with the lights off. and then the hospital room, the overhead light too bright, and the five words delivered with bucky's eyes — finally, completely, fully bucky's eyes — to someone they did not know.

you'd woken up with your hand pressed hard over your own mouth, heart doing something loud and structural against your ribs, the dark of your room pressing in from all sides in the specific way it pressed when your body hadn't caught up yet to the fact that you were no longer inside the thing. you lay there and breathed. you told yourself where you were: your room, your bed, the ceiling the right ceiling, the floor the right floor, the dark just dark and nothing in it. your body took its time about accepting this, the way bodies did, running the loop a few more times just to be thorough. the sound again. his face again. the four words again. you lay there and breathed through each repetition and waited, and eventually it receded enough that the room was just the room and you were just in it, and the hand over your mouth was your own hand and nothing had happened except a dream.

you lay there a while longer anyway. the dark sat on you and the quiet of the tower at three in the morning pressed in around the edges and you breathed through it and waited to feel tired again and didn't, and after a while you stopped waiting and accepted that sleeping was not a thing that was going to happen tonight, not with the loop still running faint at the back of your skull, and you got up.

you pulled on the sweatshirt from the chair by the door — not the other chair, you didn't look at the other chair — and put your socks on sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, and then you opened your door and went out into the corridor. the building breathed around you. the emergency lighting kept the hallways just barely visible, dim and colourless, and you stood in it for a moment and breathed the cool air of the corridor and let the realness of it settle you. floor. wall. the hum of the building. real things. you took the stairs because the elevator felt too enclosed with your heart still not entirely convinced the dream was finished, and you went down two floors with your hand on the cold railing and pushed open the kitchen door and walked in and stopped.

bucky was there.

he was standing at the counter with his back partially toward you, lit by the low counter light, the one that stayed on at night, and the metal arm caught the light and the rest of him was warm shadow and he was just standing there, very still, looking at what was in front of him. on the counter: two mugs. already out, already placed side by side with the deliberateness of someone who had made a decision about it. and beside the mugs, open, the lid set carefully to one side: tony's tin. the dark green one with gold lettering that had been sitting on the top shelf of the communal pantry for three months, too expensive-looking for anyone to be the one to open it first, the collective unspoken agreement of a building full of people who had all decided independently that it was too nice to be the thing you just ate on a tuesday. the lid was off. the smell of very good shortbread had filled the kitchen, buttery and warm, the smell of something made by people who took biscuits seriously.

he hadn't heard you yet. you stood in the doorway and looked at the two mugs and the open tin and you didn't move and something was happening in your chest that you were not ready to name.

then he turned, and saw you.

the clear dark eyes. present and direct, fully his, the way they'd been since the hospital room, and something moved across his face when he looked at you, brief and unreadable, there and gone before you could catch it. he looked at you and you looked at him across the kitchen in the low warm light and neither of you said anything for a moment.

"couldn't sleep," he said. and there was something in it — not warmth exactly, not yet, but the faint suggestion of something underneath it, a dryness, an awareness of what he was stating.

"no," you said.

he nodded once and turned back to the counter, and you watched him move in the low light, the flesh hand reaching for the machine, the metal one steadying a mug with that specific care it had always had, the quiet shift of plates as he adjusted his grip, and something in you located that sound the way you'd been trying not to locate it for months, slotting it back into a place in the inventory of him that you'd spent a long time trying to dismantle. he made the coffee without asking you anything. without turning around to check. the specific ratio of it, the temperature, the amount, all of it without a word, all of it correct, and you stood in the doorway and watched him do it and your hands were very still at your sides.

and then the memory came in sideways, the way memories did when something in the present called to them, sudden and specific and fully formed. a different morning. a grey one. the winter soldier standing in this same kitchen at this same counter, the same quality of stillness, and you standing behind him saying like this, and your hands over his showing him the ratio and the temperature and the colour to match yours, the specific pale warm shade, and him watching with the total focused attention he brought to everything, cataloguing it. i liked how you made it last time, he'd said, weeks later, rough and careful, and you'd looked at him and understood that he'd kept it, that the morning had gone somewhere in him and stayed. you'd smiled the small private quick one and said milk it is and poured it one-handed and he'd taken the mug in the metal hand because the flesh hand had been otherwise occupied, and he'd raised it at the same angle you raised yours, the muscle memory of a thing learned by watching, and you'd both stood there in the quiet and drunk your coffee and it had felt like something, like the beginning of something, and then three weeks later the beginning had become an ending in the space of a sound and four words and a door closing softly in a hospital corridor.

he slid the mug toward you across the counter.

you crossed the kitchen. your socks were quiet on the floor and you came to the counter and looked at the mug and the colour of it was correct, the specific pale warm shade, and you hadn't told him that. the winter soldier had learned it from you in a morning that belonged to a different version of everything and somewhere between that morning and this one the knowing of it had made its way to bucky, through whatever channels things moved through in him now, through the pieces shuri said were still coming back, and the mug was sitting there on the counter with the colour exactly right and on the saucer beside it — he'd found a saucer, at three in the morning — was one of the shortbreads from tony's tin. the round ones with the crystallised sugar on top, the good ones from the top of the stack. not the tin itself. one biscuit, held out in the specific way, patient and deliberate, the way the winter soldier had held one out to you once across a different kind of distance. not the tin. one biscuit. the same.

you stood there and looked at it and something cracked open very quietly in the middle of your chest, the way ice cracked on water in early spring, not breaking, not loud, just the first fracture line of something shifting.

you picked up the mug. you looked at him.

he was already looking back, his own mug raised, and at the corner of his mouth was something that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one — small and private and aimed specifically at you, the expression of someone who knows something and has decided to let you know they know it, and it sat in you like the first genuinely warm thing in a very long time. not the managed warmth of functional and fine. not the clean cold feeling of completed missions and cold showers and sitting on a dark balcony with wine and the city spread out below. something real. something that had come from outside you and arrived in you and intended to stay. you felt your own mouth do something in response that you hadn't asked it to and couldn't have stopped, small and quick, gone almost immediately when you looked down at the mug. but it had been there and he had been looking and you were fairly certain he had seen it.

neither of you said anything.

the kitchen held you in its low warm light and the building hummed and the city sat somewhere far below doing its indifferent three-in-the-morning thing and you stood at the counter close enough that the warmth of him was just perceptible in the cool kitchen air, and you drank your coffee in the quiet, and you ate the biscuits — he'd taken one too, the focused private attention with which he ate something good and knew it was good entirely unchanged from the version of him that had stood in this kitchen months ago and opened tony's other tin — and neither of you spoke and neither of you moved away and the quiet between you was not the managed quiet of two professionals coexisting carefully in the same building. it was different from that. it had a different texture, warmer, more deliberate, the quiet of something that was choosing to be quiet rather than having nothing to say.

at some point you looked at the tin, sitting open between you on the counter, and you thought about the winter soldier's hand reaching for the top shelf of the pantry and coming back with it and setting it down and looking at it, and then looking at you, and then reaching in and holding out one biscuit between two fingers, patient and straightforward. not the tin. one biscuit. you had understood then that it was an offering and you had taken it and that had been the beginning of something you had subsequently lost and were now standing in the kitchen at three in the morning tentatively, carefully, with your whole chest quietly fracturing, beginning to believe you might not have lost entirely.

you looked at the tin. you looked at your mug. you did not look at him because looking at him right now required a steadiness you were still working toward.

but you stayed. you didn't take your coffee and go. you stayed at the counter and the city moved far below and the tin sat open between you and the coffee was exactly right, and bucky stood beside you in the low light with that small private expression at the corner of his mouth and said nothing and stayed too, and that was its own kind of language, one you were just beginning to learn how to read again.

later — much later, in the ordinary grey light of a wednesday morning that had nothing remarkable about it — you would think about the two mugs already out before you'd come through the door. the lid already off the tin. the saucer. the one biscuit, not the tin, the one biscuit, the specific echo of a gesture from a morning that should have been lost with everything else. you would think about all of it and you would hold it carefully, the way you'd learned to hold things that mattered, and you would not think it too hard or too directly because the not-yet was still important, the careful management of hope being something you understood the value of by now, but you would let yourself hold it. you would let yourself think: he knows. and then, smaller and more careful and further down: he came back.

steve rogers, it turned out, had never known how to keep a secret from james buchanan barnes. not in eighty years. not once.

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a herding dog didn't ask.

it didn't request that you go a certain direction or suggest that you might want to consider the alternative route. it simply appeared at your heel and applied gentle, persistent, completely unapologetic pressure until you were going where it had decided you were going, and it looked at you the whole time with those dark patient eyes like it couldn't imagine why you'd want to be anywhere else.

you understood this by the end of the first week.

it had started small, the way everything with him started small. you'd been heading to the commissary on the wrong floor, the one that had the better coffee but was two floors down and involved passing through a section of the building that was louder and more populated, and he'd appeared at your side in the corridor and his shoulder had turned you, gently, fractionally, in a slightly different direction. not a push. barely even a nudge. just the weight of him angled against your trajectory and the steady expectation that you would adjust to it, and you'd adjusted to it without really deciding to, and ended up at the commissary on your floor instead. you'd only realised what had happened when you were already there.

he did it again the next day with the elevator. you'd pressed the button for three floors below yours to pick up a report from one of the other teams and he'd appeared beside you in the time it took the elevator to arrive, looked at the lit button, and looked at you. the elevator opened. he'd pressed your floor number before you'd stepped fully inside. you'd said i need to go to three and he'd said i'll get it and you'd stood in the elevator going back to your floor while he'd gone to three, and he'd appeared at your office door twenty minutes later with the report and set it on your desk and gone back to his position in the doorway.

"you didn't have to do that," you said.

"i know," he said.

it kept happening.

you'd wander toward the kitchen too late, past the hour that he'd apparently decided was the correct hour for you to eat, and he'd be there, materialising at your shoulder with the particular energy of something that had been tracking your location and had an opinion about your choices. he'd nudge you back toward the table with a hand at your elbow, steering without grabbing, the lightest possible pressure in the exact direction he wanted you to go. if you stopped walking he'd stop with you and then the shoulder would turn again, the same barely-there weight of him redirecting you like a ship with a very large and very patient tug, and you'd find yourself going the right direction without having made the decision.

he'd decided what the right direction was in most situations, apparently. the commissary on your floor not three. the elevator to your level not the stairs when you were tired. bed before midnight, which he enforced by appearing in whatever room you were in and standing in the doorway and looking at you until you put the tablet down, and if you didn't put the tablet down he'd come and sit beside you and the proximity of him made the tablet feel increasingly beside the point until you put it down yourself.

"you're herding me," you said to him one evening, when he'd steered you away from the briefing room where a meeting was running two hours over and back toward your floor with nothing but the angle of his body in the corridor.

he looked at you.

"you are," you said. "you're literally herding me. like a sheep."

he considered this with the seriousness he brought to most things. "you don't go where you're supposed to go," he said.

"where i'm supposed to—" you stopped. "i go where i need to go."

"you go where the work is," he said. "not where you're supposed to be."

you looked at him. "those are sometimes the same place."

"not at ten at night," he said, and his chin tilted toward your floor in the direction he wanted you to go, patient and absolute.

you went, because you always went, because he was very good at this and you were increasingly terrible at arguing with him about it.

the nudging got more physical as the weeks went on, because of course it did.

it started with the shoulder, that barely-there redirection, and graduated to the hand at your elbow and then the hand at your waist, the same calm steering energy, the same complete confidence in the direction. he'd be behind you and the hand would settle at your waist and apply the faintest pressure and you'd shift course the way you always shifted course, automatically, the way you'd learned to move with him and not against him because moving against him was a theoretical option and moving with him was the actual option. he'd steer you through a crowded common room with his hand at your waist and his body blocking the approach from the left, keeping you moving through the space the way he wanted you to move through it, and you'd arrive at wherever you were going and he'd step back and cross his arms and look satisfied, and you'd say i could've done that myself and he'd say i know.

he had opinions about where you sat.

not unreasonable opinions. always the seat with the wall behind it, always the sight line to the door, always the position that he'd already assessed as the correct one before you'd arrived and would silently direct you toward with the shoulder or the hand until you were in it. you'd stopped arguing about this one early because the reasoning was sound and because his hand at your back steering you to the right chair was difficult to maintain strong feelings against.

the herding extended to other people.

if someone got too close to you in a corridor he'd close the gap between you and them with his own body, smoothly and without drama, just placing himself in the space in a way that made the space unavailable. if a conversation ran long and he'd decided it had run long enough he'd appear at your shoulder and the person you were talking to would invariably look at him and lose their conversational thread, and you'd conclude the debrief and he'd walk you away with his shoulder turning you in the right direction. he wasn't aggressive about it. he didn't glare or posture or do anything that could be pointed to and named. he simply existed between you and whatever he'd decided wasn't necessary, calm and large and absolute.

sam had commented on it once.

"does he know he's doing that?" sam had asked, watching bucky materialise in the corridor between you and a colleague who had been talking for a while.

"i think he knows exactly what he's doing," you'd said.

"and you're okay with it?"

you'd thought about it honestly. "he hasn't steered me wrong yet," you said.

sam had made the complicated face and gone back to his lunch.

what changed in the third week was the quality of the proximity.

the herding had always been functional, purposeful, the energy of something with a job and a clear idea of what the job required. what changed was that it became something else alongside the functional, something that didn't have a job except to be close to you. he'd stand behind you at the kitchen counter not to steer you anywhere but just to stand there, his hands at your waist and his chin finding the top of your head, and you'd let the morning happen around you and he'd stay until the coffee was ready and then step back. he'd sit beside you in the evenings with his knee against yours not because you were going somewhere or needed redirecting but because that was where he'd decided to be. he'd push your hair back from your face slowly, not because you were heading in the wrong direction but because he wanted to, and then let his hand stay at your jaw for a moment longer than the hair required.

it was still herding, technically. just herding toward him instead of away from something else.

one afternoon you'd been heading to your desk and he'd nudged you — the shoulder, the faintest pressure — toward the couch instead, and you'd gone because you always went, and he'd settled beside you and put his arm around your shoulders with the same calm certainty he put his arm around your shoulders when he wanted you to put your head on his shoulder, and you'd put your head on his shoulder and the afternoon had happened around you and neither of you had gone anywhere for two hours.

you'd looked up at him at some point and said "this is what you wanted."

"yeah," he said.

"you herded me onto the couch," you said.

"you were going to sit at your desk for four more hours," he said.

"i had work—"

"the report could wait," he said. "you needed to sit down."

you'd looked at the ceiling. "you can't just decide when i need to sit down."

"i can see when you need to sit down," he said. "so i can."

you'd thought about arguing with that and decided you didn't have the energy, which was possibly his point, and you'd put your head back on his shoulder and the afternoon had continued.

the kisses built the same way the herding built, incrementally and without a formal announcement, each one a small extension of something already established.

his lips at your temple after he'd pushed your hair back. the press of his mouth to the top of your head when he stood behind your chair with his hands on your shoulders. one evening at the kitchen counter, standing behind you with his hands at your waist and his chin on your head while you cooked, and then his mouth at the side of your neck, warm and slow, staying a moment before he straightened. you kept chopping and breathed carefully and said nothing and he kept his hands at your waist and said nothing and the kitchen smelled like garlic and the city went dark outside the window.

a saturday morning at the window with your tea, him coming to stand beside you with his shoulder against yours, and he pressed his mouth below your ear and his hand came to your waist at the same moment and the touch lasted longer than the others, several slow seconds of his lips warm against your skin, and then he straightened and said morning and you said morning back and neither of you moved from the window for a long time.

the herding became the touching became the kisses, all of it the same thing, all of it him deciding where you were supposed to be and moving you toward it with the same patient certainty, except that where you were supposed to be had shifted from your floor and your chair and the right seat in the commissary to somewhere much closer than any of those.

on sunday evening you were on the couch with your tablet and he came and sat beside you and took the tablet out of your hands and set it on the table and pushed your hair back from your face and let his hand stay at your jaw with his thumb at your cheekbone, and the room was quiet and the city was dark outside and you sat there and looked at him.

"bucky," you said, quietly.

"yeah," he said. rough and low. right there.

his thumb moved against your cheek. then he pulled his hand back and stood up and looked at you with something decided in his face.

"go to your room," he said.

you looked at him for a moment. "are you herding me to my room."

"yeah," he said, like this was obvious.

"bucky—"

"go," he said, patient and absolute, the same way he said everything when he'd made a decision.

and you went, because you always went, because he was very good at this and you had stopped pretending you weren't completely aware of where the herding had been heading this whole time, and you walked to the door and looked back over your shoulder and he was watching you with those dark eyes and hadn't moved, and the corner of his mouth was there, and you turned and walked out and you were smiling before you'd made three steps.

you pressed the elevator button.

the doors opened and you stepped in and then he was through them before they closed, stepping in beside you, and the doors shut and it was a very small space and he was a very large person and you looked at the numbers above the door. you felt him turn toward you. he took one step and his hand came up to your jaw and he kissed you, not the way he'd pressed his mouth to your temple or your neck, not careful and brief and still finding its way. he kissed you like he'd decided to, like the deciding had happened a long time ago and this was just the part that came after, and it was warm and sure and unhurried, and you kissed him back before you'd thought about it, which was becoming a theme.

the elevator stopped. your floor. the doors opened.

you pulled back and looked at him for one second and then you laughed, the genuine surprised kind, and slipped out into the corridor and ran. not frightened. the run of someone who knew exactly what was behind them and had decided to make it interesting, and the corridor was dim and yours and your room was at the end of it and your heart was doing something unreasonable and you were still laughing.

his footsteps started behind you.

even. steady. unhurried. the same pace they always were, and that was so much worse than hurried because the urgency wasn't needed, because he already knew where you were going, and he'd been herding you there for weeks.

you made it to your door.

your hand was on the handle.

his hand closed over yours, the flesh hand, warm and certain, and he reached past you and opened the door himself and held it, and you looked up at him, close, and his eyes were dark and the jaw was set and the corner of his mouth was something fuller now, something that had arrived completely.

"hi," you said, a little breathless.

"hi," he said. quiet. going nowhere.

you went inside.

so did he.

the door to your room clicked shut softly behind you, the quiet enveloping the space like a shared secret. bucky stepped in slowly, his eyes immediately seeking yours—dark, uncertain, flickering with anxious hesitation. your breath caught in your throat, mirroring the uneven rise and fall of his chest. his flesh hand twitched at his side, while the metal one remained still, its plates silent. the tension hummed between you, drawing you closer in tentative steps, like hesitant magnets.

he stopped mere inches away, his gaze locked steadily on yours, searching silently for any sign to retreat. you reached out tentatively, your fingers brushing the collar of his shirt lightly. his eyes widened just a fraction, his throat bobbing with a visible swallow. a small nod from you seemed to ease him, and his flesh fingers lifted slowly to trace your jaw—his warm palm cupping your cheek gently, his thumb stroking the bone with hesitation. your breaths synchronized, shallow and anxious.

your eyes held through it all, his pupils dilating as his lips brushed yours feather-light—testing, with a faint tremble at the corners of his mouth. a quiet whimper escaped you, your body leaning in instinctively, and he sighed shakily into the contact, pressing firmer but still so careful. his tongue darted out to wet your bottom lip slowly before sliding in lazily, exploring your taste with wide-eyed wonder, even as his eyelids fluttered.

his metal hand rose uncertainly, hovering at your waist until your fingers wrapped around his wrist softly, guiding the cool plates to settle there—pulling you closer inch by inch. a gasp punched from him, his cock stirring thickly in his pants, pressing lightly against your belly over the layers of fabric. his eyes darted down briefly, then back up to yours with anxiety, checking for permission. you nodded slowly, your hand sliding up to cup his jaw, your thumb mirroring his stroke on your cheekbone.

the kisses deepened unhurriedly, tongues gliding wet and tender—savoring every slide, breaths mingling hot and intimate. his free hand clenched into a fist before you took it, placing his palm over your breast slowly. the fabric barrier warmed under his hesitant knead, your nipple peaking tightly at the touch. your soft moan vibrated into his mouth, your hips twitching forward instinctively. he froze for a brief moment, his eyes snapping open wide to meet yours, an anxious flicker there until your reassuring gaze held firm, urging him onward.

you tugged the hem of his shirt up deliberately, peeling the fabric off his scarred and muscled torso—exposing the jagged seam where flesh knit to metal, pink ridges stark against his skin. his breath hitched sharply, his body tensing with uncertainty as your fingers traced the edges feather-light, your eyes locked on his through every pass. your lips followed, pressing open-mouthed kisses slowly along the scars—your tongue flicking the ridges gently, tasting the faint salt of his skin.

a shiver rolled hard through him, a low whine escaping his throat. his eyes squeezed shut then forced open to meet yours—vulnerable, an anxious plea shimmering in their depths. his metal fingers tightened fractionally at your waist, his flesh hand fisting the edge of the sheet nearby as you sucked soft marks into blooming red on his shoulder, your teeth grazing the lightest touch. his cock throbbed insistently now, his hips shifting restlessly, seeking friction over his pants.

your hand found his, guiding his flesh palm down to cup your ass slowly—pulling him flush against you, your pussy nestling against his bulge through the denim. mutual gasps traded in the kiss, eyes fluttering but holding hazy contact. he rocked experimentally in shallow motions, his cock dragging long over your folds—your wetness seeping into your panties quickly, soaking the barriers. an anxious tremble ran through his thighs, mirroring yours, breaths panting softly against parted lips.

lips parted slick and swollen, tongues thrusting lazily like a promise of deeper intimacy—marking mouths with gentle nips, sucking the swells until they turned pink and tender. you arched slowly, grinding back with tenderness, your clit catching the ridge of his shaft deliciously—a soft moan from you drawing his eyes darker. his hand squeezed your ass hesitantly until you pressed your fingers over his, encouraging a firmer grip. his cock pulsed hotly, pre-cum leaking steadily, his hips circling in an unhurried rhythm as he learned.

eyes locked with intense intimacy through the haze, his widening each time your pussy clenched slickly against him—uncertain but eager, his breath ragged. you slid your hand up, threading through strands of his hair with a gentle pull—tilting his head to deepen the kiss sweeter, tongues swirling thoroughly. he whined muffled into it, following your lead perfectly, his metal hand gliding up your back in a cool trail that soothed the anxious heat building so slowly.

you tumbled toward the bed together, him hovering over you on braced forearms—his weight careful not to crush, eyes searching yours anxiously for the next step. your legs parted invitingly, guiding his hips to settle between them slowly—his cock slotting perfectly along your pussy lips over the clothes, the forward drag drawing twin shudders. gazes held unwavering, breaths syncing as he ground languidly, the tip nudging your clit with precision.

his flesh hand wandered uncertainly up your side until you captured it, placing it over your breast again—his thumb circling your nipple slowly through the shirt, pinching feather-light at your nod. your back arched softly, your pussy fluttering wetly against his grind, a moan spilling free. his eyes fluttered half-shut in pleasure but snapped back to yours quickly—checking, always checking, that unsure glint softening under your pleased haze.

kisses trailed to necks now, his lips sucking marks of deep purple slowly—first under his jaw, his pulse thundering against your tongue, then blooming hot trails on yours. teeth grazed collarbones tenderly, marking skin red without a harsh bite. hips rolled in synced laziness, the dry fuck building a sweet tension coil—his cock throbbing relentlessly over your clit, your slick drenching the crotch lines mutually.

an anxious pause came as he lifted his head, eyes locking deep into yours— a silent question in their depths, his body trembling above you. you smiled softly, your hand in his hair tugging gently downward—guiding his mouth to your chest, shoving your shirt up to bunch it. his lips latched onto your nipple over the bra hesitantly, his tongue flicking slow circles— a wet spot darkening the lace as his suck pulled gently. your thighs quivered, grinding firmer instinctively but reined back to sweetness.

moans traded low and intimate, his muffled against your breast—vibrating through the fabric straight to your core. his cock jerked hard with each pass over your folds, pre-cum mixing into the slick mess. your fingers moved his metal hand to your inner thigh, spreading your leg wider—its plates gripping firm but careful, thumb stroking the denim soothingly. eyes met again through the veil of pleasure, his anxious wideness at your escaping whine, his hips stuttering briefly until your gaze reassured him.

he switched breasts slowly, lavishing the same tender sucks—teeth scraping the lace in the lightest graze, drawing gasps that made his cock twitch wildly. his body shook faintly above you, unsure eagerness shining in his eyes as you rocked up steadily, your clit grinding his shaft unhurriedly. your hand yanked his hair softly to arch your neck—he marked your throat with purple blooms, his lips lingering in long sucks.

you pushed his shoulders down gently, eyes holding his with hungry but hesitant intensity as he knelt on the floor—his nose nuzzling your pussy over the panties first, inhaling deeply with a shaky breath. his gaze flicked up anxiously to yours, waiting for your nod before his tongue dragged flat and slow over the cotton—tracing your slit deliberately, soaking it further. a loud moan escaped you, your hips lifting slightly—fingers threading through his hair with an encouraging light tug.

he licked broader and more tenderly, his lips sealing over your folds to suck softly through the barrier—his nose bumping your clit with sweet pressure. eyes locked upward constantly, watching every twitch of your face for guidance, his pupils blown wide with the pleasure of your taste filtering through the fabric. his metal hand gripped your thigh steady, flesh pressing your mound in slow circles—learning the pressure that made your pussy clench visibly, dampening further.

now circling your clit with focus, his tongue flicked lazily then lapped flat—suction pulling in gentle drags for delicious friction. thighs trembled mutually, his cock humping the air desperately over his pants, the bulge dark and wet. your whine escalated softly, hand pulling his hair firmer—his eyes fluttered but held yours, the anxious drive pushing bolder into sweet laps until the coil wound tight and lazy within you.

you tugged him up slowly, straddling his lap seamlessly—your pussy aligning perfectly with his bulge, the sodden fabrics sliding easily. mouths crashed together tenderly, tongues in sloppy sweet thrusts—marking lips, necks, and shoulders afresh, your teeth sinking into the scar seam again with slow sucks. hips rolled in synced languid motions, his cock gliding over your folds relentlessly, throbbing against your clit.

hands roamed as guided—yours placing his flesh to knead your breast, rolling the nipple; metal splaying over your ass to pull tighter into the rolls. eyes locked in hazy intensity through every grind, breaths panting shared—his widening at each pulse of your pussy, yours at the hot throb of his cock leaking steadily. anxious trembles chased away by the slow build, moans traded low in wet kisses.**n tension simmered into a sweet burn, grinding in deep circles—your clit grinding the peak of his shaft, folds hugging its ridge. release washed over you first in soft waves, your pussy pulsing to soak your panties in a flood, thighs clamping his hips as a cry muffled against his lips. eyes held through it, his darkening in awe as your body arched beautifully beneath him.

he followed moments later, his cock jerking ropes of thick cum into his boxers—grinding through his shattered whine, body convulsing as his arms crushed you close, trembling hard. gazes locked in vulnerable peak, breaths heaving in sync—sweat slicking skin, marks blooming mutually on necks, chests, and scars.

you collapsed tangled together, his shirtless chest heaving beneath you—scars red from your tender kisses. he nuzzled into your hair softly, lips peppering your forehead and jaw hesitantly—eyes searching yours with lingering anxiety, flesh fingers carding through strands in gentle query. you kissed a scar lingeringly and slowly, hand guiding his to your cheek—thumb stroking in mirror, gaze holding to reassure deeply.

bodies stayed melded close, pants damp and cooling slowly—heartbeats thudding together, breaths evening out in the quiet room. his metal arm wrapped around you in secure cool weight, flesh palm warm at your low back—both lingering in unsure bliss, eyes drifting shut in synced peace, the anxiety finally easing away into profound intimacy.

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you find the letter on the kitchen counter.

you almost miss it — it's tucked under the fruit bowl, official letterhead face-down, the way dex had clearly placed it hoping you wouldn't notice for as long as possible. the companion agency's logo in the corner. your name typed neatly.

review period concluding. renewal or contract termination to be confirmed by—

you look up.

dex is standing in the hallway.

he's been there a while, you think. watching you read it. his green eyes fixed on your face with that unblinking intensity, tracking every microexpression, and his ears are doing the flat-but-trying-not-to-look-flat thing that means he's been anxious about this for longer than he's let on.

"when did this arrive," you say.

"four days ago." no hesitation. no apology.

"dex—"

"i wasn't ready for you to see it." his tail curls tight against his leg. "i needed more time before you—" he stops. jaw working. "before you decided."

the word decided sits in the room between you.

"come sit down," you say.

"i'd rather stand."

"dex."

he comes and sits. perches, really, on the very edge of the couch cushion, spine straight, hands braced on his knees. every line of him wound tight. this is the least comfortable you have ever seen him in this apartment — in the space he'd claimed as his with such absolute certainty — and something about that makes your chest ache badly.

"it's a formality," you start. "the renewal is just—"

"don't." his voice is very controlled. "don't tell me it's a formality before you've told me what you're going to do. i can't—" a breath. "don't be kind before. it'll make it worse."

you look at him properly.

his eyes are too bright. his ears completely flat. he's holding himself very still the way he does when he's trying hard not to do something his body wants to — nuzzle into you, or press his face to your neck and just breathe until the world makes sense again.

"what are you afraid of," you ask softly.

something cracks, slightly, in his composure.

"they'll reassign me," he says. "that's what happens if you don't renew. they'll send someone to collect my bag and put me with someone else and i'll have to learn a different apartment and different routines and—" his hands press harder into his knees. "they won't be you. and i won't know where you are."

"dex—"

"i folded your laundry," he says, and the non-sequitur lands like something desperate. "i know how you take your tea and i know which mug you want on bad days and i know you need ten minutes alone when you get home before you're ready to talk and i know—" his voice drops. "i know the sound you make when you're finally relaxed. i've been learning you. every single day. and you can't—" he exhales hard. "you can't just send that somewhere else."

the room is very quiet.

"i'm not sending anything anywhere," you say.

he looks up.

"i'm renewing. i was always going to renew, dex. i just hadn't gotten around to—"

he's across the room before you finish the sentence.

not graceful about it — nothing like his usual fluid deliberate movement. just suddenly there, on his knees in front of the couch, face buried in your lap, arms wrapped around your waist with the desperation of someone who has spent four days holding a fear at arm's length and has just been allowed to put it down.

his ears come all the way up.

you put your hand in his hair, find the spot behind his ear, and scratch slowly.

the purr that comes out of him is immediate and completely involuntary and very, very relieved.

"you should have shown me the letter," you say.

"i know." muffled. utterly unbothered by the undignified position he's currently in.

"four days, dex."

"i was catastrophising. i do that." a pause. "you knew that when you kept me."

when you kept me. like he's something you chose. something you'd do again.

"yeah," you say quietly. "i did."

his arms tighten. the purring deepens.

outside, ordinary saturday sounds. inside, just this — dex slowly unknotting himself from four days of private terror, and you holding the back of his head, and the enormous simple relief of a creature who has just learned he gets to stay.

"i'm not going anywhere," he mumbles into your lap.

"i know."

"i mean it. i'll be very difficult to get rid of."

"i'm aware."

"i'll hide my bag."

"dex."

"i'll learn to forge your signature on the non-renewal form."

"dex."

he tilts his head up. green eyes, bright and warm and terrifyingly fond, looking up at you from your lap like you are the only fixed point in his entire world.

"thank you," he says. simply. quietly. the most unguarded you've ever heard him.

you look down at him — this ridiculous, needy, fiercely devoted creature who knows your bad-day mug and has spent four days quietly panicking rather than just ask you — and feel something in your chest settle into place with the finality of something that was always going to end up here.

"you're welcome," you say. "now get up off the floor."

"in a minute."

he stays there for considerably longer than a minute.

his breath warms your thighs through your pants, steady now but laced with soft whines that vibrate against your core. the purring rumbles deeper, a constant hum as his nose nudges higher, inhaling your scent like it's his lifeline. fingers clutch your hips, pulling you closer, his tongue darting out to lick tentatively at the fabric over your pussy.

you shift, parting your legs wider, and he takes it as permission—desperate, eager. 'let me taste you,' he whimpers, voice muffled, green eyes pleading up at you. his hands tremble as they unbutton your pants, yanking them down with your underwear in one frantic tug, exposing your slick folds. cool air hits your wetness, but his hot mouth follows instantly, lips sealing around your clit, sucking with starving pulls.

a sharp moan escapes you, hand fisting his hair tighter, scratching that spot behind his ear. he keens, high and needy, the sound turning into a growl as his tongue plunges deep into your pussy, lapping at your juices like he's dying of thirst. slurping noises fill the room, wet and obscene, mixed with his whines—'please, need this, need you'—gasped between long licks that drag from your entrance to your swollen nub.

his ears flick forward, tail thumping against the floor in rhythm with his bobbing head. he devours you, nose grinding your clit while his tongue fucks in and out, curling to hit that ridge inside. your thighs quake, clamping his head, but he pushes deeper, fingers spreading your ass cheeks to lick lower, rimming your hole with filthy swipes before sucking your pussy lips into his mouth.

'good boy,' you murmur, and he shudders violently, purring so hard it buzzes your clit. precum leaks from his cock, tenting his pants, but he ignores it, focused only on your pleasure. two fingers thrust inside you, thick and curling, pumping fast while his lips lock on your clit, teeth grazing just enough to spark fire. squelching sounds echo as he fingerfucks you, your arousal dripping down his chin, soaking his shirt.

you buck against his face, chasing the build, and he whines louder, desperate slurps turning frantic. 'cum on my tongue, please, i'll do anything,' he begs, voice breaking, eyes locked on yours—pure devotion shining through tears of effort. the pressure snaps, orgasm crashing over you, pussy clenching his fingers as you flood his mouth. he drinks it all, moaning like it's nectar, tongue scooping every drop while you ride out the waves on his face.

panting, you pull him up by the hair, his lips glistening, green eyes wild with want. 'now fuck me,' you command, and he scrambles to obey, shedding clothes in a blur. his cock springs free—thick, veined, tip weeping—slapping against his belly. you straddle him, grinding your wet pussy along his length, slick folds coating him as he bucks up, moaning your name. 'fuck me like you own me,' he begs, fingers digging into your hips. you sink down, impaling yourself on his cock, walls stretching tight around his girth. he thrusts up hard, pounding deep, balls slapping your ass with every brutal drive.

you both cry out, his whine pitching high as your walls grip him tight. he pounds into you on the couch, hips snapping with bruising force, balls smacking your ass. his mouth latches onto your nipple, sucking hard, teeth grazing the peak while his hand slides between you, thumb circling your clit. pleasure spikes, your juices dripping down his shaft as you ride him faster, breasts bouncing.

the couch creaks under you, skin slapping loud, his purrs mixing with guttural grunts and your gasps. sweat beads on his forehead, ears pinned back in ecstasy now. you rake nails down his back, and he yelps, thrusting wilder, chasing your pleasure over his own. 'make me cum again,' you demand, and he angles his hips, grinding your clit with his pelvis while his cock batters deep.

'you're mine,' you gasp, clenching around him, milking his cock. he flips you onto your back, pinning your wrists above your head, slamming in deeper, cockhead battering your cervix.

'yours, always yours,' he sobs, leaning down to kiss you messily, sharing your taste. his hand finds your breast, pinching the nipple hard, twisting as he ruts deeper, cock dragging your g-spot with every plunge.

second orgasm builds fast, his whines frantic—'yes, yes, take it'—as you shatter, milking him ruthlessly. he follows seconds later, roaring your name, hot cum erupting in thick ropes, painting your insides white. he keeps pumping through it, oversensitive thrusts drawing whimpers from him, until he's spent, collapsing half on you, cock softening inside.

he collapses onto you, cock still twitching inside, both panting. 'renewal or not, i'll always be yours,' he whispers, kissing your neck softly now, devotion etched in every touch.