How Do I Break You Before You Break Me?
Part VII - Threads
Bullseye x Reader
Summary: It looks like an exposed nervous system.
Word count: 1.8K
Previously
A/N: This is getting longer than expected but the words are flowing out of me and you guys seem to be liking it. It was originally supposed to be 5 parts but now it should be 9 plus an epilogue..... whoops! ANYWAYS, to the story...
The walk to her old apartment is long. The dense fog keeps her mostly unnoticed, the rain washes away most of the blood.
She tries her best to stay hidden from view, taking old prohibitions-era passages that she discovered during her urbex phase as a teen. But even that has a limit; some routes are blocked, tunnels completely sealed.
When trying to be covert starts to feel stupid, she sticks to walking through dark alleys. She can feel the lingering gazes of the homeless, but people in New York City know to mind their business.
The streets of Hell's Kitchen are unusually calm. No fights, no muggings, no chaos. A few dogs bark in the distance. Maybe there's a thunderstorm on the way.
Y/N's shadow follows behind, making no sound. She refuses to acknowledge him, or think over why she let him follow.
She has to reach a safe space. So no, she doesn't ponder on Dex or question the unusual quietude of this godforsaken neighborhood; she'll take it as the universe trying to make it all a bit easier to handle.
She nearly falls on her face walking up the entrance of her building. She's been away for too long, forgot that the stairs are uneven. It's stupid really, a small inconvenience. But it's irritating enough that she's daydreaming about killing Dex again.
Shot to the head, brain splattering on wet asphalt.
The shitty elevator works fine for once, rising quicker than she remembers, cables running smoothly without too loud a drag. When it opens to her floor, she doesn't see anyone, halls empty.
For a second, she wonders if she stepped into an alternate universe, if they're the only two people in the world. Were the homeless on her path even real? Or her brain filling in blank spaces?
She slows down at the sight of her apartment number, comes to a complete stop once the door is in arms reach.
This is wrong.
Too easy.
Coming back can't be this effortless, there has to be a catch, something to rip into or crawl through.
Except it was neither easy nor effortless. She fought to be here, killed to be here.
You're just like me.
"Apartment's empty." Dex speaks like he's afraid to startle her. "Nobody moved after you."
She stares at the door. All she has to do is open it and her old life is back. Right? So why does the idea make her wanna throw up?
Her hand hovers over the handle without touching. The corners of her nails are still dirty with blood. From her, from Dex, from the dead man in the bunker. Maybe she died in that bunker too, maybe she died a long ago.
Maybe she turned into a revenant. She certainly feels like one.
This night was all about opening doors, yet this one feels forbidden, like coming back would do nothing but pollute the life she once had.
She can't do that, not after the drag of the kitchen knife.
She turns sideways, walks three doors past her own, and knocks on the neighbors apartment, hoping he hasn't moved after all this time.
"What are you doing?" Dex's voice spikes with anxiety.
"Hey, Castle?" She rasps, the wound on her cheek throbbing from the movement. "You still around? It's Y/N."
No one answers.
If she can't open certain doors, she'll break through others. It takes a few tries, but it eventually gives. She can feel Dex staring holes into her back as she walks inside.
The apartment is dark, dusty, and, to her surprise, still showing signs of life. There's duffle bags on the floor full of ammo, empty cans of beans and tuna in the trash, half-dissolved pills in the sink along with their orange bottles.
You'd expect a vigilante not to linger in the same place for too long, she thinks to herself.
She walks around, trying to remember where the bathroom is. Turning a corner, she's met with the sight of a toilet, a sink, and... her image reflected back at her.
It's haunting. Her skin is pale, the gash on her cheek still bleeds, albeit slowly, sluggish and thick. It's a near copy of Dex's scar, wide and deep.
Her hair is wet and messy, a few grey strands standing out in the low light, probably stress-induced. There's sand in it, from struggling at the bay.
She immediately averts her eyes when Dex appears in the mirror. She squats down to open the cabinet under the sink, and finds what she was looking for: first aid.
"It's not smart for us to be here." He tries to appeal to her rationality.
Fuck him.
Inside the kit, there's needle but no thread. She double checks, gets impatient, pricks the tip of her finger on the needle in the process. But still, no thread is found.
Motherfucking Frank must've used it all up.
She exits the bathroom before staring at the bedroom entrance. She shouldn't, they were never that close in the first place, but still, she finds herself barging through.
The room looks like an exposed nervous system; there's photographs the walls, some circled, most of them marked with an X. There's maps, notes, newspaper cutouts, so much information it couldn't fit on a single board, so the papers got pinned straight to the wooden walls.
A dirty body sized mirror stands near the bed. On the bed itself, there's old blood stains, a picture of Frank's family, and a trauma kit.
She opens the kit at lightning speed. There's no simple needle and thread. There's gauze, shears, splinter forceps, and... a skin stapler.
She's past caring.
She grabs the stapler like it's the solution to all her problems, walks up to the mirror, aims it towards her face.
Dex jumps in, reaching out in a flash. She slaps his hand away before turning to look at him.
There's warning in her eyes; don't touch.
He moves cautiously on the second try, fingers brushing against in her wrist in a silent request to let him help. She shoves him back with a strained grunt, but he barely moves. Not because he's imposing himself or standing his ground. He's just heavy.
When she's sure he won't rip the stapler out of her hand, she turns back to the mirror.
Her legs nearly fail at the first clip. Her jaw locks shut from the fear that opening her mouth to scream will make the skin rip through the staple.
On the second clip, her jaw clenches so hard she thinks she hears one of her teeth crack. Tears fill her eyes until she's nearly blind.
On the third, the agony is so overwhelming that she doesn't fight when Dex reapproaches.
He sits her down on the bed and cups her face gently. He doesn't continue immediately, instead reaching into the trauma kit and grabbing a miraculously clean piece of cloth.
She doesn't look him in the eyes while he cleans the wound, nor when the stapler returns, much less when he bandages it. When he's done, he pulls her into a hug.
She pushes him away, the stapler clattering to the ground as she stands. On impulse, she grabs it and throws it at him.
Dex stays mostly silent as he patches himself up.
The stapling sounds fill the room, but Y/N keeps her attention elsewhere, eyes focusing on Frank's walls, desperate to get her mind off Dex. She tracks the red threads by themselves, not really focusing on any particular information they connect to.
At first glance, it all seemed linked. It would be easy to miss the papers on the far corner, but she notices how the red threads break off. The web doesn't go to that corner of the wall, like Frank investigated something unrelated to his main obsession.
She approaches and... it's her.
A picture of her, straight from her ID.
Surrounding it, printed out copies of emails and texts. Emails she Dex sent to her employer, apologizing for having to quit on such short notice. Messages upon messages she Dex sent to her friends, claiming she'd met the love of her life and decided to move to Europe.
"Your friends weren't hard to convince." Dex says sheepishly, disrupting her focus. "But Frank was smart. He was the only guy that knew something was wrong."
There's handwritten notes on the printed copies, some of them reading: No records of conversations with any partner. Why did she actually leave? Where did she go?
She tugs another piece of paper from the wall; a government security form draft.
"I misled him." Dex clarifies while he finishes closing the would on his bicep. "Forged a few documents, made it look like you joined an intelligence agency overseas. It was a hard sell but eventually he moved on. He had other things to focus on."
I'm not even officially declared missing, she thinks to herself.
All this time, she imagined she was on some list, missing and maybe presumed dead. She imagined her friends bothering the shitty cops over having to do their job properly.
But nobody knew. Nobody questioned or cared enough to actually find her.
Frank thought it was weird but even he eventually stopped looking because he wasn't an actual friend. He's just a guy with sharp eyes who she shared a beer with once or twice, who probably appreciated her not ratting out the Punisher.
You have no one else out there.
"Frank thinks you're a spy." Dex says, stappling the cut on his shoulder shut. "If he comes back and sees us going through his apartment..."
She doesn't entertain him, focused on scanning all the papers on the wall relating to her. Dex could be lying just to get her out of here. Frank could've come close to figuring out what actually happened.
Maybe he was still looking.
"If you don't want to go back to your apartment, I can get you a hotel." Dex tries again, getting in his feet. Then his tone turns insecure. "Why did you even knock on his door? He never meant anything to you."
The slap against Dex's cheek is sharp.
The air gets heavier. She pretends like her stomach doesn't drop.
"I said you could follow." She tries to talk without opening her mouth too much. "But you need to shut the fuck up."
It's a risky move, lashing out like this. But he's acting like she has some level of control. So she'll take it and use it.
When he doesn't react, when he stays quiet, she turns back to the papers.
There's not much else that helps her understand Frank's thought process. She grabs her photograph again, turns it around. Written on the back; her full name, date of birth, hometown, and a concluding note that reads:
Probably working somewhere deep undercover.
The photo is ripped to pieces, an irrational anger fueling her.
Stomping out of the room, she steps on a floorboard that creeks a little too loud.
She steps on it again, the sound boomy and hollow.
You know what?
Fuck Frank.
A/N II: As always, I would love to hear your thoughts so far on the plot direction :)
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