Trinket Goblin

he in turn holds you close, large hands settled on your waist — grip directing your winds and grinds over his aching cock. the inners of his thighs hook at the outers of your own, legs bent and pressure firm as if to keep you close, close as humanly possible with his lounged position against the headboard.

your grip intensifies around the lower of his face, and it's then your thumb and fingers dip further into the hollows of his — pressure making his lips part against yours. his breath is ragged against you, pants hot and desperate in a way that matches your own. 

you itch in slightly and brush your lips over his. though you don't connect them, instead they ghost his, mouth agape as he swallows the gasps he earns from you with each pump he fucks up into you with. each upward wind making you splutter on choked-out whines.

with your mouths merely connecting, you swipe your tongue over his bottom lip and then nip at it, latching on lightly. you hold it between either set of your teeth, tugging on it with the most gentle of pressure. he chuckles, noise low and lewd while his pawing tightens around your waist, his grasp growing with extremity. desperate hold guiding you down on onto the cock he dicks up inside you.

you release your toothed hold from his bottom lip and press a kiss to where you had momentarily bitten into, giving him something slightly sweet and heartfelt. though your kisses drift from his bottom lip and teeter outwards, reaching his cheek. pointing your tongue, you trace over his scar — trailing the joined fusion of skin. haste non-existent.

but that's short lived and you soon feel absence grow around your upper hips. 

instead, he places them around your neck, one on the side, one nearing the back as he directs you to meet his eyes once more. he's mindful as he tugs you, thick fingers encompassing the base of your throat like it was no effort at all. he lowers you down, making you meet his lips so he can speak against them. 

"you're my dream girl," he utters, voice low and gruff. it sounded honest. or as honest as you believe dex to be capable of.

"yeah?" you hum, smiling against his lips.

the hand around the back of your neck itches upwards, fingers swirling at the root of your hair at the base of your neck. and it's then that he gives it a considerate tug. his hold like an effort to keep you close, to keep you right there.

"yeah," dex affirms, eyes cast up at you — gaze heavy and wanting. He nips at his own lip, it's like a redirectional effort for the slipping self-control, you believe.

his hands snake from their placement and pause at the either side of your face, grasp encompassing your head within two of his very thick hands. he retains your position and itches up to meet your lips; the connection rough and sort of desperate as deep breaths muffle between from either one of you.

your winds grind to a gradual halt when you feel dex's hips still beneath you, the motion of his upward fucking ceasing completely. you pull back to look over him, like it was to question the reasoning for such a sudden stop. though by the time you're able to figure out what his expression meant, he's pushing you backwards, grip firm on you as he repositions with you — cock still plugged inside you. 

he lays you down, pushing you back just under 180 degrees so the position you're each in is the same, only reversed. he's on top, like how you were only a mere moment ago.

his hands have since retracted from the sides of your face and one instead finds itself anchoring your pinned wrists into the mattress, his hold keeping your interlocked pinkies above your head. though the other has situated itself at the top of your throat, just under your jaw. he angles your face, making you look him in the eye as he rebuilds the pattern of thrusts from before. each one grows, and a system of deep and equally strategic pumps fall into place. 

dex keeps his eyes cast down on you below, gaze focusing on your growing fucked-out expression — the one that he's a direct cause of. and it's then that he nods down at you, encouragement building across his features as he gives your lower cheek a few light taps. ones that were again, some means of encouragement.

his thumb slips aside and reaches for your mouth, and it's there that he hooks onto your bottom lip, tugging on it slightly so as to keep your gasping mouth agape. he leans in nice and close, lips brushing past yours as he spits between them, laying saliva on your tongue for you to swallow. 

"attagirl," he coos against your parted lips, eyes as smitten as he can manage. "attagirl."

Finally reaching Afshin, they stumbled upon what was most certainly Silas' factory, given that they spotted him walking around nearby, but seemed to just be at the side of a mountain.

"Shall we go and have a gander?" James said over Sherlock's shoulder, a strange sort of gleam in his eye as he gazed at him.

"That's all well and good, James," Mycroft interjected, "but how do we get in?"

As she looked up at Mycroft, she noticed that he too was looking at Sherlock expectantly. He had an expression reminiscent of a parent waiting for a child to find the solution to a very simple problem. He masked it with genuine curiosity, which may have fooled Sherlock, but did not fool Jane.

"Suggestions in a hat, if you please-" Sherlock called back, before pausing. He observed the side of the mountain closer. "The map in Silas's study. The outline of these mountains. They match."

Mycroft's eyes lit up, but he schooled his expression as he urged Sherlock further. "I thought you told me that map was useless? It didn't even have North marked on it."

"It's not a map," Sherlock replied eagerly, "It's a cross-sectional plan."

James joined Sherlock in his observations, swiftly deducing a second, less guarded entrance to the tunnels.

"You knew," she accused quietly as they made their way down, "You knew about the map."

He smiled, "You read me far too easily, dear," he said with fondness, "Yes, I knew. I went to look at the map before we left. But, it is better to let Sherlock figure these things out on his own. He needs the mental exercise."

James felled the guard outside the entrance very easily, and Sherlock felled the one inside, albeit with much less brutality. James looked pleased, almost hungry as he praised his work. Xiao-Wei, Emine, and James split from the group to go after Malik. Mycroft seemed pleased with this arrangement, and kept a steady hand on her the entire time they searched for Beatrice.

When they found her, she seemed to be already paranoid. Sherlock attempted to persuade her, but it was Cordelia who truly broke through to her. Beatrice, Jane realized, is possibly Silas's worst victim. To take a child away from a most loving mother and two elder brothers, molding her into a puppet, was perhaps more despicable than locking Cordelia in an asylum. Cordelia had support in her sons, while Beatrice was isolated and preyed upon in a way that Jane could only imagine.

A bittersweet reunion was had between the mother and daughter, and she found herself wiping tears from her eyes. But they were soon in motion again, as Beatrice led them to Silas. Jane thought for a moment that they had been duped, and that Beatrice was still very much loyal to her father. That was, until she pulled a gun on him.

As she understood, Silas had asked Sherlock to be the heir to his criminal enterprise, while having also promised Beatrice the same. Beatrice had overheard this the night prior, which led to her distrust of him. Silas, to his credit, tried his hardest to manipulate her back onto his side, pulling her into his arms. Beatrice seemed to reciprocate his embrace, but they soon found that this was only a ploy to press the gun to his side, firing a shot through his stomach.

The shot had only just rang out when an explosion ripped through the tunnels. Mycroft was atop her in a moment, shielding her from the debris and dragging her away.

"Where is he?" he yelled to Sherlock, "Where did he go?"

Beatrice grabbed hold of Cordelia's hand, calling for her brothers to follow as she led them outside.

Jane held her breath until the fresh air hit her lungs. But just as she inhaled, another explosion echoed from behind them, knocking both herself and Mycroft off their feet. She was still for a moment, barely registering the scuffle around them until she heard James call Sherlock's name. When she looked up, Xiao Wei, Sherlock, and Beatrice had fled along with Silas, and gunshots rang from the mountain. She looked over to Mycroft, who was already sitting up again and watching them retreat.

"James?" she called, seeing his crumpled form on the ground. She crawled over to him, and watched as he shoved a paper into his pocket. "Are you hurt?"

It was when he looked up at her that she finally saw the extent of what Mycroft meant by his affliction. His eyes were wide and manic, his pupils twice their usual size. His usual charm was gone, and what was left behind was something deeply unsettling as he stared past her after Sherlock. "…James?"

Mycroft pulled her away just in time as James moved to push her out of his line of sight. "Come. He can take care of himself." He hauled her away, and pulled her into the shade of a nearby tree, taking his handkerchief from his pocket and wiping the soot from her face.

"Are you hurt?" she asked, checking him over for any blood.

He shook his head, "A few bruises, and perhaps a temporary aversion to loud noises, as is typical for a bombing."

"Should we not go after Sherlock?" she questioned.

Mycroft looked up the mountain, "They took the horses," he said, "It is of no use. The probability of Sherlock being seriously hurt is low. It is three people against an already wounded man. It would do no good for you to witness such things, anyhow."

James had finally pushed himself up, and hobbled towards them. He too looked unharmed apart from a few bruises. "Terribly sorry, Jane. Had quite the shock," he tapped the side of his head lightheartedly.

"It is alright," she replied as gently as she could. James seemed back to his usual self now, but she couldn't shake the sight of his black, vacant eyes. "You should sit down, James."

The sound of hooves diverted their attention as three horses made their way towards them. Sure enough, Silas was not among them.

"He is dead," Xiao Wei announced.

Mycroft stood, noticing Sherlock's horse lagging behind slightly. He dismounted shakily, ignoring James' greeting completely, tears in his eyes as he tottered towards his brother, who moved closer to him. Sherlock crumbled before their eyes, seeking refuge in his brother's arms as he sobbed violently. Mycroft assumed the position naturally, softly shushing him until his breathing evened out again. "He fell," Sherlock whimpered, "He held me— and then he fell. I tried to- I tried to stop him but he wouldn't-"

"It's alright, Sherry," Mycroft assured, "Breathe, now, brother dear."

Cordelia seemed tearful as well, so Jane joined Beatrice in consoling her. Emine and Xiao Wei gathered their things and prepared for their journey back to their own horses. James stood and observed from the sidelines, scanning the human devastation before him.

Sherlock did not speak for the entire day's drive back to Constantinople. James tried his hardest to comfort him, but did not succeed in breaking through to him until they were safely back at Silas' manor in Constantinople.

The house was abandoned when they arrived, which was a relief to them all. She made her way to the room she had been assigned before they left, changing out of her clothes and bathing herself with the washbasin in her room. She was pleased to find that there were nightclothes in the wardrobe, as it was already very late at night, and she did not wish to impose upon Beatrice any further.

She had only just pulled her dressing gown on when there was a knock at the door. She had the good sense to peak through the crack in the door before opening it this time. She was very happy to find that it was Mycroft, and swung the door open. He smiled nervously at her, and it seemed that he too had cleaned himself up. He looked almost sinful, standing before her in his own dressing gown, his skin still damp.

"Mycroft," she cooed, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him into the room. "How I have missed you in the past-" she glanced at the clock, "half an hour."

He laughed, "As I have missed you," he countered, "I… Well, I thought you may like a bath, so I've had one drawn for you, if you are not too weary."

She leaned back, looking up at him, a smirk tugging at her lips. "You are seducing me, Mr Holmes," she triumphed.

He grimaced at the phrasing, "I would not put it so lewdly."

"I would love a bath," she insisted, taking his hand, "Lead the way, my love."

He led her down the hall, giggling and shushing her so as not to rouse suspicion as the others settled in their beds. She was pleased to see that the bath was large enough for two.

"You will be joining me, yes?" she hoped, and he flushed softly.

"If that is what you wish," he squeezed her hand. She practically leapt at him, pressing her mouth against his much in the way they had at sunset two days prior. He groaned softly against her lips, "May I undress you?" he asked in a whisper.

"You may do whatever you'd like to me," she smiled, and he swallowed, squeezing his eyes shut.

"Do not say such things," he whined, "At least until the wedding."

She scoffed, "We are still waiting for the wedding?"

"It is what's proper, Jane," he replied firmly.

She stepped back and untied her dressing gown, letting it drop to the floor, swiftly followed by her nightgown until she was bare in front of him. She knew it was a foul move on her end, to resort to such lowly tricks, but she could not resist— especially when his lips parted in shock and he clapped a hand over his eyes after they had already spent a long moment flickering over her form, observing every detail.

"This," she stifled a laugh, blushing to her shoulders, "Is quite the opposite of propriety, Mycroft."

"Jane!" he tittered, "You startled me!"

He uncovered his eyes again once he heard the unmistakable sound of the water sloshing against her skin. He began to laugh, a contagious laugh that spread until they were both covering their mouths so as not to wake the whole house.

"My point still stands, you know," he added as he began to disrobe as well. "The marital act is named so for a reason. You are a lady, and deserve to be treated as such, yes?"

She made no response, only staring at him, entranced. He was beautiful, traitorously so. There was a light scattering of hair over his chest and a trail down his stomach, leading to the already rigid length of him. She was not oblivious to carnal desire by any means, she had more than once imagined him in such a state in the dark of her bedroom. Yet, he was more enchanting in the flesh than her imagination ever conjured. Despite all they had endured, all that he had endured, he was happy— comfortable even in this moment.

"It is your turn to fluster, then?" he teased, stepping in beside her and settling into the water. "Have you no witty reply to bestow?"

"You are magnificent," she exhaled, gliding atop his lap and kissing him fiercely, the water nearly splashing out of the basin, "You are the most handsome man in the world, and I the most fortunate woman."

He blushed and put his hands cautiously on her hips, one sliding up her back to tangle in her hair. "I must endeavor to best you, and tell you that you are much more magnificent than I. I feel I do not often remark on your beauty, so as not to seem shallow— but you must know that it occupies much of my mind. And now that I have seen you like this, I fear I shall never think of anything else again."

"Mycroft," she moaned against his neck, straddling his thigh and rutting against him.

"Heavens, Jane," he panted as she kissed and nipped at his jaw. "Perhaps- perhaps we can work around that one small limitation."

She giggled, "Yes. A loophole, perhaps?"

"Yes," he quipped eagerly with a chuckle, "Yes, that would be acceptable. We are engaged, are we not?"

"Yes," she nodded gravely, "Simple touches are not coitus. And we have had quite the difficult week, have we not? It is only natural to wish to unwind."

He laughed, and pulled her in again, parting her lips with his tongue and guiding her cunt over his thigh again, his eyes darkening at the whimpering moan that escaped her.

"There you are, darling," he praised in a hushed tone, "How is that?"

She found herself lost for words, and so she just nodded fervently, her lashes fluttering and her eyes wide as her hand ran over his chest and down his stomach. "Will you let me touch you?" she asked with equal amounts of timidness and desperation. His cock twitched, and he inhaled sharply at her words.

"Yes, God, yes," he muttered, his grip on her hair loosening in favor of cupping her face tenderly, pulling her in for another kiss. It lasted only a moment though, as she pulled away in order to trail her fingers down his pelvis. His breath hitched, and his brows furrowed as she wrapped her hand around him, squeezing the head softly. The water made him glisten as she stroked him, his swollen lips parted in ecstasy. She observed him keenly, watching every micro-expression on his face, every muscle twitch.

His firm grip on her hips never stopped, and she pressed her forehead against his, as she canted more and more desperately against him, whimpering with every praise he offered. Each of his breathy curses sent her closer to her pinnacle, and she gripped his damp hair with her free hand. "Mycroft-" she gasped, "Mycroft, I-"

"Yes, I- he shuddered, "Yes, I know, my darling. Go on. You've done so well."

He tensed his thigh underneath her, and with a few more splashes of water over the side of the bath, she found release in his arms, trembling violently and letting out sounds that were much louder than they should have been given the late hour. Mycroft did not seem to worry about that, however, as he spent over her fingers with a guttural groan.

"My darling," he said through labored breath, pulling away enough to look into her eyes, "I love you so very much. More than anything in the world."

"As I love you," she smiled, her own chest heaving. "More than life itself."

They laid there for several minutes, until the water began to run cold, and he helped her out of the bath and into a linen towel. "Your legs are shaking," he observed after drying himself off and putting her nightclothes back on her.

"If they are, the fault is all yours," she accused, tying his dressing gown and leaning against his chest.

"Indeed, you are right, my dear. I shall do my best to atone for my mistakes," with that, he swept her off her feet, shushing her playfully as he carried her to the other side of the hall and into his room.

"Who are you and what have you done with Mycroft Holmes?" she whispered through a laugh as he placed her gently down on the bed and perched next to her.

He leaned down to kiss her forehead before laying down beside her and allowing her to slot against his side, "You bring it out of me, my love."

Leo loved that Daddy loved Mommy. That was not the problem.

Honestly, Leo thought it made perfect sense. Mommy was amazing. Mommy smelled like books and soap and the cotton she wore to the library. Mommy knew where the plasters were, remembered which dinosaur was which, and always did the voices properly during bedtime stories. Mommy could tell when Leo was sad.

So, of course Daddy loved Mommy. Obviously. 

Daddy loving Mommy was not confusing. But Daddy being attached to Mommy like a very large, very serious sticker was the confusing part.

Because since Daddy had come home, he had been very… clingy (he learned that word from your best friend, Uncle Jonathan). Leo noticed it immediately. Daddy stood too close to Mommy in the kitchen. Daddy followed Mommy down the hall when you went to get laundry. Daddy held on to Mommy’s waist whenever she walked past him, like he had to check she was still real. Daddy kissed Mommy’s forehead. Daddy kissed Mommy’s hand. Daddy kissed Mommy’s shoulder when she was making coffee, which made Mommy say, “Dex,” in that voice that meant you were pretending to be annoyed but were actually not annoyed at all.

And at night, Daddy was worse.

At night, when Leo was supposed to be asleep, Daddy slept in Mommy’s bed. Apparently it was also Daddy’s bed now, but Leo wasn’t ready to accept that.

And Daddy didn’t just sleep beside Mommy, but he was practically glued to Mommy!

Leo had seen it from the hallway more than once, when he was supposed to be asleep across the hall. You would be propped against the pillows, reading under the warm gold light of the bedside lamp, and Dex would be wrapped around your waist like he had been hired to keep you from floating away. His face would be half-buried against your chest, one arm heavy over your stomach, mouth pressing sleepy little kisses to your collarbone every few minutes.

You let him do it. You even smiled when he did, because you loved it.

Sometimes you put your fingers in his hair and scratched gently, and Daddy would go so still that Leo knew he liked it very much.

Leo understood affection. Leo understood love.

Leo didn’t understand, though, why Daddy was allowed to sleep with Mommy every night when Leo had to sleep by himself.

Because Leo had a room. Mommy had a room. Rabbit had a place in the dollhouse. The dinosaurs had their chest. Mommy’s library books went in her tote bag, even when you sometimes forgot three of them on the kitchen table. Shoes went by the door.

Everything had a place.

Except Daddy, apparently. Daddy’s place was just wherever Mommy was. He didn’t even have his own room!

This bothered Leo for days.

Not in a jealous way. More in a sad, practical way. Everyone needed a place. So one afternoon, Leo marched into the guest bedroom that had slowly become your office, pointed at the pull-out sofa bed and your desk, and announced, “Daddy, this can be your room.”

Dex looked up from where he had been fixing the loose hinge on the door. “My room?”

Leo nodded, very seriously. “You need one.”

Dex glanced toward the hallway, where you were making tea in the kitchen, then back at Leo. He looked confused. “I… have a room.”

Leo frowned. “Where?”

Dex said it like it was obvious. “With your mom.”

Leo went completely still. His little face folded into pure confusion. “With Mommy?”

Dex’s mouth twitched. “Yes.”

Leo stared at him like Daddy had just explained the laws of the universe incorrectly.“But that’s Mommy’s room.”

“It’s our room.”

Leo blinked.

You appeared in the doorway with two mugs just in time to watch your son’s entire worldview collapse.

Leo looked at you. Then at Dex. Then back at you.

“Mommy shares her room?”

You bit your lip.

Dex, unhelpfully, looked deeply pleased with himself, smug despite the fact that his competition was literally his own son. “Yes,” he said. “With me.”

Leo’s mouth opened. For once in his tiny life, he had no argument ready. He didn’t even know people could share rooms!

One night, though, when the apartment had gone dark, Leo climbed out of bed with his blanket dragging behind him and tiptoed down the hall. His night-light had been on, but the corner near the wardrobe still looked too shadowy, and Rabbit had fallen off the bed twice, which is probably a bad sign.

Your bedroom door was half-open.

Inside, you were trying to read.

Keyword trying, because Dex was not helping.

He was curled around you beneath the blanket, his arm around your waist, his cheek pressed against your chest. Every time your eyes moved back to the page, his mouth brushed against your skin in a lazy little kiss, like he couldn’t help himself.

“Dex,” you murmured, the book still open in one hand. “You’re distracting me.”

His voice came muffled against your skin. “Hmm.”

“I am trying to read.”

“So read.”

You lowered the book.

Dex lifted his head just enough to look at you, and Leo saw that gentle thing happen to Daddy’s face again. The thing that only happened around Mommy. Leo decided this was very sweet.

Unfortunately, Leo was also a very rule-oriented kid, so he also found it very hypocritical.

“Mommy?”

Dex went still immediately.

You looked toward the door, your eyebrows furrowing. “What is it, sweetheart?”

Leo stood in the doorway in his pyjamas, clutching his blanket with both hands. “I’m scared of the dark. Can you come sleep with me?”

Your eyes changed from curious into sympathetic. It meant Leo already knew you were about to say something disappointing and feel bad about it later.

“Oh, baby,” you said. “You’re getting bigger now. You need to try sleeping by yourself, okay? Being independent is important.”

Leo stared at you. It was very close to his father’s death stare when his eyes moved, very slowly, To Dex.

Dex, who was still wrapped around your waist.

Dex, whose face was still half-buried against your akin.

Dex, who had made no attempt to move, explain himself, or pretend he was not clinging to you for dear life.

Leo frowned. “But Daddy’s bigger than me.”

You froze. Dex’s eyes finally opened properly.

Leo pointed at him, deeply offended by the hypocrisy happening in front of him. “He should be independent first!”

What followed in the next few seconds was terrible, perfect silence.

Then you made a laugh-like sound into your hand, trying to hide it but failing. 

Dex lifted his head slowly. Leo stood his ground.

He had Dex’s stubborn little mouth. Dex’s serious eyes. Dex’s absolute confidence when he believed he was right.

And unfortunately, he was right.

“Leo,” you said carefully, trying very hard to remain a responsible parent. “Daddy is…”

You looked down at Dex. Your husband looked up at you, daring you to finish that sentence.

You couldn’t.

Because what were you supposed to say?

Daddy spent seven years missing Mommy?

Daddy has attachment issues?

Daddy is a six-foot fugitive who becomes emotionally unstable if Mommy is too far away?

Daddy is emotionally dependent but we’re working on it?

Leo blinked at you, waiting for an answer, but your husband beat you to it. 

“I am independent,” Dex defended himself, clearing his throat.

Leo’s eyebrows pulled together. “You’re holding Mommy.”

Dex looked down at his own arm around your waist as if discovering it there for the first time, because at this point, it was muscle memory. Then, he looked back at Leo.

“I’m protecting her.”

You chuckled, and Dex shot you a look, almost a pout.

Leo didn’t look convinced. “From what?”

Dex opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

You bit your lip to stop a laugh

That was when Leo knew he had found weakness.

He stepped farther into the room, dragging his blanket behind him like a tiny judge entering court. “There’s no bad guys in here.”

Dex’s face went serious. “There could be.”

You smacked his shoulder lightly. “Don’t scare him.”

Dex rolled his eyes, because he knew his son. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

Leo climbed onto the end of the bed without permission, still frowning at his father, which was funny, because it just looked like Dex and mini-Dex having the world's cutest standoff.

“If Daddy can sleep with Mommy because he’s scared of bad guys,” Leo said, “then I can sleep with Mommy because I’m scared of the dark.”

You stared at him. Dex stared at him.

Leo stared back, deeply satisfied with his own logic. It was, unfortunately, airtight.

Your resolve lasted maybe half a second. “Oh, sweetheart,” you sighed, already defeated. “Fine. I’ll come with you.”

Leo’s face lit up immediately.

You pulled the blanket back and started to climb out of bed. Dex, because he was your husband, moved at the same time. He was already sitting up, hair mussed, expression serious, one hand reaching for the edge of the blanket like it was obvious that he was coming, too.

Leo noticed, and his little smile vanished.

“No.”

You paused halfway out of bed, with one foot on the floor.

Dex looked at his son. “No?”

Leo tightened his grip around your hand and stood very straight, blanket dragging behind him like a tiny king issuing a royal decree. “Daddy can’t come.”

Dex blinked. You pressed your lips together.

“Why not?” Dex asked, and there was just enough offence in his voice to keep you amused.

Leo frowned at him, still deeply wounded by the audacity. “Because Daddy needs to practice to sleep by himself.”

You turned your face away because if you looked at Dex, you were going to laugh.

Dex stared at Leo.

Leo stared back with the calm, righteous confidence of someone who had caught a grown man breaking his own rule.

“I can sleep by myself,” Dex said, eyebrows furrowing.

Leo’s eyes dropped very pointedly to your side of the bed, where Dex had been wrapped around you two seconds ago. “You don’t.”

You made a small, helpless sound.

Leo tugged your hand, already pulling you toward the door. “Come on, Mommy.”

You let him lead you, biting your lip so hard it hurt.

Dex stayed in bed, visibly offended, the blanket pooled around his waist, looking like an assassin who had just been grounded by his four-year-old. As a result, he scoffed.

It was small, but Leo heard it.

“Daddy,” Leo said, scandalised.

Dex stared at him. “What?”

“That was rude.”

Dex closed his eyes.

For a second, you thought he might actually argue. Dex liked arguing when he thought he was right, and Dex almost always thought he was right. But then he looked at you, and the annoyance in his face tamed into something much more helpless.

Leo saw it.

Daddy loved Mommy so much. Leo liked that Daddy loved Mommy.

He did.

It made the house feel cozy.

But rules were rules.

“It’s one night, baby,” you said softly.

Dex’s teeth clenched.

He didn’t  like it, that much obvious.

But Leo was watching him with solemn expectation, and Dex had been trying very hard to be good at fatherhood. Good at breakfast. Good at bedtime. Good at not moving the dinosaur chest even though he clearly still wanted to. Good at letting Leo win small things because he was his son. 

So Dex exhaled through his nose. “Fine.”

Leo brightened.

Dex pointed lightly at him. “But Mommy comes back after you fall asleep.”

Leo frowned. “No. Mommy sleeps in my bed.”

Dex’s expression went flat.

“All night?” Dex asked, very annoyed now.

Leo nodded. “All night.”

Dex looked at you like betrayal had entered the marriage.

You smiled sweetly. “It’s only fair.”

“Hmmm,” Dex sighed.

“Yes,” Leo said. “Because Daddy is learning.”

Dex looked deeply unimpressed. Still, he leaned across the bed and kissed your temple. His mouth lingered against your skin, warm and reluctant, his hand coming up to cup your cheek like he was already annoyed about missing you from two rooms away.

Leo sighed loudly. Dex looked at him.

“You kiss Mommy a lot,” Leo said.

You laughed for real then.

Dex’s mouth twitched. “I’m married to her.”

Leo considered that.

“Does married mean Daddy is always cuddling mommy?”

Dex shook his head, trying to wrap around why his son was so argumentative about you. Oh right. He was his son. “No.”

Leo looked at you. “I think yes.”

Dex opened his mouth, but you reached over and patted his cheek.

“Don’t argue with him,” you said, still smiling. “He’s already won.”

Dex looked offended, but he kissed your palm anyway.

Then he leaned down and rested one large hand on top of Leo’s head. “Be good,” he said, even though he knew Leo was already a very good kid. 

Leo nodded. “Be brave.”

Dex breath hitched. 

Leo repeated very seriously, “Be brave, Daddy.”

Dex looked at him for a long moment, and then his voice went smaller. “I’ll try.”

So you carried Leo back to his room, even though he was big enough to walk, because sometimes being scared of the dark meant you got carried. His room smelled like clean laundry, picture books, and plastic dinosaurs. The night-light cast amber stars over the walls, and the dinosaur chest sat at the foot of the bed, exactly where Leo wanted it.

You curled yourself around him in his little bed as best you could. It was too small for you, so your knees bent awkwardly and one foot stuck out from under the blanket, but Leo looked pleased.

Your arm went over his tummy.

“Mommy?” he whispered.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Daddy loves you a lot.”

Your hand moved slowly through his hair. “Yes,” you whispered. “He does.”

“He kisses you all the time.”

You smiled in the dark. “I noticed.”

“Is that because married?”

You were quiet for a second. Then you said, “Partly.”

Leo thought about that.

“Does Daddy get scared when you’re not there?”

Your hand paused only briefly, but he felt it. To avoid thinking too much, you kissed his forehead.

“Sometimes.”

“But he’s big.”

“Yes.”

“And he has to learn.”

You laughed into his hair. “Yes. Apparently he does.”

Leo nodded, satisfied.

For a while, there was only the hum of the apartment and the faint noise of New York outside the window. Leo’s eyes grew heavy. Your hand kept moving gently through his hair until sleep pulled him under.

At some point, you fell asleep, too.

You meant to wait until Leo was settled and then secretly go back to your room. You really did. But Leo was warm, the bed was soft enough, and the apartment was silent. Your eyes closed for just a second.

Before you knew it, pale morning light was slipping through the curtains.

Leo woke first.

For a moment, he only blinked at the light on the wall. Then he noticed you still curled awkwardly around him, asleep with one arm across his middle.

Then, he noticed your hand.

It had slipped over the edge of the bed sometime in the night and… someone was holding it.

Leo lifted his head.

Daddy was on the floor.

Dex was asleep beside Leo’s bed, back against the wall, one knee bent, one arm resting on the mattress. His fingers were tangled gently with yours. He must’ve come into his room sometime in the night, found your hand, and fell asleep. 

He hadn’t climbed into the bed.

So, while he may have tried to stay in his own room, he had definitely not slept by himself.

Leo stared.

Dex looked different asleep. Still serious somehow, but softer around the mouth. His black T-shirt was wrinkled. His hair was messy. He looked uncomfortable on the floor, but he was holding Mommy’s hand like it was the only place his hand belonged.

Leo looked at you. Still asleep. He looked at Daddy again. Still asleep.

Then Leo slowly reached for Stegosaurus.

He lifted it close to his mouth so he could whisper without waking either of you.

“Daddy is not independent,” Leo told it.

Stegosaurus, wisely, didn’t argue.

Leo nodded to himself. Then, after a moment, he added very softly,

“But he’s learning.”

—end.

"And I know you don't," The lines around Mr. Charles' mouth deepen as he smiles at him. He's sitting on the edge of his desk, almost knee-to-knee with Dex who sits across from him, uncomfortable. "But it's necessary. Red tape to you, but necessary."

Necessary. Like Dr. Mercer, or his psych eval with Dr. Myman. Except someone would be watching him all the time, noting every little misstep for someone else's file on him. Dex has to remind himself that Mr. Charles has every file on him ever made and still hired him. He squirms in his chair. "How does it work?"

"Check-ins four times a week, with or without incident. You'll be given a phone with their contact in it. If that phone goes missing, you get a warning. If you go missing, you won't be for long. Your handler will provide status reports on you after every check-in or successful mission complete. You need a new gun? Your handler buys it for you. You need dinner? Your handler will Uber Eats you something. When you are on the clock, they will be up your ass. Figuratively. Outside of that, though? You're free to do whatever."

Dex squirms again at "up your ass". He reminds himself that he needs this. Structure, he means. Not you up his ass.

And so your introduction is brief, done in the hallway of the CIA before his first big mission, and you are the picture of professional. You hand him a phone, shake his hand, and tell him you're excited to work with him. The first moment alone, Dex gets a look at the lockscreen on this new phone and pauses.

It's a low-res shot of shortstop Derek Jeter mid-air, throwing back a baseball during the '98 championships. It jars him. He remembered watching that moment on TV when he was 14. He almost threw out his shoulder trying to replicate it.

He finds you in his contacts because you're the only one there, even if it throws him a bit.

You Jeter? Uber Eats You're not a fan of the Yankees? You Better than the Mets. Uber Eats 🤣

Dex doesn't like that you always know where he is.

It's hypocritical given his line of work, how much privacy he's invaded even for personal interest. But it makes sense. The hunter cannot allow themselves to become the hunted, and you hunt often.

There's no way to turn off location sharing on this phone, and he cannot remove the MDM installed in his settings unless he has the passcode. You see all his calls, all his web history, where he goes and when. It's been replaced twice now since he started working for you. Once by accident, once just to get a breather. He made sure the second time happened long after probation ended, specifically just to piss you off.

But you didn't get pissed off, not really. You'd just showed up on the rooftop he was watching sunsets on, took a sip from his beer, and handed him his new phone. This time, the lockscreen was the cover of Turnstiles by Billy Joel. It had a lot of his favorite songs on it. He still stuck to his CD player, but every once in a while, when he'd pick up a new album from the store, he'd find the same album loaded into his phone's music library within minutes. He listened to an album on it once when a storm woke him up and he couldn't find his headphones.

He forces himself to get used to your tracking, even though he knows he never will.

He's only been in the infirmary for three minutes, and you're there forty seconds after that. "What happened?" You ask, walking around the nurse diligently cleaning up the cut above Dex's eyebrow.

Dex grunts. "Just a scratch."

You stand there, scanning him over with your eyes. His mission had been a simple tailing, until his target caught sight of him and sprinted. After a chase, he'd suffered some minor cuts and bruises. A cut above the eye, a bullet graze on the thigh. You hover a hand over his leg where a salve is currently soothing the burn and Dex flinches away. You look up, hand still hovering. "How do you feel?"

"Sedative's already kicked in."

"I meant emotionally."

Dex blanks. You've never asked him that before. The psych evals were usually left up to the professionals, people other than you that monitored him on scales of threat. So long as he never tipped too far in the direction of "immediate elimination", he was right as rain as far as you should be concerned. "What? I don't know. I'm fine. The job got done, didn't it?"

You nod. "It did. Even though it went sideways, you kept your cool and we got our target. Zero spillover. I was impressed. You did good."

Dex huffs. He can't feel the pain in his face anymore, it's all just warm.

He feels you drop something in his lap and he jerks his head down fast, disrupting the nurse's work. There's a gift card in his lap for $500. The design on the front has a large, silver gift bow with a glitter backdrop. In neat, black cursive, the text at the bottom reads: "Happy Anniversary."

Dex is speechless.

"My gift to you for your first six months." You say, and he's shocked to see you a little giddy as you watch him pick it out of his lap. "Spend it on whatever you want. A movie, dinner, new knife. I won't be watching."

He reacts a little dumbly. "What?"

"For the next twenty-four hours—and only the next twenty-four hours—I'm letting you off your leash. Consider it your day off."

Dex pointedly ignores the leash comment. "Was this Mr. Charles' idea?"

"All mine." You both watch the nurse walk away when he's done. "He doesn't know I won't be monitoring you so don't do anything stupid."

Dex can't remember the last time he'd been given a gift. Maybe it was back in the FBI, when it was his birthday and the office insisted on getting him a cake and a card. That had been... many years ago. Nothing he'd ever received was as expensive as this. Nothing that was truly his to own, anyway. "How do I know you'll keep your word?"

You look up at the ceiling, sighing. "It'll be hard." You say. Your eyes flit back down to his. "I really enjoy watching you."

Something in Dex's stomach tightens. He feels a mix of things: disgust, frustration, discomfort, weakness. And underneath it all, after peeling back layers of stubborn, stuck-on paint: arousal, for lack of a better word. The kind he got when he zeroed in on a threat seconds before being targeted. The kind he got narrowly avoiding a bullet. The kind that stirred up in his gut a whole lot of complication. Fear, with the aftertaste of pleasure. The kind he only liked in the field, handling people he needed to put down.

This job was going to kill him. You were going to kill him.

Dex spends his day off watching you.

He makes the choice to follow you as soon as he gets out of the infirmary. He'd always wanted to do it: wanted to know where you lived, if you had loved ones. Family, friends. A partner. Kids that looked like you. It was hard to follow you properly when you always knew where he was, but you'd promised not to look this time.

It starts late at night. He finds that you don't live very far from where he does and he knows that's all by design. You live in a nice, rent-controlled apartment complex with well-tended gardens out front and poop bags for pet owners. He stakes you out across the street as you head on in. There's a security guard inside who greets you with a big smile on his face, and you stop to chat. He can't see what words you're saying through the glass, only that you make the guard laugh.

You're perfectly normal.

He thinks this all day as he watches you run errands, grab lunch, bask in the sun while waiting at a crosswalk. He waits for you to check your phone—to check on him, see what he's up to, break your promise—but you never do. Not even to check on your other agents. You've never told him about any other agents you handled, but you had to have more than just him, right?

You have no kids, not even a pet. No partner from what he could tell. That'd be normal, right? To call up your partner on your day off?

You don't make plans to hang out with anybody. You buy enough food for one person and head up to your apartment before sundown to start dinner. He finds a nearby building to continue watching you from, his arm perched on his knee as he holds the scope to his eye. You leave all your windows open. Almost like you wanted him to see inside.

He feels a chill when you finally do pick up your phone for the first time, and—

His pocket vibrates. He almost doesn't want to answer it.

You stand there in your kitchen, idly stirring pasta with your phone tucked between your ear and shoulder. Waiting. Knowing.

You call him again after he lets it go to voicemail, and he answers very flatly: "I thought today was my day off."

"You must be hungry."

He narrows his eyes. "What makes you say that?"

You spin, and he thinks you might make direct eye contact with him through the window, but you don't. You go to grab some wine glasses from your cabinet. "I imagine you've been busy since you're a free agent today."

Dex keeps his breathing light. "As a matter of fact, I have been. Thank you for the day off, officer."

You chuckle low, beginning to pour port into both glasses. "You're very welcome. You didn't answer my question."

Dex can see your play. Invite him in, let him sniff around, get used to your scent. Allow him some sense of satisfaction in the situation even though you've found him out. He kind of wants to take the bait. "That wasn't a question."

"I'm making dinner. Are you a fan of Italian?"

Dex hums. "Not a fan of sweet wine, though."

At that, you look up at him. Your eyes pierce through him with pinpoint accuracy. You bring a glass to your lips, sipping slowly. You hold the other glass up to the window in cheers.

And then? You pour it down the drain.

"Did you enjoy playing voyeur with me for once?" The change in your tone is immediate. It freezes over, and if Dex did not have the advantage right now, he would feel the urge to shrink on himself. But he does have the advantage. He has a gun he feels very comfortable with strapped to his thigh, and you will never be as quick as him. Except, if he killed you, they would know. He would not make it out alive, and these days, he kind of enjoys being alive. Feels a sense of purpose for the first time in a while. And he would never find out what about you tilts his world off its axis.

He says nothing. He keeps watching. His stomach turns.

You keep going, "You and I are partners, Dex. It's okay that you're curious. So long as you stay on the other side of this window. Understood?"

"So you get to control my life but I only get to see yours through a window? That doesn't seem fair, partner."

Your face shifts in his scope. You snarl, or smirk. "We are partners. I give the orders, you take them. Do you understand?"

Dex wants to challenge you further. He'd spent most of his adult life taking orders, and it had gotten him in messes almost too deep, always relying on someone else to dig him out. He did not enjoy relying on you... but something in your voice is tranquilizing him. Twisting his arm. He nods, and wonders if you can see it from this far away, this late at night.

You smile. Apparently you do. "Good boy. See you tomorrow."

You notice him a lot.

Your check-ins happen in public places: diners, coffee shops, parks by ponds. You pass off information over shared food and you always share food. You have a list of his allergies, his yucks and yums. You introduce him to new foods and adjust with his input. Most of the time, you get it really, really right. When you get it wrong, you send him home with something familiar.

He didn't yet feel comfortable with being known by you, studied. You never wrote anything down but he could always tell when you filed something away about him.

It took him much longer to get used to your praise.

You didn't look like the type, usually pretty cut and dry about his mission objectives and outcomes. But then he'd give you his report, sometimes in more excruciating detail just to see you sweat... and every time, your lip would twitch. You'd nod. "Good, Dex. Very good." He usually ended up sweating.

Today, you're sharing milkshakes on a warm summer afternoon. Dex has just shared his mission report, and you are writing down details in your journal. He waits patiently after he's done, trying to hide the anticipation. You look up after shutting your journal, lean forward, taking a long sip from your milkshake, and nod. No twitch in your lip. No "Good, Dex. Very good."

He frowns. "Well?"

You blink. "Well, what?"

"You gonna say somethin'?"

You don't look confused. You must know what he's talking about. That just frustrates him more. "You disobeyed me, Dex."

"Disobey". His expression tightens. He runs through the mission again in his mind: intercepting a shipment on the docks. Early morning, overcast. He arrived early. Stealth-took out a few monitors near the back of the docks, sniped his target from the warehouse loft. Retrieved the payload. Caught his ride out of there. Met up with you, all before lunch rush. "I completed my mission."

"You almost didn't."

"But I did."

"Poindexter." And this is how he learns that you'll only call him that when you're mad. "You almost didn't because you disobeyed a direct order from me. You were off by a minute and fifty-two seconds because you wanted to have a little fun with your target. You had a clear shot for his head but you went for his knee. Do you want to know what you could've been doing in that minute and fifty-two seconds, instead of pulling out the exposed bone from your target's leg? You could've been gone, so no one could see you leaving."

"I took care of that." Dex grits through his teeth, and he knows it's a weak excuse, but he's upset and he still killed the fucking guy so why weren't you pleased? You tuck your journal in your bag and set a twenty on the table, about to scoot out of the booth to leave, but Dex extends his right leg and rests it next to your hip. You still, looking down at his dirty boot out of the corner of your eye. Dex smiles, stirring the rest of his ice cream with his straw. "Come on, partner. Admit it: I did good."

"Do you want me to praise you?"

"I want you to be honest."

"Okay. I'm not replacing that knife you lost making up for your mistake. Consider it your punishment."

Dex clenches his jaw. "I'm not a child."

"Of course you're not. You should know better."

"Why don't you have any other agents?" Dex's question catches you off guard. He can see the flicker in your eyes, the discomfort before it's gone. "Most of the handlers have two or three. You only have me. Why is that?"

Dex watches as you breathe slow, collecting yourself. You look away. More people are starting to enter the diner: businessmen in suits still taking calls as they grab a table, two elderly women waddling slowly toward the back by the jukebox, a child and his father in fishing gear bringing in the scent of freshwater. Dex focuses on the dad's tackle box and the filet knife that hovers a few feet behind him. Just in case.

"What is your North Star?" Dex's eyes immediately snap back to you. "It's the one thing in your file we struggled with documenting. I've always been curious."

Dex hasn't said Julie's name in a while. "You first."

"I have very high standards." You hesitate, and then, as if against your better judgement, you continue. "You are the only one who meets them. Your turn."

Dex thinks about mentioning Julie and Dr. Mercer and Matt. His hopeful attempts at retribution, his crutches toward the light. But it's the one thing you don't know intimately about him, and he isn't about to give that up.

He removes his leg from your side of the booth and stands up, watching you watch him. He feels a wave of satisfaction when he sees the realization dawn on you. "Thank you, officer. That's all I needed to know."

Mr. Charles tells Dex that he is the organization's highest performing agent seven months in a row. Dex sends you dyed blue roses and a bottle of dry wine to your front door. On the card, it reads:

We make a great team. Party at yours?

You return the bottle to his kitchen counter, half-empty to the exact ounce. On the back of his card, it reads:

No dogs allowed. Sorry :)

A rubber bullet whizzes past Dex's ear, implanting itself in a foam block five feet behind him. He takes a breath, then moves to aim his own gun at the agent across the way, striking them in the shoulder. They fall back with the force, and Dex resumes his crouching position behind the half-wall. He can hear the sounds of triggers going off all around the facility, but he keeps his ears trained on the ones right in front of him.

"You know," His partner starts, having resigned himself to the floor crisscross applesauce. "You're like the golden boy of the CIA right now."

Dex pinpoints where his next target is, and quickly takes a shot above the wall to his right. He hears a groan and a "Come on, man!" before the buzzer sounds, alerting everyone to another fallen agent. In his moment of reprieve, Dex glances at the agent beside him playing with his own gun like a paperweight. "What?"

Agent Banks motions in the direction of nothing in particular. "You can't tell me you don't know what people have been saying about you."

Dex's lips purse. He feels in his gut that someone is stalking closer from his left, but he can't jump the gun. "I make it my mission not to know."

"You've been on a winning streak since you got recruited. I know you're like, a sharpshooter, but I haven't seen a guy come close to you in years."

The stalker is closer now. The playground the CIA has locked its special agents in is a padded hellscape with nothing to bounce off of. If this were a real battlefield, Dex could ricochet a bullet off a telephone pole and hit this guy in the leg. Maybe the head if he timed it right—and then he reminds himself that there's no aiming for the head.

He crouches around the corner, shooting his stalker in the stomach. The buzzer sounds again.

"Not to mention your handler."

Dex pauses, slipping back into his safe zone. They'd need to move soon, lest the others figure out where they're camping and close in on them, but Dex cannot help his curiosity at the mention of you. He glances over at Banks, reloading his gun. "What do you mean?"

Banks laughs. "They chose you specifically. That doesn't just happen."

This was the first time Dex had heard of this. He knew you had no other agents to control, which is why you always had time to watch him. How long that had been the case and whether it was by choice was nothing he could gather in conversation with you, and he didn't like talking to anyone else anyway. The one time he'd tried asking Mr. Charles, he'd been teased about wanting to be "the favorite". Dex did not make that mistake again.

The chatterbox beside him seems to want to talk about it, so... maybe. "Yeah? How do you know that?"

"My handler." Banks says. "She says before you got recruited, your handler couldn't keep an agent for longer than a month or two."

Perhaps because you liked to watch them, prying into their lives more than professionally necessary. Like the freak you were. Dex hides a smile at that. "Why?"

"They were all great agents. I know some of 'em. Guess your handler just wasn't impressed until you came along."

Dex stills. He tries very hard not to let that get to his head.

Banks glances around, then pats him on the arm and motions for them to start moving to higher ground. They follow a path up some stairs, quickly slipping up and around the railing before the other agents could spot them. He knows twenty-four agents went in, and he'd personally taken out six so far. He'd heard the buzzer go off seven times for everyone else. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I don't know. Just curious about you, I guess. Joining our group of ragtag delinquents couldn't have been easy for you. But you're the best of the best." Dex is paying attention to the landscape of the second floor, but the tone in Banks' voice makes him slow down. He can hear his heartbeat in his chest. Banks is behind him. He doesn't know what's ahead of him. Banks has been behind him the whole time.

All of a sudden, two agents jump out of their hiding places in front of him, and Dex quickly rolls in between two large foam block walls before their bullets can hit him. He pants, gathering his wits about him. He can see his partner towering above the blocks, and the other agents don't bother to shoot him. It becomes very clear what this is.

Dex's nostrils flare. He forces himself to focus. He can't think about you right now, or the fact that you're definitely watching. He cannot think about how you'd chosen him.

He assesses the area. There are eleven—a bullet goes off downstairs, the buzzer following soon after—ten other agents left including himself and Banks. Two more definitely on this floor.

Dex crawls around the foam labyrinth, careful not to shake any structures and give away his position. He sneaks around until he's poised behind one agent's back and shoots. The buzzer rings out. A bullet flies past Dex but he's quicker, aiming for the other agent's torso. Another buzzer.

"Fuck this." He hears Banks round the corner, gun pointed at Dex. "I don't care if I lose."

But Dex is faster. He's always faster. Two bullets go off, but only one hits its target. Instead of the buzzer, a voice calls over the intercom: "Cease gunfire. Agent Poindexter, you are disqualified. Please return to the lobby."

It's a slow walk out of the room, agents watching from their hiding places as Dex shoulders his way out.

The first thing he hears is your voice. The first thing he registers is that you are pissed.

"—Poindexter was ambushed by his partner. He should not have been disqualified."

"The rules clearly state—"

"—and what do the rules say about ambushing your partner with the enemy? What kind of teamwork is that? Are these the standards we're holding our agents to now?"

He sees you standing outside the training room with all the other handlers, arguing with a higher-up who looks just about done with you. Said higher-up looks over your shoulder at Dex and narrows his eyes. "Agent—"

"I got it." Dex interrupts. He pulls off his bulletproof vest and helmet, dropping each piece of protective gear onto the floor.

You glance at him, and your expression is more distressed than he's ever seen on you. It shocks him but, even more, it angers him. He's angry at letting himself get carried away in the training, distracted by the bit of information he'd learned about you. If he didn't care, he would've caught on to the play long before he'd been cornered. Then he wouldn't have failed, and—

Dex squints at a woman ten feet away from you, leaning up against the door to the viewing room. He's not met many of the handlers here, but he knows who belongs to her. She looks smug.

There's a ringing in Dex's ears. He needs to get out of here.

As if you've synced up with him, he feels you grabbing at his arm, dragging him toward the elevator at the other end of the floor. You're muttering something under your breath and he knows better than to question you right now. He waits behind you, arms crossed over his chest, and looks behind to see the group of handlers resuming the training. He hopes someone puts a bullet in Banks' eye.

The elevator dings.

You both stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, as it takes you up.

You've stopped muttering. You're staring straight ahead at the reflective metal of the elevator interior. Dex watches you through it. "I won't let them dock points for that." You say, and Dex thinks "That's what you're worried about?"

"I don't care about a stupid training exercise."

"You were disqualified for attacking an ally, Dex. They could bring that up in your next evaluation. Argue that you're not suited for this work."

Dex gets flashbacks to the FBI, his whole department turning against him. He liked to think he'd moved past all of that, even if the memory makes him itch. "I'm the best agent they have. They wouldn't."

"They won't." You assert. Dex finally looks directly at you. Your arms are crossed like his, standing straight as a board. He finds it kind of cute.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"Talk about what?" Your response comes out more like a hiss.

"About that lady in there. The one who kept smirking at you."

Your nose twitches, kind of like a bunny. That is cute. "Finch. She's Banks' handler."

"She got something against you?" Dex says, and no attempt from him could make it sound less like a threat.

You shift your weight as you get closer to ground level. "...Banks used to be mine, way before you came along. He was an up and comer but he just..."

"Wasn't impressive?" And no attempt would be made on Dex's part to not sound so self-satisfied.

You watch him from your peripheral. He doesn't know what you're thinking, but you don't scold him, so it can't be bad. "He was fine."

Dex still has much to learn about you, but he knows the way you say "fine" belies all the contempt in the world. You were never pleased with just "fine". "Is that why you picked me?"

Now, you look at him. You're not unguarded but your eyes do pin him to the spot. "I read up on you, long before Mr. Charles decided to recruit you. When I got a hold of your file, I just... there was something about you that I couldn't shake. You were impeccable from an early age. Second to none. But you grew up and tried to live a simple life. Then Fisk came along and that changed. No matter who was pulling your strings, you were always just as dangerous of a weapon. And I kept thinking... how would it feel to hold that weapon in my hands? Point it in the right direction? How would it feel to control something... extraordinary?"

Dex should be insulted. You've objectified him, reduced him to a weapon, only a killing thing. You're interested in puppeteering him, and yet... beneath that, he feels a spark. Something volatile catching fire.

He takes a step toward you and you back away. He follows you until your back hits the elevator wall and he is placing the tip of a knife to your gut. When you feel the point, your eyelashes flutter. Dex smiles. "People have died trying to control me. What makes you think you're any different?"

You take in a breath, and Dex picks up on the shudder in it. "Everyone who has ever wanted to control you has been terrified of your potential. I don't want to stop you, I want to guide you. I think you are the best. But it's up to you." And Dex feels your hand close around his holding the knife, concealing it as the doors of the elevator finally open. Dex turns to see a group of agents all standing impatiently, stopped in their tracks when they see the compromising position he has you in.

You push him away, patting his chest. "Good talk."

Dex does not like you.

Well, his feelings fluctuate. Right now, he doesn't like you. He wants to punish you, too, because he's been exceptional lately and you have the nerve to be busy.

It turned out that sometimes you did do other work. When you weren't handling him, you would—on occasion—be sent out for reconnaissance because of your lack of other agents to manage. They were small missions with low risk. So simple, even Banks could do it.

So why wasn't he? Why did it have to be you?

You Mission complete. Freak Nice. All clear? You All clear. Freak !!! 🥰 Good job. You Check-in? Freak Sorry, still busy. Freak sent you $50. Treat yourself. We'll catch up later.

You're not lying. He can see you from his vantage point at the bar across the street, typing away on your computer in the same cafe as your targets. You blend into the crowd of busy New Yorkers winding down the early evening with more work, earphones on playing nothing so you can take accurate notes on the conversation happening near you.

It's kind of amusing watching you at work. You play the part of an uninterested local, never looking up when a person of interest enters your sphere. You've been tailing them for a few days: three guys, all grimy mafia-looking types. The shop is just enough of a hole-in-the-wall to not make them stand out, but Dex can't imagine they're used to being subtle. Small fish, simple bait. Why couldn't Banks do this?

Dex is considering texting you something when you suddenly shut your laptop and grab your things, heading out of the shop. He watches you strut casually in the direction of where you live, and his eyes flicker down to his phone. He's typing out, "Still busy?" when he hears the bell over the coffee shop door ring again. Dex looks up.

The three men you'd been listening in on are walking in your direction.

He watches them for a while. Waits to see them walk down an alley, or hail a cab, or turn the opposite way you do. He watches them for so long, shaking his knee from his seat until he can't watch any longer. The text he meant to send you sits unsent on his phone.

You must know. You knew when he followed you, and he'd made an effort not to be seen. These buffoons wouldn't go unnoticed by you. You'd lead them elsewhere.

And he'd just make sure.

He follows at a considerable pace, heart pounding as he cuts through traffic, horns honking and hot exhaust whipping up into his face. He slips in between the evening crowds of office workers clocking out for the day. You're too far ahead to see outside of small glimpses, but he has zeroed in on the three men tailing you, all greasy ponytails and chest hair to the wind. An image of one of them touching you crosses his mind and he has to physically shake his head to get rid of it.

You've been tailing them for days. If you've had time to gather info on them, they've had time to gather info on you. It's not far-fetched to think they know where you live.

The pit in his stomach hardens when your complex comes into view, and he watches as you slip across the street and up the stairs, buzzing yourself in. The guard from before is there, and the closer he gets, the easier it is to see you cracking a joke like usually. Your stalkers tail behind at a further distance. Dex keeps himself on the other side of the street.

Even if they did manage to get into the lobby, the guard wouldn't let them get far. These guys couldn't be that stupid. If they knew someone was tailing them, they wouldn't draw attention to it. Maybe they'd wait for you another day, and by then, Dex would've taken care of them himself.

He watches one of them walk up to the buzzer, mouth moving in a sluggish way. He waits with baited breath. He can hear the faint buzz over the traffic, and he sees all three stooges rush the lobby in seconds.

He doesn't have time to text you.

Your furniture is nice. He practically sinks into your armchair, his tired muscles relaxing after the weight is taken off them. He spreads his legs and wipes his knife clean on his a dishtowel he'd stolen from your kitchen, flicking it back and forth between his fingers as he listens to you vocalize. You're singing along to "Out of Touch", no unbroken notes even as he put the last of your would-be assailants through the business end of his knives. He watches blood pour out of one's mouth as the shower comes to a stop.

Dex listens for the sound of you moving behind your bedroom door: the creak of your bathroom door opening, floorboards protesting as you move around. The smell of your body soap wafts out into the living room on a cloud of humidity, and Dex pauses to take it in. Milk and honey. He approves.

Your music comes to a stop, but you're still singing as you open your door, wrapped in a towel and nothing else. You pause in the doorway.

Dex watches you take in the three bodies felled on the floor of your living room, all telling stories of the abuse Dex had put them through. There's shock there. You don't bother to hide it this time. "Should be more careful walking home," He twirls his knife, a lazy smile on his face. "You never know what kind of bad men might follow you in."

When your eyes land on him, they narrow. "Poindexter," You start, and his eyes flash back at you. "I thought I made myself very clear the first time."

His head tilts. "You can't be serious." You lean against your door frame with a look of... disappointment? Dex's nostrils flare. "How about: 'Thank you, Dex.' 'You saved my life, Dex.' 'Next time I'm tailing a couple mafiosos, I'll make sure to look over my shoulder, Dex.'"

You pout. "Why would I need to look over my shoulder? You seem to have that covered."

A beat passes. Dex stands the next, trekking through the blood toward you. His frown is deep as he stabs his knife into the door frame by your head. You do not flinch. Your lip twitches up, though.

Dex leans down until he's breathing in your space, until his nose is bumping yours. You maintain eye contact with him the whole time. "You knew." And he doesn't ask because he knows he's right. You nod. "Were you testing me?"

"You're not on probation anymore, Dex. I've already decided to keep you." He does not acknowledge the hitch in his breath when you say that. "And I already know what you are."

"And what's that?" A mocking smile slithers onto his face.

"A loyal dog. And a good one. A very, very good one." He feels one of your fingers graze the scar under his eye and he lets you, anger and intrigue all stirred up inside him as you look at him. No fear, no uncertainty. Part of him wants to prove you wrong and watch the smugness drain out of you like bloodfall, like the men he'd killed to keep you safe.

But your hand slips into his hair, nails scratching along his scalp, and the bundle of nerves all there light up like Christmas day. His lids slip closed as you massage, rubbing the tension out of the base of his skull with such skill that the breathy little noise slipping out of him makes his ears tinge pink. You look pleased. "You're still in trouble, though. Coming in when I told you not to. What ever will I do with you?"

You are still you. You still have your own heart, your own mind, your own love, your own mercy. But under your skin, behind your eyes, there is something divine and monstrous that wants to turn every sinner it touches into dust.

Like every other Ghost Rider before you, you have the penance stare.

It forces a a sinner to feel every bit of pain they have ever caused. All of it comes back at once as punishment.

Dex has seen you do it.

He has seen what happens when the Rider takes over and your skull is on fire. He knows the smell of smoke and burning leather and the way your voice stops sounding like one person and starts sounding like a chorus of dark angels hunting for a thousand damned souls.

He has watched your flaming skeletal hands grip AVTF agents by the jaw and make them look into your eyes. He had seen them scream. Most go catatonic. Some hearts simply stop because the body could not survive the weight of its own sin.

So yes, Dex knows what lives inside you. And you know what lives inside him.

Because the Spirit doesn’t look at Benjamin Poindexter and see your boyfriend. It sees a man who needs to pay for his actions.

See, you can smell sin on people, and Dex is drenched in it.

Dex, who has thought terrible things, done terrible things, wanted terrible things. Dex, who would do more terrible things if someone gave him a reason and a clean line of sight.

The Spirit takes one look at him and goes: Sinner.

And you internally go, I know.

The Spirit says: Guilty.

And you say, I know.

The Spirit says: Burn him.

And that is when you bare your teeth and say, No.

Because you love him so much it is making you blasphemous. You love him so much you are arguing theology with the Spirit of Vengeance living in your ribs.

You love him so much you are standing in front of divine punishment saying, yes, I know he is guilty, yes, I know what he has done, yes, I know what he might do, but he is mine, he is my home, he is the only person who touches me like I am still human after the flames go out.

And Dex loves you for it. 

In his defense, when he first fell in love with you, he didn’t know about the Ghost Rider.

He just thought you were a pretty girl with pretty eyes he could get lost in. A pretty girl whose voice made his whole world narrow down into one fixed spot. He didn’t know there was hellfire under your skin. 

Then one day your eyes turned orange and your flesh burned away and suddenly the girl he loved was vengeance itself.

And Dex should’ve run.

He didn’t, because he knew you were still in there.

And honestly? He couldn’t care less about the Spirit of Vengeance.

He cares about you.

Dex loves like tunnel vision. Once you are the centre, everything else is just noise.

The Spirit hates him? Fine.

The Spirit wants him dead? Fine.

The Spirit wants him burned for every sin he has ever committed? Fine.

You warned him multiple times. Told him, “Dex, it wants to kill you.”

And Dex, an awfully devoted man, just looked at you like you had handed him a challenge, and boy does Dex love a challenge. Especially when the prize is loving you.

Still, there are good days and bad days.

On good days, when Dex is almost docile, Zarathos stays mostly silent as you go on your flamed bike and go hunt some other guilty soul instead.

But on bad days, when Dex kills and thinks about killing, he knows that loving him hurts you.

And he hates that.

Because for all the terrible things Bullseye has done, he wants you obsessively safe. Locked-door, checked-window, hand-on-your-back-in-a-crowd safe. He wants to protect you from every bad thing that has ever existed.

Except most of the time the bad thing is him. Because he is the one waking up the ancient spirit inside you. On these days, you actively have to bargain for his life to the Spirit. 

And Dex is not selfless enough to leave. He loves you too much, wants you too much, needs you too badly to do the noble thing and disappear for your own good. He can’t. He won’t.

But it still wrecks him.

It’s obvious when he comes home bloody.

The second he steps into the apartment, everything changes.

The whites of your eyes disappear and they go black instead of orange. Then, you just stand there, staring at nothing.

Dex freezes in the doorway, blood drying on his skin, and his stomach churns because he knows you are fighting on his behalf. 

You are somewhere inside your own head, teeth bared, pushing hellfire back down your lungs because Zarathos has seen him and smells blood.

SINNER.

You grit your teeth in your head. I know.

HE HAS KILLED.

I know.

HE WILL KILL AGAIN.

You cannot deny that.

You know Dex too well to think of him as innocent. You know the blood on his will never truly wash off. But the spirit lives in you. So if it wants to judge Dex, it has to go through you first.

The windows rattle.

The lights flicker.

Your eyes are somehow darker, darting back and forth as you are fighting a battle in your mind. 

Dex is behind you now, blood drying on his sleeves, hands settling at your waist. 

Zarathos snarls. HE BELONGS TO VENGEANCE.

No.

HE BELONGS TO JUDGMENT.

No.

HE BELONGS TO ME.

You bare your teeth inside your own skull.

You chose me, you hiss. You live in my bones. You use my hands. You wear my face. So listen to me for once.

In the physical world, Dex presses a kiss between your shoulder blades. Your fingers twitch.

You will not touch him.

HE HAS BLOOD ON HIS HANDS.

So do I.

In the real world, he presses another kiss, lower this time, through the fabric of your shirt. Dex’s mouth lingers there like he is trying to call you back.

HE IS DAMNED.

Then damn me beside him.

Dex’s arms fully slide around your waist. His forehead rests against the back of your shoulder.

“Baby,” he murmurs. “Come back to me.”

Zarathos roars.

The lights flare.

The air heats so quickly it feels like the apartment is about to catch on fire.

And then Dex, Benjamin fucking Poindexter, the man covered in blood, the man divine vengeance wants dragged screaming into punishment, kisses the side of your neck and almost whines. “Come on. I want a cuddle.”

Which is so ridiculous.

The Spirit of Vengeance is awake in your bones. Hellfire is crawling up your throat. An ancient force of punishment is trying to seize control of your body so it can burn your boyfriend’s soul clean out of him.

And Dex is behind you asking for a cuddle like a clingy housecat.

But that’s your Dex, alright.

And somehow, it works, because the Spirit is losing its grip on you. 

Zarathos roars, all fire and ancient hunger.

But Dex kisses your shoulder. Then just under your ear.

These were little kisses. Sweet, stubborn, selfish kisses from the world’s most guilty man.

Insane.

Because what do you mean you are arguing with divine vengeance over Bullseye? What do you mean the Spirit wants him punished and you are standing there saying no?

The Spirit snarls.

YOU WERE BORN FROM WRATH TO DRAG SINNERS INTO THE FIRE.

I know.

Dex kisses your cheeks as his hands tighten at your waist.

But not this one.

The black in your eyes starts to break as you come back to the real world. You suck in a breath like you just crawled out of a grave, and Dex turns you around before your knees can give in

“There you are,” he whispers.

You are mostly you now.

Mostly.

Your breathing is still shaky. Your hands are still gripping his shirt. The apartment still smells like smoke and the windows have just stopped rattling. The lights are still pulsing.

But your eyes still have a flicker of orange there.

Zarathos, the spirit of vengeance, is quiet, but it’s not gone.

It’s watching and Dex knows it.

Of course he knows. Dex notices everything, especially when the ancient entity inside his girlfriend is staring at him like it’s time for dinner.

He knows Zarathos could kill him. He knows that thing could drag sin out of him and burn him hollow. He has seen what you can do. He knows the Spirit does not bluff.

And still, he smiles against your lips, that smug little fucker.

Because as far as he was concerned, The Spirit of Vengeance is being forced to watch its vessel kiss its prey. And Dex is just awful enough to enjoy it. 

He kisses your cheek, your jaw, then your mouth again.

This time it’s slow and hot and a little mean with it, like every kiss is aimed at the orange glow behind your eyes.

“Dex,” you breathe, half warning, half plea, as if to say please don’t antagonise the ancient power in me.

He hums against your mouth, not even pretending to be sorry. 

Because he loves that the Spirit wants him punished, and instead has to sit there in the back of your eyes while you let him pull you into his lap.

Such a fucking Dex thing to do.

He looks right at that little orange flicker and smiles, like he is baiting it. Like he knows exactly what he is doing.

Like he’s saying, look! Look at her choosing me again!

His thumb brushes your cheek, so gentle it aches, and his forehead presses to yours.

“I missed you,” he whispers.

And you melt a little, because fuck does he know how to bring you back.

So you kiss him again, blood drying on his shirt, your hands still trembling against him, the Spirit burning silent and furious behind your eyes.

Dex loves making it watch.

Because every time Zarathos reaches for him, you come back to Dex.

Every time.

And Dex loves that he is winning.

—

"did i do something to you?" the alcohol fueled your courage. dex was taken aback by the genuine hurt in your eyes "you obviously don't like me."

"when did i say that?"

"you didn't need to, dex. i'm not a fucking idiot." you took a swig of your drink and pointed a loaded finger at him. "i guess my real question is: if you hate me so much, why do you keep staring?"

dex thought it best to play dumb. "what?"

unfortunately for him, you were also in the fbi. you tracked his panicked eyes, frantically blinking as if they could speed up his thoughts, come up with a lie. you took a carefully-measured step into his personal space. dex inhaled sharply, looking around to see if any of your coworkers were seeing this.

"is that it, dex?" you teased, cocking your head to the side. your goading smile was infuriating. "you being all mean because you want me?"

the flash of fear in dex's eyes made your smile fall. he shifted under your gaze, cheeks burning.

"i--uh--no."

a laugh left you then; high and thoroughly amused. "you wanna try that again?"

dex swallowed thickly, looking like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin. but you had him under your paw and you weren't letting go quite yet. he'd never shown you any mercy. your eyes followed a bead of sweat traveling down his reddening temple. a lazy smirk slid onto your lips as you grasped the edges of his grey suit jacket to pull him close enough to feel his body heat. dex could smell the liquor on your lips when they brushed the shell of his ear. it took everything in him not to shudder.

"tell me what you want," you whispered, almost a plea. dex's hand fell to your waist, squeezing like a lifeline. your stomach flipped at the implication.

he leaned in to nuzzle your hair, nose and breath tickling your ear. he tried his best to not make it obvious that he was inhaling you. you knew he was. you knew he always did when you walked by. but you secretly found his desperation endearing, so why tell him you knew?

"want...you," he said quietly. darting eyes now still, focused on you like a scope on a rifle. he didn't dare move, didn't dare breathe now, lest he scare you away. you were so close. the object of his desires.

then you heard something you thought you'd never hear out of dex. not once in your life.

"please."

you jerked away as if he slapped you, staring at him in surprise. dex cringed away, seemingly bracing for a verbal lashing, to be called a fucking freak, to be told to be normal, to--

"oh, just kiss me, you fucking loser," you said with a blinding smile.

dex would've thought he was dreaming if you didn't grab both sides of his face to pull his lips to yours. at the feeling of your wet, hot tongue against his and your delicate fingers carding through his hair, he's whimpering into your mouth pathetically. he's criminally easy and he knows it, but no shame taints dex as he lets you take the lead, showing him exactly what you like. you pull away with a spinning head and shit-eating grin.

"do you wanna get out of here?"

oh god, please, dex thought, brows knitting together as he tried to think of an acceptable response.

you giggled, hand coming up to hide your smile.

“Baby, baby, baby—” Holland hangs his head as you grind it against the ashtray on the kitchen counter. He eases up his grip on you as you go to throw the cigarette butt straight into the trash bin. You win. Holland throws his head back with a sigh; you’ve been doing this more, lately, trying to get him off smoking. He lets you, aiming to please. The only caveat, really, is when you use it against him as punishment for when you’re mad.

And now, you’re mad. “You’re pissing me off, March.” You’re not trying to be too loud about it, not wanting to rouse too great of a suspicion from Holly or Healy. But Holland can see the way that you’re glaring at him. It isn’t an over-exaggeration.

“Honey, I’m just trying to give you options.” Holland frowns, “Maybe, you don’t want to go and you’re just too polite to say so. I don’t know many hot, twenty-somethings who’re opting to spend their Friday night attending middle-school productions of The Sound of Music.”

“I’m trying to be supportive!” You hiss, “Now, stop being a wuss and let me attend Holly’s show.” You can see the hair hanging over Holland’s forehead swaying as he looks you up and down. He’s getting distracted. Clearly, he’s enjoying the sight of you pissy a little bit too much. So not the time. You’re inclined to snap your fingers at him; the sound jolts his attention back up to your face.

“Okay. Fine,” Holland yields. He’s trying to run through the night in his head. The two of you in the car, enjoying each other’s company up until the top-of-show, where you’re watching those stupid, little middle-schoolers perform and suddenly find yourself wanting to break up with him. Holland, the perpetual single father. He grits his teeth, “If you want to go, then we can go. I’ll pick you up after I drop her off, and we’ll watch it front-row.” 

“Good.” You stand up straighter, expression much brighter than before. Even if he’s so terrified by the thought of you coming to Holly’s play, Holland can only really aim to please you. If this is what he has to do, then so be it.

“Happy?” Holland asks cautiously, glancing over your features with a tilt of his head. You’re much more touchy now, a good sign, hands coming up to fix his collar.

“You’re in the safe-zone for now,” you tell Holland. Without further delay, he’s bending down to give you a sloppy kiss—pointer-fingers pulling you by the belt loops. You’re grinning wide as he moves upwards, laying a kiss on your nose, and then your forehead. All is right in the world.

Healy’s muttering carries over into the kitchen. “Jesus. It’s like they can’t go a minute without touchin’ each other.” His acute observation causes Holly to begin twisting her head with naive curiosity—but he stops her with a tap to the shoulder and a shake of his head. “Don’t look, kid. S’gross.”

—

On Friday night, Holland’s five minutes early—double-parked on the street of your apartment with the convertible roof down. The two of you are already well-agreed on the attire for tonight. Not too casual, not too formal, just charming enough to impress. As soon as you’re outside and locking the door behind you, Holland is beaming. “Hon, you look perfect.” But, as soon as you turn around, he’s dead quiet. Holland’s very caught off-guard, you think, by the large bunch of carnations cradled in your arms, all wrapped up in cellophane and ribbon. Holland gawks as you approach the car, open the side-door, and plop yourself onto the seat behind him. “Is that a bouquet?”

You shut the door and adjust the carnations carefully above your lap. It’s difficult to navigate where to put them exactly; the petals are rising out of the plastic film in generous bunches of off-white and fuschia. The bouquet’s big; you don’t know where to put it. “It’s for Holly. Opening night’s always a big deal, and I’m sure that all the parents are gonna have these kinds of things, too.”

Holland’s looking down at your lap like you’re carrying some kind of contraband. “Did you buy it? When?” He’s acting absolutely clueless, as if he’s never even seen a flower before in his life.

“There’s a florist a few blocks down,” you explain to Holland, half-distracted. “Would you hold it for me?”

He ushers the bouquet towards him with his hands. “Of course, baby. Give it here.” As soon as Holland takes the bouquet off your hands, he’s glancing down at your hands. You’re pulling a 35mm Canon from your side, pulling the thin leather strap over your head and placing it gently for a moment on the dash. “And you brought a camera. Of course.” Once the camera’s secure enough, you’re taking the bouquet out of Holland’s hands and putting it gently in the backseat. You can feel Holland watching you—particularly, the backside of you—as you make an exerted effort to secure them with a seatbelt. His entertainment is cut short as you sit back down in the shotgun with him. He’s restless, hand coming down to adjust his pant leg.

“You really need to keep up, March. Momentous occasion calls for momentous effort. Once I get them developed, they can go up on your fridge or something.”

Holland revs his car up a little bit, before rolling the car slowly down the block. “You’re running laps around me. I’m being… bested,” he says, palm hitting the steering wheel softly. As stumped as he sounds, you can see right through the facade.

You lean over for a quick second to kiss Holland soft on the cheek. “That’s how you like me, right?” And, unfazed, you slide back to plug your seatbelt in. Though Holland’s making a grand show of checking both sides of the street before he turns, you can see the way his lips twitch up into a smile.

—

This middle-school performance of The Sound of Music, though prepubescent in nature, has its charm. During the intermission, you spend a resolute amount of time conversing with Holland about Holly’s lighting prowess. He can only listen and nod, seeing as he doesn’t understand anything about the technical. But he is happy to be there—has a little bit of a frame of reference with the Christmas show—and just knows that his daughter’s somewhere in this auditorium, behind the handlebars of a giant spotlight, buzzing with excitement.

After the bows, it’s very easy to find Holly. She’s all the way up in the lighting booth, first. Then, skipping down the stairs, she’s running her way down to the two of you. Dressed in all show-blacks, Holly’s light blonde hair pops. She sticks out like a sore thumb amidst all the other families, bouncing around, hand shot straight in the air to flag you. She’s practically hopping up and down at the sight of you and her dad, shoulder-to-shoulder. “You came!” Holly exclaims, hand reaching to squeeze yours.

“Of course I came. I said I would come, didn’t I?” you tell her. Then, you’re tugging soft on Holland’s sleeve. “Flowers, baby.” Holland pulls the bouquet out from behind his back with a soft “ta-da,” holding them right in front of Holly’s face. She takes them heartily, looking straight down into the carnelians with a giddy look on her face.

“That’s for being the best kid offstage tonight.” Holly won’t stop saying ‘thank you’ over and over, and so, you’ve got to wave your hand and nudge her towards Holland. “Go stand next to your dad with those. I wanna shoot a picture of the both of you.”

The sight before you in the viewfinder is lovely. Holland is standing just behind Holly with both his hands on his shoulders; she’s holding the bouquet up for you to get a clearer shot. There’s the same wide grin shared between the two of them, and you can feel your heart just swelling at the sight. As soon as the camera clicks, Holly’s peeling off of Holland in an instant. “I’m supposed to go help put the spotlights back in the storage, and I’ve got to say bye to Jess. Can I meet you outside?” she asks you, bright-blue eyes blinking rapidly.

Holland decides, maybe too eagerly, to respond on behalf of both of you. “We’ll go warm up the car. You take your time.” You cast him a sidelong glance—the tone alone telling you that he’s too excited to rush out of the auditorium.

Upon further inspection, Holland is jumpy. He’s checking for his keys in his trouser pockets, fixing his already-straight tie. It’s like watching an old German Shepherd wag its tail. His daughter can only narrow her eyes with a scrunch of her nose. “Gross,” Holly says. “Meet me in twenty minutes near the flagpole.” Holly’s always getting dropped off there in the mornings; it’s a solid landmark. The two of you watch as she skitters away from the both of you to go close up for the night. Holland is turning to face you, hand finding the small of your back with a feathery, brush of your spine. It’s going to be a very short walk to the car.

—

Holland insists on bringing the roof up on his convertible for the sake of privacy, though his windows are fish-bowled and you’re sure that anyone within a couple of yards can see you both. Still, he seems very urgent about ushering you into the shotgun and the both of you sitting there for a moment before swinging the car around to grab Holly. Once he’s able to toss the bouquet in the back, he’s taking your hand up; his mustache brushes against your knuckles as he kisses them. “You’re getting sappy on me.”

“I’m not used to bringing anyone to these things,” Holland tells you, “Besides Healy, maybe.” Not the time. He shakes his head and tries again, placing your hand back down onto your lap. “It’s pretty nice having you come and support Holly. You, uh… make great backup.”

You’re turning to face him. In the dimly-lit lot of the middle school, you can only barely see the antsy look on his face. Softly, you chuckle, “It isn’t a case, Holland.” He nods. You’re right, as per usual.

“Right.” He finally cracks. “I’m not used to this. And I love it, baby, I do. It’s more than I could possibly ask for.” Holland had only been burning through the occasional one-night stand before he met you. And before that, there’d only been his wife. You’re steady, and it’s not what he’s used to. It’s really all as new to you as it is to him. That last thing you want is to impose on the March’s home life—but the closer you get to Holland… It's starting to resemble a family.

“I just want to make sure that you know that you’re not running it alone. It takes a village, or whatever.” Warily, you confess to him, “And I wanna be good for you and Holly.”

“Oh, honey.” He’s giving that same old look that he always does, pupils blown, lips parted. He just can’t help it. “You’re perfect,” Holland assures you earnestly. There’s an irresistible urge for you to plant a tender kiss on his jaw. As soon as you do, he doesn’t let you get much further away from him. Holland tilts your chin up with his thumb, leaving a gentle peck on your lips. He’s always impatient when it comes to you, never able to keep it short and sweet. Quickly, Holland is bringing his hand up to your neck, calloused fingers pushing against your pulse point. He’s following the trace of his fingers with hard kisses, then capturing your lips again with a fluttery groan.

“Holland,” you whisper. You have to pull back from him, though you’d really kill to carry on. He’s muttering “already?” under his breath and you have to insist with a squeeze of his knee. “She’s going to be out any minute now.” Holland drops his head onto your shoulder, taking in a deep breath. Then, he grabs for your seatbelt, clicks it into the lock, and gives you one last smooch on the cheek.

“Okay. I’m gonna treat the kid and you out to a nice dinner tonight. Ice cream after. She can’t go without ,” Holland nods. He sits up straight, raising his arm over the back of your seat to pull out of his parking space. “And next weekend, we’re gonna go take a drive, you and me—find a hotel room and make good use of that film camera of yours.”

With a swift swat to the arm, you mutter, “You’re such a perv. Go pull up to the flagpole.”

Dex went still. The principal kept talking beside him. Something about lockdown protocols, fire exits, parent pick-up procedures, and perhaps thanking him for the visit. Dex didn’t hear any of it. He watched the little boy rub his face with his sleeve, watched you reach into your cardigan pocket and produce a tissue because of course you had one ready, because of course you had walked through life expecting the world to hurt these precious little things and had prepared yourself to help.

“Reading slowly just means you get to spend more time with the words,” you told the boy. “That’s not a bad thing.”

The boy sniffled, and you smiled at him.

Dex felt that smile land in his cold heart, somewhere it had no business being.

It would have been easier if you were only beautiful. That would have been manageable. Uncomfortable, maybe, but manageable. Beauty was a fact. Beauty could be observed, catalogued, eventually put away. You were beautiful in a way that seemed unaware of itself, unpolished and terribly human. The cardigan sleeves falling too far over your hands, the loose strand of hair stuck to your cheek, the worn soles of your cheap flats, you smiling so easily for children who probably forgot to thank you for it.

Dex thought you were gorgeous with an alarmed resentment, as if his own body had betrayed him by noticing before his mind had given permission. Then you looked up at him.

Your eyes met his across the library, and for half a second, Dex forgot what face he was supposed to be wearing. You smiled politely, like he was just another adult in the building, not a man with a gun under his jacket teaching staff how to react in case of a school shooting.

“Hi,” you said. “Sorry, do you need the library?”

The principal brightened. “This is our librarian.”

You gave Dex your name. He repeated it silently once. Then again. Then a third time, because it felt like something he should store somewhere safe, somewhere no one else could touch.

“Special Agent Poindexter,” he said, holding out his hand.

You shook it, and your hand was warm. Dex noticed that there was a tiny paper cut near your thumb. 

You were still smiling at him. Not because he was FBI, and not because he was handsome, though he was. You smiled because you were kind.

Fuck. That’s inconvenient.

Pretty made him look, but good made him stay.

That first visit should have been the last. Dex knew that. There was no operational reason for him to return personally. The school’s safety review was a basic one. The principal had his notes, but the follow-up could have been handled by email. A junior agent could have dropped off the printed materials. Anyone could have gone.

But Dex went. That second time, he poked his head to the library, and said hi. You said hi back, right after you told two boys that no, the beanbags were not for wrestling, and yes, you were very impressed by the creativity of the attempt.

Dex couldn’t stop thinking about it for a week.

The third time, he told himself it was because the library’s rear exit needed another assessment. It was technically true. The lock was old, the corridor outside had basically no surveillance, and the staff entrance was too far from the main office. He made it seem like a legitimate concern, when really, it was a neat little justification. Dex was excellent at finding those.

You were reshelving books when he appeared in the doorway, balanced on the tips of your toes as you reached for the top shelf. The hem of your blouse lifted slightly at your waist. It was nothing indecent. Barely anything at all.

Still, his mind went briefly blank. 

He cleared his throat.

You startled, turned, and smiled. “Agent Poindexter.”

Dex liked the sound of it from you. That was inconvenient too.

“Sorry,” you added, stepping down. “Am I in the way?”

“No.”

“Good. Because if you were about to tell me my fiction section is a security risk, I might cry.”

His mouth twitched before he decided to let it. “I’ll leave fiction alone.”

“Very generous of the DOJ.” That’s when he realised you were teasing him. 

Dex looked at you and thought, you have no idea what a dangerous thing that was.

After that, the visits became a pattern.

Not obvious, because Dex was never sloppy when he could help it. He didn’t go every day. He didn’t stand outside the library staring like some lovesick idiot with no self-control. He knew how to make repeated contact look procedural. 

His supervisor barely looked up from the file the fourth time it happened. “Poindexter, you handled the school outreach last week, right?”

“Yes.”

“They’ve got some updated compliance questions. I can send Nadeem.”

Dex immediately shook his head. “I’ll take it.”

His supervisor paused, but Dex kept his face still. “I’m already familiar with the layout,” he said, and what a good excuse that was. 

The whole truth was that he had thought about you every day since the first visit. You came to him through triggers. When he saw children’s drawings in a hallway. A cardigan on a mannequin The smell of old paper. A mug with painted stars on it in a café window, because you had one on your desk.

You were good, and you were pretty, and that combination felt less like attraction and more like orientation. As if Dex had spent his whole life moving without a fixed point and then walked into a school library and found one.

So, yes, he came back to the school. And, yes, eventually, he followed you home.

The first time, he told himself it was because you were the last staff member to leave again and the car park lighting was poor, so he had to make sure you were safe. It had rained earlier, leaving the pavement slick and black. You walked out with a tote bag over one shoulder and an armful of books pressed to your chest, juggling your keys between your fingers. 

Dex sat in his car and watched until you pulled out of the lot. Then he followed. He learned the route to your apartment in fourteen minutes. He cleared that you lived in a building with a front door that did not latch unless pulled hard, that the hallway light on your floor flickered, that your window faced the street and your curtains were thin enough to turn your silhouette suggestive when you moved past them with nothing on.

He hated your building immediately. The lock was bad. The street was worse. Your neighbours were careless. The man in 2B smoked on the front steps and watched women walk past like a fucking creep. The laundry room was in the basement. The side gate did not close properly.

Dex catalogued every vulnerability, then sat in his car for twenty-three minutes after your lights went out and told himself this was a reasonable concern.

He was trained to notice risk, and you just had so much of it. You were too open, too trusting, too underpaid to live somewhere safe enough. 

He found out about the money without needing to try very hard.

He figured out your exact job title, your district, and salary ranges within twenty minutes. He knew what you could afford, what you probably couldn’t, what your grocery budget looked like if your car needed work or if the school asked you to buy supplies out of pocket again. And you did, apparently. He saw the receipts in your hand one afternoon when you came out of a discount store with construction paper, glue sticks, tissues, and children’s stickers paid for with your own money.

That bothered him more than it should have. It enraged him. Not because you were helpless. Dex didn’t think that. You were competent in the way good people often were, holding ten pieces of a room together while everyone else assumed the room simply stayed whole on its own. But you were tired and stretched thin. You loved your job, the children, the library with its peeling posters and overhandled paperbacks, but love didn’t pay rent.

I could, he thought. Dex could pay your rent without noticing. He could buy groceries without checking his account. He could fix the lock. Replace the car. Put you somewhere safe and close. That’s… a good reason to ask you out, right?

If he ever had the courage. 

By the fifth visit, you laughed when you saw him. “Again?”

Dex stopped in the library doorway, because he insisted to the bureau that some of the teachers were security risks. “Again.”

“Should I be worried about the state of our emergency preparedness?”

“No.”

“Should I be worried about you?” That caught him off-guard.  Your tone was teasing, but your eyes were warm and curious.

Should I be worried about you?

Yes, he thought. Probably.

Instead, he said, “No.”

You narrowed your eyes in mock suspicion. “I don’t know. Five visits to the school. Either we are extremely unsafe, or you really like laminated evacuation maps.”

Dex looked at the map beside your door. “It’s a good map.”

You burst out laughing.

Dex loved the sound immediately and started to memorise it so he could copy it when you made a joke. More than that, he wanted to be responsible for it. He wanted to know what your laugh sounded like in his car. In his kitchen. Against his mouth.

The thought came so suddenly that his teeth clenched.

You noticed. Your smile softened, and Dex had the devastating impression that you thought you had embarrassed him. “I’m sorry,” you said. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”

“You didn’t.”

“Okay.” You tilted your head. “Good.”

Good. The word followed him home.

So did you, though not physically. Not yet. But your image, your voice, the way you said his name after he told you to call him Dex, the way you remembered he took tea plain after seeing him drink it once in the staff room. The way you handed him a paper cup and said, “I made too much,” as if generosity was just something that spilled out of you naturally.

And then there were the guys around you.

He had watched a math teacher who lingered at your desk too long after school, making you laugh over some stupid story about a parent email. A divorced father at pick-up who asked whether you ever took private tutoring work and then smiled in a way Dex didn’t like. A man you met for coffee one Friday evening, two neighbourhoods over, at a café with steamed windows and terrible parking.

Dex hadn’t meant to follow you there. That was a lie.

He had followed you there because you had worn lipstick, the kind you probably put on in your rearview mirror after work, thinking no one would notice.

The date was unremarkable. The man was unremarkable. He wore a blue shirt, laughed too loudly, and checked his phone while you were talking. Dex watched from across the street with his hands still on the steering wheel and felt jealousy move through him.

The man was wrong for you.

He was careless, dull, and too impressed with himself. He made you pay for your own tea. That alone felt like a crime.

You left to do some off-the-clock work, and your date stayed. Dex waited until the man left to use the bathroom, then walked into the café and passed close enough to his table to see the phone he had left face-up beside his plate. He saw a message from someone named Laura lit the screen with a heart attached.

Dex smiled. That was useful.

The next morning, he sent an anonymous message to Laura. The following week, you didn’t see blue-shirt again.

You looked a little sad about it on Monday. Dex hated that. Then he hated the man more for making you sad. Then he told himself it was better this way.

It became easier to scare off your dates after that. All it took was an inconvenient scheduling conflict, a resurfaced truth, a gentle nudge. One man had an outstanding warrant for unpaid fines. One was married. One was simply easy to scare with the right look from the right federal agent in a parking lot.

By the sixth visit to the school, there was no reason good enough to fool anyone but himself.

A “Penultimate walkthrough,” he called it, before the final walkthrough next week. 

The principal seemed pleased, though you looked amused. “Penultimate?” you asked when Dex appeared outside the library.

“Yes.”

“Should I be honoured?”

“You should feel secure.”

“I do. The biography section has never been safer.”

He looked at you, and you smiled like you were proud of yourself. Dex couldn’t help but copy that smile back. Your expression changed when you saw it, going still for one second, like you liked him, too.

That day, he walked through the library with you while you pointed out doors and windows and places the children liked to hide during reading hour. This corner was where the overwhelmed ones went. That shelf had the books no one returned on time because they loved them too much. The lamp near the beanbag was too warm if left on all day, but you kept it anyway because the kids said it made the corner feel cozy.

“This is where they go when they need silence,” you said, gesturing toward a little space tucked behind a low shelf. A lamp. A basket of soft toys. Books with soft edges. A handmade sign that read: take a breath.

Dex looked at it.

You had made a place for children to be afraid safely. Of course you had.

“You did this?” he asked.

You shrugged, suddenly shy. “It’s not much.”

Dex looked at you. “It is.”

You met his eyes, and for a moment, the library noise faded behind you.

After that, he wanted to give you things. He wanted to give you better shoes. Better locks. A safer car. A warmer apartment. Groceries you did not buy with mental arithmetic running behind your eyes. A kitchen where your tea sat beside his coffee because it belonged there. A bed you didn’t have to assemble yourself. A life where you did not walk to your car alone. He wanted your life folded into his so completely that you never again had to stand unprotected in the world.

It was raining the day he finally asked.

The sky had turned the school windows grey, and the car park outside shone black under the streetlights. Most of the staff had already left. The corridors had emptied, and you were the last one in the library again.

Dex had lingered through a conversation with the principal he barely needed to have after the final walkthrough. He had checked the same exit twice. He had waited near the lobby until your light was the only one still glowing down the hall.

Then you came out with a tote bag sliding down your shoulder and a cardboard box of donated books pressed against your hip. Your umbrella refused to open, and you stared at it like it had stabbed you.

“Need help?”

You startled, then relaxed when you saw him. “Dex.” You laughed, breathless and embarrassed. “Do you just appear whenever I’m losing a fight?”

“Your umbrella is inside out,” he pointed out, before taking the box from you.

You tried to hold on. “I can carry that.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you take it?”

“Because it’s raining.”

You looked at him for a second, then smiled, soft and helpless and too fond for his sanity.

“Okay,” you said, as if letting him carry a box was nothing. As if it didn’t make a dark and pleased thought settle low in his chest.

He walked you to your car and put the books in the back seat. He noted the old jumper on the passenger side, the stack of overdue returns, the half-empty water bottle, the evidence of your life that was still not his.

You stood beside him under the broken umbrella, rain misting your hair.

You were gorgeous, he thought.

It struck him then in the stupidest way. No analysis or clinical separation. Just so pretty it made him feel young and strange and almost angry with himself.

“What?” you asked, smiling like you could tell he was staring.

Dex could’ve said nothing. He could have smiled, stepped back, wished you a good night, returned to his car, and come up with another reason to see you next week.

Instead, he looked at you and thought of your whole life together. Then he said it. “Have dinner with me.”

Your smile faded into surprise. The rain tapped against the broken umbrella between you. You blinked once. It wasn’t really a question, was it?  “With you?”

“Yes.”

“As in…”

“A date.”

Your cheeks warmed. Dex watched the colour rise and tilted his head.

“Oh,” you said softly. Then, after a second, you smiled. “Okay.”

Just like that, he got what he wanted. 

—

The first date was dinner at your favourite restaurant, though you couldn’t recall ever telling Dex that.

You paused outside the little place with the handwritten menu in the window, your hand tucked into the crook of his arm. “Oh,” you said, surprised. “I love this place.”

Dex looked down at you, calm as anything. “Do you?”

You laughed. “I come here all the time.”

“I didn’t know that.”

The lie was smooth, but Dex said it with such calm that you accepted it because you wanted to. So you smiled up at him and said, “Then we have similar taste.”

His eyes held on your face. “Maybe we do.”

“Maybe we belong together then,” you joked.

Dex’s brain went to a catastrophic halt.

You didn’t see it from the outside, not really. His face barely changed. Maybe his eyes went a little too still. Maybe his fingers pressed once, carefully, against your hand where it rested on his sleeve.

But inside him, his heart lit up white-hot. Belong together.

You had said it so lightly. Dex heard it like a verdict. Like the universe had leaned down and put a hand on his shoulder and said, yes, that one.

He opened the restaurant door for you and followed you inside with your words still burning through him.

You had no idea he had chosen this restaurant because he had followed you there three weeks before, parked across the street while you sat by the window with two friends and laughed over a bowl of pasta. You had no idea he had watched you order the same thing twice. You had no idea he knew which seat you liked, which dessert you split with your friend and pretended not to want more of, which route you took home afterward, how tightly you held your coat closed when the wind picked up.

But yeah, dinner was great. 

The second date was coffee because you were trying to take things slower.

He was already there when you arrived, sitting by the window with your drink waiting in front of the empty chair. Your exact order, right size, right syrup.  He claimed similar taste innocently again. 

You should have been alarmed. Instead, you chuckled and sat down.

Coffee turned into a walk. The walk turned into him standing beside your car, close enough that your shoulder brushed his sleeve. He looked at your mouth once, then back at your eyes. “Can I kiss you?”

You didn’t even answer. You just stood on your tip toes and kissed him, carefully at first. But his hand came to cup your face, so you made a hum into his mouth and felt him unravel. 

When he pulled back, his eyes were dark. You smiled, dazed. 

The third date was dinner at his apartment.

He cooked for you, because apparently Dex did everything like it was a mission and feeding you was no exception. His apartment was neat  and perfectly arranged, but then you were there with your jacket on the back of his chair and your laugh in his kitchen, and he kept looking at those little disruptions were worth you being here.

The food was good, so you smiled and pushed a little harder. “You’re very good at taking care of me.”

Dex went still, and you could’ve sworn his ears went pink. 

After dinner, you kissed him on the couch. That was all it was supposed to be: A kiss.

Yes, maybe Dex made it feel a little too deep. Maybe it was too hungry. Maybe it was a little reckless, considering this was only the third date and you weren't the kind of woman who did things like this. You didn’t tumble into a man’s bed after three dates and let your body make decisions your brain would have to defend in the morning.

Your brain was trying, to be fair. The little voices there had formed a whole committee meeting about it.

This is too fast. This is insane. You have work tomorrow. You barely know him.

Unfortunately, Dex was kissing you, open-mouthed and desperate, his hands tight on your waist, breathing against you like every second of restraint physically hurt him, and your body didn’t seem particularly interested in attending the discussion.

You climbed into his lap because there was nowhere else you wanted to be.

Dex let out a breathy moan when you settled over him,  his head tipping back against the couch. His shirt was still on, but you had already pulled half the buttons open, enough to get your hands on skin, enough to feel his chest rise under your palms every time your mouth found his again.

Your skirt was hiked high around your thighs, his fingers trembling at the hem of it.

Dex, who could easily take what he wanted, sat beneath you with his hands on your thighs and waited for you to tell him he was allowed.

You kissed him harder for it.

His mouth opened under yours immediately, wet and so eager that you felt your stomach twist. You threaded your fingers into his hair and tugged once, just to steady yourself, just to feel him closer.

Dex sighed into your mouth.

“Oh,” you whispered, breathless.

His eyes opened, fixed on you. You smiled because you understood then that Benjamin Poindexter liked being told what to do.

He wanted to be good for you. He wanted to earn every sound you made.

You shifted in his lap, and his whole body reacted. His fingers slid higher under your skirt, then stopped again.

“Dex,” you breathed.

His throat worked. “Tell me.”

You leaned down, your lips brushing his as you spoke. “Touch me.”

He obeyed so fast it made you gasp.

Your panties were pulled to the side with clumsy, shaking urgency, his pants shoved down just enough because neither of you had the patience anymore. It was filthy how desperate it was. There was no time for the bedroom, no careful undressing, no pretending this was slower than it was. It was you in his lap, his open shirt under your hands, your skirt bunched around your waist, both of you panting into each other’s mouths like you had been struck by fucking lightning.

He was so intense you expected him to take over. Because he could’ve flipped you under him. He could have pinned you to the couch and made you forget every thought you had ever had. He had the body, he had muscles, he had the skills. 

Instead, he looked at you like he needed permission to breathe. “Like that?” he breathed.

You nodded, nails dragging over his chest nodding frantically. “Don’t stop.”

He didn’t.

Dex listened like obedience was devotion, like your pleasure was a commandment, like the only thing in the world that mattered was keeping you exactly like this: skirt up, mouth open, shaking in his lap while he looked up at you like you were holy.

You knew this was too quick. You never had one night stands. Even three dates was way too quick, by your standards. 

But his hands were on your waist, his shirt was open, his breathing was breaking, and when you whispered, “Fuck, baby,” he shuddered so hard beneath you that all your remaining common sense died on the couch.

Afterward, you stayed folded against him, both of you warm and breathless, your face tucked into his neck.

Dex’s hand moved slowly up your back, careful now. 

You lifted your head enough to look at him. His hair was wrecked. His mouth was red. His eyes were softer than you had ever seen them, though there was still a frightening stillness underneath, satisfied and hungry and already too attached.

You touched his cheek. “I should probably go home.”

Dex went still.

He looked at you from beneath those dark lashes, still flushed, still breathing hard, still beautiful enough to make bad decisions feel like fate. “Stay the night,” he said, trying not to say please.

You swallowed. “I have work tomorrow.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“My things are at home.”

“You can wear something of mine.”

“I need my toothbrush.”

“I have a spare.”

A laugh slipped out of you, helpless and fond. Of course he did. 

Dex’s mouth barely moved, and it was always a smile.

He looked at you like he needed you to say yes and hated that you could tell. Like letting you leave after this would physically hurt. Like you had crawled into his lap and accidentally turned yourself into the centre of his orbit.

You should go home. Your sensible little inner committee was banging on the table now.

But Dex looked at you like he was unaware he had puppy dog eyes, and you couldn’t say no to that, right? 

So you kissed him once. “M’kay, baby,” you said.

Dex held you tighter then, giving an upbeat little whine as he peppered kisses on your collarbone.

Little did you know, there was no going back now. 

—

The next day, Dex picked you up from work, even though you hadn’t asked him to.

He had driven you that morning as promised, his hands on your waist while he kissed you goodbye like he was trying not to follow you into the school library.

You had spent the whole day after that with his shirt on, but it was terribly oversized on you. Still, you managed to make it look intentional under your blazer, tucked and adjusted just enough that no one could tell. You had pinned your hair neatly, put your librarian face on, and acted very normal. Very professional of you, honestly.

Then the final bell rang, the library emptied, and by the time you stepped out of the front entrance with your bag over your shoulder, Dex was already there, waiting by his car with a suit jacket on and badge hidden. 

You stopped mid-step. “Oh,” you said, lighting up.  Beside you, Jonathan stopped too.

Jonathan, the music teacher. Nice Jonathan. Harmless Jonathan. Jonathan who lived two streets away from you and always carried a canvas tote bag with an embarrassing number of reusable water bottles inside it. He had been walking with you because you didn’t have your car with you and he offered to drive you home because you were both headed in the same direction. 

Dex’s grip tightened around his keys.

You were still wearing his shirt, and this man wanted to take you home? Cute.

“Dex?” you called, surprised.

Dex barely spared Johnathan a glance. He came to you instead, handsome in that frightening l way, his attention fixed you that it made the other man feel like background noise.

“What are you doing here?” you asked.

“Picking you up.”

You blinked, then laughed softly. “Why?”

Because you were wearing my shirt. Because I spent all day knowing you were out of sight. Because I don’t like it when you’re not with me.

“Your car’s not here,” he said, and that was reasonable enough, right?

“Oh.” You glanced back. “Jonathan was going to offer me a ride. He lives a few blocks away, so—”

“No.” The word came out flat.

You tilted your head, confused. You tried to recover, sweet thing that you were, turning half toward the man beside you. “Dex, this is Jonathan. He’s the music teacher. Jonathan, this is—”

Dex opened the passenger door. “You’re coming with me.”

Jonathan stopped with his polite smile halfway formed.

You looked at Dex for a second, and your sensible little inner voice probably tried to say something about how this was strange. 

Then Dex looked at you, and you melted, because fuck! Some foolish, lovesick part of you found that endearing. He came all this way for me? 

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Jonathan,” you said gently.

Dex shut the passenger door after you climbed in and stood there for one extra second, hand still on the handle, the word burning through him. What did that mean?

He got into the car.

The drive started silent. You settled beside him, and Dex saw you cozy up one the corner of his eye and had to tighten both hands on the wheel.

“Tomorrow?” he asked finally.

You looked over. “Hm?”

“You said you’d see him tomorrow.”

A little smile pulled at your mouth. You leaned across the console and kissed his cheek, like you thought jealousy was cute when it came from him.

“We work together, Dex.”

Oh. Okay. Okay. That’s fine, right?

Normal boyfriends were fine with that, right?

Still.

Then, asked if you wanted to come over to his place again because he couldn’t help himself. Because having you in the passenger seat made it feel obscene to let you leave again. Because you were already dressed in his things and smelled faintly like his apartment and he couldn’t understand why the day had to end anywhere else.

You looked down at yourself and laughed. “Dex, I am literally wearing your clothes. I need to go to mine.”

He kept his expression calm, but his fingers went still on the wheel.

You noticed enough to furrow your brows. “I’ve got work stuff to do,” you said. “I’ll call soon, okay?”

He nodded. He could do that. He could be normal. He could drive you to your car and let you go back to your apartment with its bad lock and pathetic hallway light and no trace of him except the marks he had left under your clothes. He could.

He pulled up beside your car outside your building and watched you unbuckle your seatbelt. You said your goodbyes and were halfway out when he blurted out, “I love you.”

You stopped.

Fuck. Fuck! 

He had not planned it like that. Not in the car, and definitely not with you leaving. But there it was.

You turned back to him slowly.

For a second, you bit your lip in shock. 

It was quick. Too quick to say that. You’ve been going on dates for what? Two weeks? 

You supposed he’d been around the school for two months now with the outreach program. But even that didn’t really make sense, right?

So now, your inner committee was no longer holding a meeting. It was pounding on the table, screaming that this was insane, that love wasn’t supposed to arrive between a third date and a school pick-up, that normal people didn’t do this.

But Dex was looking at you like you hung the stars for him. 

So leaned back into the car and kissed him. Gently first, then deeper, because his hand found your jaw like he had been waiting for permission to touch you again since the school gates.

“I love you, too,” you whispered.

Oh. Oh.

You left before you could take it back.

Dex watched you wave from your door, hands resting on the wheel, mouth curved in a small, helpless smile he couldn’t seem to stop.

She loves me.

The thought repeated all the way home.

She loves me. She loves me. She loves me.

By the time he reached his apartment, he was still smiling.

Then he opened the door, and the smile vanished immediately because you were not there.

The apartment was exactly the same as it had been that morning, clean and perfectly ordered, but suddenly none of that mattered. The couch was empty. The kitchen was empty. The bed was empty. All those neat, controlled rooms had become useless because you weren’t inside them.

Dex stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand and felt his stomach in him turn over.

You loved him, so why were you not here?

The question sat in his head with terrible simplicity. 

You loved him. He loved you. He could take care of you. He had the space, the money, the locks, the discipline. Your apartment was unsafe. Your building was bad. Your neighbours were careless. Jonathan from music lived too close. The world kept touching you and taking from you and making you tired.

Here was safer. Here, it made sense. Here, he could see you.

The thought came fully formed before he knew to stop it.

He could go get you.

He could get in the car. Drive to your apartment. Knock. Tell you that you should change your mind. Tell you the city was unsafe. Tell you your lock was bad. Tell you to pack a bag. Tell you you belonged in his apartment. Tell you until you believed him.

If you said no, he could still bring you back.

He was stronger than you. Faster than you. He was trained. He knew exactly how to move you without hurting too badly. He could overpower you, get you inside his apartment, lock the door, hide the keys, take your phone just for a while. He’d you keep warm. Feed you. Talk to you until the panic passed. He’d do that just until you understood. Because you would understand.

You loved him, so eventually you would understand that this was not cruelty, right?  This was not punishment. This was him seeing the truth faster than you did. This was him making the hard decision because someone had to. This was him saving you from all the places that were not him.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise that was kidnapping.

Actually, legally, literally kidnapping.

Kidnapping. False imprisonment. Coercion. Felony. It was bad.

“Oh,” he whispered. Then, after a beat, “Shit.”

His breath went wrong. The heat in him snapped into panic so quickly he nearly staggered. He saw himself then, not as a man in love, not as someone protecting his girlfriend, but as exactly the kind of thing you would need protecting from.

No.

No, no, no.

He backed away from the door like it had opened onto a cliff.

He loved you. He loved you. He wasn’t going to make you afraid of him. He wasn’t going to put his hands on you. He wasn’t going to lock you inside his life and pretend that was the same thing as being chosen.

Even if some awful part of him wanted to. Especially because some awful part of him wanted to.

Dex went to the drawer with shaking hands and pulled out the tapes.

Dr. Eileen Mercer’s voice filled the apartment through a soft crackle of static. “Your internal compass isn’t broken, Dex. It just works better with a North Star to guide you.”

Dex sank onto the couch.

North Star.

That was what you were.

Of course you were. You, with your kind heart and your gentle voice and your stupidly good heart. You, making safe corners for children. 

He had simply made the catastrophic mistake of falling in love with the star.  Which complicated things.

Because you were supposed to guide him, not belong to him. You were supposed to be fixed above him, untouchable enough to follow. Not in his apartment. Not in his bed. Not wearing his shirt and saying I love you in his car like you had any idea what those words would do to a man like him.

Dex pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes and forced himself to breathe while the tape kept playing through the static.

The apartment was still wrong without you. His hands still shook. The need to leave and get you didn’t disappear just because he had named it correctly. The desire sat there, dark and patient, waiting for him to mistake it for devotion again. But he stayed where he was.

He stayed on the couch with his teeth clenched so hard it ached, listening to the tape like it was the only thing holding him in place.

He loved you. That had to mean something better than possession. It had to.

So Dex sat in the empty apartment and tried, breath by breath, to become the kind of man who could love his North Star without building a sky small enough to trap her.

—

Dex barely made it through the week by hearing your voice through the phone.

You were busy with the school, chaperoning a trip, dealing with children and permission slips and packed lunches and museum gift shops, so he did the good thing, the normal thing. He didn’t show up. He didn’t follow the bus route. He didn’t appear outside your apartment just because he knew you would be exhausted.

Well. Maybe he just did it once, but he didn’t even stop! He just took a quick peek around the block to make sure you got home safe. 

After that, he took it one day at a time.

At night, he lay in bed with the phone pressed to his ear and listened to you talk when you called. You told him about the children, the chaos, the little girl who tried to correct the tour guide, the boy who cried because his sandwich got crushed in his bag.

He hated that he couldn't tell if you were warm enough. Hated that you sounded exhausted and he wasn’t there to put a blanket over your shoulders or press his mouth to your temple or make the world stop asking things of you for five minutes. But he behaved.

When you said, “I’m so tired, baby,” he closed his eyes like the world wrapped a hand around his throat.

When you said, “I miss you,” he pressed his fist against his mouth until the feeling passed enough for him to answer normally.

“I miss you too.” An understatement so violent it almost made him laugh.

Then you came back to regular life, and started spending more time with him. 

And naturally, you started spending more nights at his place.

It was easy. His apartment was closer to the school. His shower was better. His fridge always had food you liked. Your tea was already in his cupboard. Your toothbrush was still in his bathroom from that first night, and the spare charger by his bed somehow became yours without either of you discussing it.

One night a week became two. Two nights a week became most of the week.

Your laundry ended up in his machine. Your favourite cardigan stayed folded in his bedroom. Your substitute teaching papers got graded at his kitchen table while he made dinner. Your commute became easier because he drove you when he could, and when he couldn’t, he made sure your car had petrol, the tyres were checked, and the weird noise under the hood had been fixed before it became a problem.

It was dangerous, how much easier he made your life.

Dangerous because you were a school librarian on a school librarian salary, and Dex had big boy FBI paychecks and paid for groceries without mentally rearranging the rest of the month around it.

You tried to argue about that once. He looked genuinely offended.

“I should help,” you said.

“You do.”

“I mean with bills.”

“You buy supplies for children who are not yours because no one else will. Let me pay for dinner.”

That shut you up, not because it was fair. But because it was kind. Or because it sounded kind. Or because, with Dex, the difference had started to blur.

Your car made a noise; he had it checked. Your shoes wore thin; a new pair appeared by the door. You mentioned once that you were out of your favourite cereal, and the next morning there were two boxes in his cupboard.

By five months, you were barely at your own apartment.

You still paid rent. You still had mail there. Technically, you still lived there. But most nights, you went home to Dex.

Then one night, while you sat at his kitchen table grading reading logs and wearing one of his shirts under your cardigan, Dex said, “You should move in.”

You looked up. “What?”

“You should move in here.”

He said it so calmly. Like he was pointing out the weather. Like he had not been waiting weeks to say it. Like he had not already measured the space in his closet, looked up your lease date, and made sure there was room for your books.

You felt your inner committee rise from the dead.

Babe. What the fuck. Five months. Are you actually considering this? What’s wrong with you? Huh?

So you pushed back, but not very well.

“Dex,” you said, looking around his apartment. “We’ve been dating for five months.”

“I know.”

“Moving in would be very quick.”

“I know.”

But would it? You were at his kitchen table in one of his shirts, your papers stacked on his coffee table, your mug in his sink, your shoes by his door. Half your life was already there.

Suddenly, Dex leaned down and kissed you before you could keep arguing.

He did it because he had seen men do it in movies when they wanted to calm the woman they loved. 

That was how affection started with him, really.  He imitated touch. He put a hand on your waist because that was what boyfriends did. He rubbed circles over your hip because that was what loving partners did.

But then you melted under his hands and sighed into his mouth. Your fingers curled lightly into the front of his shirt.

And Dex thought, oh. So that was what it was supposed to feel like.

So after the first time, it no longer felt like pretending. It was no longer fake, no longer a costume he wore to convince you he could be normal.

He liked this. He liked the warmth beneath his palms. Liked the trusting weight of you leaning into him. Liked that touching you made him feel whole.  His thumbs kept moving in slow circles at your hips, more because he wanted to than because he remembered he was supposed to.

“I love you,” he murmured.

You closed your eyes like the words had done exactly what he hoped they would. “Dex…”

“You love me too.”

You laughed softly. “That is a terrible argument.”

“It’s my best one.”

Unfortunately, it was.

You hummed, but you were smiling now, and Dex felt his whole chest go warm.

He kissed you again, a little braver this time, still rubbing those gentle circles into your hips like he had finally found a love language that made sense in his hands.

You sighed, and he smiled against your mouth. It surprised him, even after five months, how much he wanted to be good at this. 

“Okay,” you whispered.

Dex went very still.

You opened your eyes and looked up at him, soft and doomed and already half his. “Okay, baby. I’ll move in.”

—

People got weird when you told them you had moved in with Dex.

Your friends did that careful-smile thing. Your mother went quiet on the phone before saying, “Already?” like the word had three question marks and a police report attached. One coworker just blinked at you over her mug and said, “Wow. That’s… fast.”

You kept giving the same answers. My lease was ending. His place is closer. It makes sense financially. He takes care of me.

Jonathan was the most obvious about it.

You told him in the staff room, after he was complaining about one of his classes committing recorder-based psychological warfare. “I moved in with Dex,” you said, trying to sound casual.

Slowly, he turned around. “Your fed boyfriend?”

“He has a name.”

“Agent Intense?”

“Dex.”

“Right. Your fed boyfriend.” He stared at you. “That’s so fast.”

You sighed. Here we go again. “My lease was ending.”

“You’ve known him for six months.”

“If you count his school outreach, seven actually”

“That’s not better.”

You crossed your arms, already defensive. “He’s not bad.”

“I didn’t say bad,” he shrugged, “I think more like…  creepy.”

“Jonathan.”

“What? He once looked at me like I was trying to steal you because I offered you a ride home.”

“He’s just protective, that’s all,” you huffed.

“I’m gay.”

“I know that.”

“Does he?”

“He does now,” you said.

“Does he care?”

You opened your mouth and closed it. Because no, Dex didn’t care when you told him. Johnathan was still just another person standing between you and him, platonic or romantic or whatever. Jonathan could have been gay, married, celibate, and allergic to women, and Dex still would have watched him with that flat suspicion the second he stood too close to you.

Jonathan pointed his teaspoon at you. “Exactly.”

Your phone buzzed before you could answer.

Dex: Did you eat lunch?

You smiled and held up the phone like evidence. “See? He’s sweet.”

Jonathan looked at the message, then at you. “Sure,” he said carefully. “Sweet.”

You texted back yes, baby, and when Dex replied within seconds, Jonathan sighed. You ignored him.

After all, Dex cared. That was all.

—

The people who thought the move-in was quick were in for a treat, because one month after you moved into Dex’s apartment, he asked you to marry him in the back seat of his car.

See, you had shown up because summer holidays had made you stupid with missing him. You were bored. You had no school, no library chaos, no children asking where the glitter glue went. Just too much free time and the embarrassing realization that you had become the kind of woman who missed her boyfriend at eleven-thirty in the morning like an addict running out of nicotine patches.

So you brought him lunch and went to his workplace. That was a normal girlfriend thing, right? Except the lunch did not get opened.

Dex had barely gotten the car door shut before you were kissing him, and he had barely made it through the first breath of your mouth before his hand slid under your thigh and dragged you into his lap in the back seat.

“Dex,” you laughed into his mouth.

He made a low and lewd sound into his mouth. Then his hands were on you again, pushing your skirt up around your hips with a little too much force, a little too much need, until the seam gave with an unmistakable rip of fabric.

Dex stared at the torn fabric in his hand with the horrified focus of a man who had committed a federal offence against cotton blend. “I’ll buy you another one.”

“That is not the point,” you chuckled.

“I’ll buy you five.”

You should have been annoyed. But his eyes were black with want, and there was something so obscenely flattering about Benjamin Poindexter accidentally ruining your clothes because he needed you too badly to be careful. So you tightened your fist in his tie and pulled. “Later,” you whispered.

Dex obeyed, because liked it when you pulled him by it. He liked the pressure, the direction, the filthy little reminder that he was still half-dressed for work while you were undoing him in the back of his own car. His mouth opened under yours, hands clamped on your hips like he was trying not to lose the last piece of his mind.

Your inner committee, exhausted from the moving-in situation and still technically on unpaid leave, attempted to return to service.

Babe. This is his workplace. This is a federal garage.

Babe, your skirt is ripped.

Babe, we cannot keep replacing clothes every time this man gets horny and emotional.

Then Dex kissed down your throat and the committee immediately lost quorum.

By the time you were done and either of you remembered he had to go back inside, the windows were fogged at the edges. His hair was ruined from your hands. His tie was loose and crooked. His shirt was open at the collar, your lipstick low enough on his skin that he would need to button all the way up and pray no one noticed. His mouth was swollen. 

You sat in his lap, skirt torn and shoved badly back into place, one hand still looped lazily around his tie. “You have to go back in,” you whispered.

His forehead rested against yours. “I know.”

“You look…”

His eyes lifted to yours.

You smiled. “Compromised.”

Dex’s mouth twitched. His thumbs moved on your thighs, circling through the thin fabric of your ruined skirt.

You tugged his tie gently. “I should let you go.”

His hands tightened, only barely.

“Marry me,” he said suddenly, as if he would die if he let you leave without saying it first.

For a second, you just stared at him. Somewhere inside your head, your inner committee walked back into the room, saw the situation, and immediately considered retiring.

Babe, no. Babe, absolutely not. Babe, stand up for yourself!

“What?” you managed to choke out.

“Marry me,” Dex calmly, like the idea had been sitting in him for weeks, waiting for the right opening, and apparently the right opening was you flushed and breathless in his back seat. 

“Dex.”

“I love you.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Your inner committee sighed so hard the lights flickered.

“I love you,” he said again, quieter. “You love me. We already live together. It gives you legal protection. If something happens to me, you’re taken care of. If something happens to you, they call me first.”

“You are making a case,” you realised, though you shouldn't have been surprised.

He just shrugged. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t get married.”

There it was, the simple Dex logic of it: I love you. You love me. Why wouldn’t we?

It was reasonable if you ignored the fact that he was clearly halfway to losing his mind and had probably been planning this long before he said it out loud. And underneath that, there was the thing he did not say. Because sure, the practical reasons were true. But underneath all that, there was the darker, sweeter logic he kept tucked behind his teeth. If you were only his girlfriend, you could change your mind. You could wake up one morning, decide he was too much, pack a bag, and walk out before he had time to kiss you and remind you how gentle he could be when he was trying. A girlfriend could leave in one terrible conversation. A wife had to take steps.

And Dex loved steps. You’d have to go through lawyers, papers, and waiting periods. A marriage would buy him time, and time meant he could come to you, he could hold your face, and remind you that you loved him as much as he loved you. He would never hurt. But if the law could slow you down long enough for him to convince you that leaving was a mistake, Dex couldn’t help loving that, too.

He didn’t say that, though. He only looked at you with his hair mussed and his mouth ruined and said, “It makes sense.”

Your inner committee made one last brave attempt: Babe. Please. We JUST moved in.

But you banged the gavel at the head of your imaginary table and pouted. But look at him! He’s so hot! 

In the real world, Dex was looking at you like you were already his wife, like the ring was only a formality. Then he kissed you, tenderly this time.

“I love you,” he murmured against your mouth.

The committee dropped their clipboard. Fine, you win, they seemed to say, Whatever you say, handsome.

You laughed weakly into the kiss, and Dex pulled back just enough to look at you.

“What?”

You touched his face, thumb brushing over his cheekbone, and felt him lean into it like affection was still new enough to surprise him.

“Yes,” you whispered, hand tightening in his tie. “Yes, baby. I’ll marry you.”

For a second, he looked almost scared by how happy it made him. Then his arms locked around your waist and pulled you close, his face turning into your neck, breath hot and uneven against your skin.

“But you really do have to go back inside,” you whispered with a chuckle.

Dex lifted his head. He looked ruined, happy, and possessive in a way that should have made you run but somehow only made you kiss him again. “I have ten more minutes.”

You giggled and pulled him in by the tie.

Your inner committee walked directly into the sea, never to be seen again.

—

Dex let you pick the rings.

The engagement ring first, because he said you were the one wearing it, so you should love it. Then the wedding bands, including his, even though he tried to act like he didn’t care what his looked like. That lasted until you slid a simple band onto his finger in the shop and watched his whole face go still, almost overwhelmed.

A month later, you married him at the courthouse.

It was too soon for anyone around you to feel truly comfortable about it. Your family came anyway. Your friends came anyway. Even Jonathan, looking like he had accepted his role as the last remaining voice of reason, and still failing anyway. On Dex’s side, there was a couple of coworkers standing near the back in neat suits, polite and reserved, present more like witnesses than family.

Dex had no parents, no siblings, no cousins, no childhood friends with embarrassing stories. No one who could say they had known him when he was young. No one who could reassure your parents he was a good person through and through. Just coworkers, Ray congratulating him as the rest of his coworkers stood on the courthouse hallway while your side filled the room with nervous affection and badly hidden concern.

You saw the way your mother looked at him. The way your friends glanced at one another when they realised there was no one on his side who really belonged to him. It made them uneasy, and because you loved him, you rushed to explain it in your head before anyone even asked. His parents were dead. He grew up alone. It was complicated. He didn't have people the way other people had people.

You said little pieces of that aloud, as if it explained half of it away. Maybe to you, it did. Maybe that was a teeny part of the reason you kept choosing him. Dex had no one, and then he had you. But it was also tender, in its own damaged way. He stood across the room in his suit, eyes finding you every few seconds as if checking that you were still real, still walking toward him eventually. He looked alone until he looked at you.

The problem was not that Dex didn't love you. Anyone with eyes could see that he clearly did. That was half the horror, really. 

He loved you devoutly, too much for such a small courthouse. His attention followed you like a sniper scope. When someone hugged you, his eyes moved there. When Jonathan made you laugh, his face soured. When you looked at him, though, everything in him relaxed so completely that even your worried friends had to see it.

The ceremony itself was almost absurdly short, just a few legal words. A few signatures. Then came the ring that he slid on to your finger with a reverence that made your throat ache. His thumb lingered over the band once it was in place, brushing the metal like proof, like possession he was trying very hard to make gentle.

Your family saw it. Your friends saw it. Ray probably saw it too. But no one said anything anymore. They had tried to warn you. They had tried to tell you it was fast, intense, worrying. They had tried to point out all the red flags. But standing there, with Dex looking at your ring like the world had finally given him permission to keep the one good thing he had found, you knew why none of their warnings had worked.

Because you knew they were not entirely wrong. You just loved him anyway.

When Dex kissed you, it was gentle enough to make your mother cry. His hand came to your cheek, and his mouth touched yours like he was afraid of doing it wrong in front of everyone. But you felt the restraint beneath it, the hunger and devotion. The way he kissed you softly because that was what you deserved, even when every dark part of him wanted to hold on harder and bruise and mark his territory.

—

Two years later, Dex was in prison.

Jonathan tried not to say I told you so. To his credit, he really did try. He stood in your apartment after everything went public, arms folded too tightly, mouth pressed into a line while the news tore the FBI corruption apart in digestible pieces. Even family and friends looked at you like this was the ending they had feared from the start.

But you knew better.

Not because Dex was innocent. He wasn’t. You loved him too much to lie about that. He had done terrible things. There were parts of him that had always been hungry for direction, always been too easy for the wrong man to use.

And Fisk had used him perfectly.He had found every fracture in Dex and pressed his thumb into it. The instability, the need to be useful. The desperate, obsessive love Dex had for you. 

Fisk kept you in a basement beneath one of his shell properties and let the world mourn you.

That was the cruelty of it: Fisk did not need you dead. Dead was final. Dead meant there was nothing left to use. But alive, hidden in a cold and windowless place? That made you useful. That made you leverage. Fisk could keep your body locked away while giving Dex a grief designed to break him.

So Fisk staged your death. He built the lie piece by piece. He staged an accident, a fire. The reports say that the body burned beyond recognition was yours, and even had an urn with someone else’s ashes in it with your paperwork attached just in case people started asking questions.

Dex believed it, because why wouldn’t he? Fisk made sure every piece fit. Even Matt believed it for a while. Everyone did.

So when Dex found it, he carried the urn like it was alive. He thought he figured out that Fisk was manipulating him, which was correct. He thought that Fisk had killed you, which was false.

He put the ashes in the passenger seat. He drove to the hotel with one hand on the wheel and the other reaching over sometimes, hovering near the metal like it might feel lonely. He talked to it in that broken voice of his, the one he would have been humiliated for anyone living to hear. He told the urn things. He apologised. He told you he loved you.

Then Dex’s spine broke.

And you were found by the cops shortly after, alive. Bruised, starved, shaking under a blanket in the basement Fisk had buried you in, still asking for Dex before your voice had fully come back.

So when they told you he went into surgery under guard, he had fought your way into that hospital room on the only ground no one could deny: you were his wife, his next of kin, his legal family. You should be allowed in, and you eventually got what you wanted. 

During recovery, he looked wrong under hospital lights. The tubes and monitors and bandages made him look less like the terrifying thing the news kept replaying. Guards stood by the door. His wrists were shackled to the bed rails, his ankles too. You scoffed at that but couldn’t do anything about it, really. 

When his eyes opened, he came back fighting. His hands jerked against the restraints, chains snapping taut with a hard metal sound that made one of the guards shift forward.

“Don’t,” you said quickly. “Dex, don’t.”

His head turned and saw you. Suddenly, thoughts halted to a stop.

You had seen Dex angry. Jealous. Focused. You had seen him desperate in your bed and gentle in your kitchen. You had seen him worshipful, frightening, almost boyish with love.

You had never seen him look like that. Like he was staring at a ghost and trying to decide whether believing in it would kill him.

His mouth parted, but sound came out.

You stepped closer, hands trembling. “Hi, baby.”

Dex’s breath broke. “You’re alive.”

Your chest caved in. “yeah.”

“No.” His voice cracked in disbelief. “No, I saw— Fisk said—”

“I know.”

“You’re alive,” he said again, louder now, almost frantic. “You’re alive. You’re alive.”

“I’m here.”

The chains snapped tight again when he tried to reach for you. Pain tore across his nerves, but he barely seemed to feel it. His eyes stayed locked on yours,wild and terrified, like if he looked away, you would vanish and the whole nightmare would become true again.

“I thought you were dead,” he whispered.

“I know, baby.”

You moved to him before anyone could stop you. Your fingers found his hand where the shackle allowed, careful around the bruised skin. His grip closed around yours instantly, weak but desperate, like even broken he could not help trying to hold on.

Your wedding ring caught the light. It was a reminder that he was still yours, you were still his, and whatever was left of him seemed to collapse under the proof.

“You’re alive.”

—

Dex was incarcerated after he healed enough to be moved.

Not rehabilitated. Not treated. Incarcerated.

They put him in solitary confinement like that could contain him. Like isolation would ever make him better. Like locking him away from voices and faces and human contact would somehow fix a man whose worst injuries had always come from being left alone too long with his own head.

You hated it. So for three years, you fought to get your husband moved somewhere that might actually help him.

Three years of forms, lawyers, psychiatric evaluations, and rejected petitions. Three years of people looking at Benjamin Poindexter and seeing only what he had done, three years of people looking at you, Mrs. Poindexter, as if you were insane because you still loved him. Three years of explaining, again and again, that solitary confinement was not treatment. And Dex had always been dangerous when he was quiet.

Your old school library job no longer paid enough to carry the life Fisk had torn apart, so you took a better job at a public library. It's a better salary, but longer hours. More responsibility. You now had to think about staff rotas, community programmes, council meetings, difficult patrons, funding cuts, late nights under fluorescent lights while you built displays and answered emails with your wedding ring flashing every time your hands crossed the keyboard.

Every other day, you went to the prison.

Sometimes straight from work, your blazer wrinkled, your tote bag full of library paperwork, your lipstick faded from too many cups of coffee. Sometimes on your days off, when you could pretend the visit was the centre of the day instead of an activity squeezed between legal calls and grocery shopping and a life you had never wanted to live without him in it.

Dex always noticed when you were tired before you said it. He noticed when your shoes were new. He noticed when you had cut your hair, even slightly. He noticed when you had skipped lunch and lied about it. Even in prison uniform, even under the dead light of the visiting room, Dex was still your husband in all the ways that made people uncomfortable and all the ways that kept you coming back.

You told him about your days. You told him about the elderly man who came into the library every Wednesday to read the newspaper and complain about the chairs. The little girl who asked for “a book with a dragon but not a mean dragon because mean dragons have bad vibes.” The teenager who pretended not to care about poetry and then checked out three collections when his friends were not looking. You told him about staff meetings, leaky ceilings, broken printers, new shelving systems.

There were visits where he barely spoke. But even then, his eyes stayed on you. Even then, his fingers moved toward yours. Even then, when you said, “Baby,” parts of him came back to the surface.

You kept fighting because he needed help.

Then one afternoon, after three years of pushing against walls that did not move, one finally gave. The blip, after all, freed some space up. Though you really shouldn't celebrate such a tragedy, it was hard to ignore the fact that this time, it worked in your favor. That day, you carried the news into the visiting room.

His eyes moved over your face, your hands, the folder tucked beneath your arm. “What’s that?” he asked.

You smiled, biting your lip, “I have good news.”

You reached across the table. This time, they let you hold his hand. It was a small mercy. His fingers closed around yours immediately, like he could feel the tremor in you and wanted to steady it without frightening it away.

“A facility we applied to reviewed your case,” you said. “It’s looking good. The transfer is pending final approval.”

Dex didn’t move. You kept going before fear could steal the words from you.

“It’s a secure psychiatric institution. It’s not freedom, I know that. But it’s not solitary. You’d have doctors, actual treatment, scheduled therapy, medication reviews. You wouldn’t be in shackles.”

His face remained controlled, but you knew him too well. You saw the tiny shift in his breathing. 

“It’s going to be better,” you whispered. “Okay? Not perfect. Not easy. But better. You won’t be alone in a box, and we get longer visitation hours, okay?”

Dex was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded once. “That’s good.”

Your laugh came out broken, because part of you still found that endearing. “That’s good? That’s all you have?”

His mouth almost softened, guilty at the thought of offending you. “It’s very good,” he amended.

You squeezed his hand, and for one rare second, the visiting room didn’t feel quite so much like a cage. It felt like a door opening somewhere far away.Then Dex looked up again. “But I hope my request gets approved before I get moved.”

“Request?” You blinked. “For what?”

He held your gaze with the seriousness of a man discussing nothing more important than bills. “A conjugal visit.”

For a moment, your mind simply stopped. “What?”

“A conjugal visit,” he repeated, as if you might not have heard him the first time.

You stared at him. Of course he had thought of that.

In three years of legal petitions, medical reviews, prison visits, and fighting to have him treated like a person instead of a weapon, you had somehow not allowed yourself to think about that part. About being his wife in that way still. About how long it had been since he had touched you without guards and tables and rules between you.Dex had, though.

“Dex,” you said softly, rubbing slow circles on his hand.

“What?”

“You are in solitary confinement.”

“I know.”

“You’re probably not getting approved for a conjugal visit.”

“Probably not.”

His expression didn't change, but he squeezed your hand and your stomach turned over despite yourself. You leaned forward as much as the table allowed. The guard near the door shifted, but you ignored him. You kissed the edge of Dex’s mouth, brief and soft, but still enough to make his breath catch.

“Let’s focus on this, yeah?” you whispered.

His eyes stayed on yours. For a second, the hunger in him quieted, almost obedient. He nodded once. “Okay.”

Your hand stayed in his until the guard told you time was up. Dex didn’t let go until he had to.

—

He got approved. Somehow, Benjamin Poindexter got approved for a conjugal visit.

You read the notice three times in your kitchen, work bag sliding off your shoulder, lanyard still around your neck, your shoes aching from a long day on your feet. The letter was painfully plain and administrative. But it was approved nonetheless.

You stared at it until the paper blurred. “What the fuck?” you whispered.

Because there was no way. There was no reasonable, lawful way that your husband, a convicted killer, a high-risk prisoner, had been granted that kind of access.

You knew then that Dex had done something. Nothing obvious enough to get the request pulled. He might have threatened a guard. Maybe Dex had mentioned a name, a detail, some small piece of information he shouldn’t have known and let them do the rest.

You should have been horrified. Mostly, though, you pressed the paper to your mouth and laughed once, breathless and disbelieving, because all you could think was: That’s how badly he wanted me. That’s how much he loves me.

—

When the day came, you waited in the room alone.

You had done the paperwork, gone through twenty locked doors to get here. You came knowing you had a couple of hours with your husband. And forthe first time in three years, there would be no table between you, no visitor chair bolted too far from his. No guards close enough to hear every word. No one telling you not to lean too far across the table when all you wanted was to touch his face.

A couple of hours was not enough. 

You smoothed your hands over your blouse, then over your skirt, then clasped them together in your lap to make yourself stop fidgeting. You had dressed too carefully without really thinking about it. You had a white blouse, a nice skirt, because Dex liked seeing you in skirts. You were wearing the cardigan you were wearing when you met him.

You stared at your wedding ring until Dex stepped inside. For a second, neither of you moved.

He looked different. That was your first thought, blunt and stupid and immediate. He looked different, because of course he did. Years had happened. Prison had happened. Surgery had happened. His hair was shorter. His jaw looked sharper. But he was also bigger.

You noticed from your previous visits, of course, but seeing him a bit closer now, it was evident. His shoulders filled out the plain prison shirt. His arms looked stronger than they had in the hospital, muscle sitting heavy under institutional fabric, like all the recovery and physical therapy and whatever routines they let him have had made him sturdier.

You blinked before you could stop yourself. What were they feeding him?

Dex’s eyes found your face first, gaze locked onto you. For one fragile second he did not look like a prisoner at all.

He looked like Dex. Your Dex. Your husband, seeing you after being forced to miss you for too long.

“Hi,” you whispered.

His mouth parted slightly. When the door closed behind him, the lock turned, and whatever restraint he had used to walk in there like a normal person vanished.

You barely got to stand before his hands were on your face and yours were on his chest, and the first kiss was so clumsy it almost made you laugh. Your noses bumped. His mouth missed yours by half an inch and caught the corner instead. You made a tiny sound, half sob and half laugh, and Dex froze like he had done something wrong.

“No,” you said quickly, already smiling through the sting in your eyes. “No, come here.”

You took his face in both hands and kissed him properly, softly at first. Then again. And again.

These were little, ridiculous kisses. The kind you had imagined giving him in every prison visit where a guard stood too close. You kissed his mouth, the corner of it, his cheek. You kissed the line beside his nose, the skin under his eye, the edge of his mouth again.

Dex stood there and let you love him, as if he couldn’t believe you still did at all.

His hands stayed at your waist, almost uncertain, like after all this time he still didn’t fully trust that he was allowed to hold you without someone telling him to stop. But the longer you kissed him, the more his fingers settled. The more his body leaned into yours. The more the tension in his shoulders slowly started to melt.

“I missed you,” you said between kisses.

Dex’s eyes closed. “I missed you, too.”

“I missed you so much.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” You kissed his cheek again, because apparently now that you had started you couldn't stop. “I missed you in the kitchen. I missed you in our bed. I missed you when I had to fix the shelf myself because you would have been so annoying about doing it better.”

His mouth twitched. “You fixed a shelf?” he asked.

“I tried to.”

His eyes opened with attentive focus you had missed so badly. “What happened?”

“It’s currently leaning.”

Dex stared at you, then he laughed. It wasn’t loudly, or freely. It was small, rough, and almost startled, like his body had forgotten how to make the sound and needed you to remind it. 

You broke a little. “Oh,” you whispered, smiling like an idiot. “There you are.”

His expression changed before he leaned in and kissed you again, not clumsy this time. A kiss that said yes, here, I’m here, I came back up when you called.

His arms moved around you properly then, and fuck, he was solid.

You had expected him to feel fragile, because part of you still remembered the hospital bed, the shackles, the bruised skin around his wrists after surgery. But this Dex was heavy and strong under your hands. When your palms slid over his shoulders, you felt muscle there making your stomach drop and go hot at the same time.

Still, he stayed sweet for a little while.

You had both expected the hunger. But before that, there was Dex touching your hair like he had thought about the texture of it more than once. There was you smoothing your thumb over his cheekbone, relearning him up close. There was him pressing his face into the side of your neck and breathing in once like he had been living on memory for years and memory had never been enough.

“I missed how you smell,” he said, voice muffled against your skin.

You laughed. “That’s creepy,” you said, but smiled into his hair anyway.

Your fingers drifted to the back of his neck, then lower, over the ridge of his shoulder. You felt him shiver when your touch found the edge of the scar beneath his shirt. You paused, but he shook his head against you. “It’s okay.”

So you kept touching him gently. Through the fabric first, then at the collar where your fingers could slip just beneath. The scar was there, and Dex’s breathing changed when you traced it. Not with pain, exactly. It felt more… intimate.

“My baby,” you whispered before you could stop yourself.

His hand flexed at your hip. This time, when his mouth opened under yours, the sweetness warmed.His body crowded yours a little more. His hands moved from your waist to your back, then down again.

“You got…” You swallowed, then laughed softly because there was no graceful way to say it. “You got big.”

Dex blinked. For half a second, he looked genuinely confused. Then his eyes dropped to where your hands were spread over his chest. “Big?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I had physical therapy.”

“That is a criminal understatement.”

His mouth twitched again as you dragged your palms over his shoulders, shameless now, because you had earned this. You had earned the right to be stupid about your husband’s arms after three years of prison visits and legal calls and sleeping alone.

“You’re very…” You squeezed his bicep lightly. “Recovered.”

Dex looked at you. “You’re flirting with me.”

You shrugged, but didn’t deny it.

The sound he made was almost an arrogant chuckle.

He kissed you again, and this time there was no mistaking the heat under it. Then, his hands settled on your blouse.

Not grabbing yet, but touching the fabric at your waist, thumbs moving slowly over the buttons as if he had only just realised there was something between his hands and your skin.

You were still smiling when his eyes dropped.

Suddenly, his eyes were fixed on the small gap where one button had loosened, where the fabric had shifted just enough to reveal a flash of black lace underneath.

Dex recognised it at the same time you remembered. “Is that…”

Your face burned hot as you nodded.

It was the black teddy he had bought you for your first wedding anniversary.It was sheer lace at the cups, delicate straps, a low satin-trimmed neckline. Dex remembered the first time you tried it on. You stood at the foot of your bed, pretending not to be shy, while he sat there ruined, looking at you like his brain had briefly stopped receiving oxygen. And now, you had worn it here.

Dex’s thumb brushed the edge of your blouse, right where black lace disappeared beneath it. His eyes darkened. “You wore my anniversary gift under your blouse,” he said.

Your stomach flipped. “When you say it like that—”

“How should I say it?” He demanded, and it was a little mean. But that always did turn you on.

“I don’t know,” you whispered. “Less like you’re about to lose your mind.”

Dex looked back up at you, too focused, too hungry. “I am.”

Oh.

Your hands tightened in his shirt.

The room felt smaller after that, less like a prison facility and more like the bedroom he remembered, the one with your knees pressed into the mattress and his hands shaking at your waist because he hadn’t known a piece of lace could make wanting feel that violent.

His grip settled firmer on your hips. “You have no idea,” he murmured, mouth brushing your ear. “What you do to me.”

Your eyes fluttered shut. There he was. Your husband, touch-starved, breathing against your neck like he had waited years to find out if he could still make you tremble.

You smiled, kind and doomed all the same. “Show me.”

Oh, he had a list.

Dex was undressed before you could blink, all broad shoulders and blown pupils, moving with a focused urgency that made the sterile little room feel suddenly too small to hold him. The white walls, the bolted table, the narrow bed, the chemical-clean smell of the sheets, and none of it stood a chance against the way he looked at you.

He had been counting down to this for years. Every prison visit, every supervised touch, every night alone in a cell had led into this exact moment.

His hands were already on your blouse, quick but not careless, tearing through buttons, ripping them off with a precision that would have been funny if his breathing had not been so rough. The black teddy appeared inch by inch beneath the fabric, lace and satin and memory, and Dex looked ruined. 

First on the list: his mouth between your legs.

You understood that the second he dropped to his knees. Dex had barely gotten the teddy off before his hands were already under your skirt, gripping your thighs.

Then his mouth was on you, and every thought in your head broke apart.

“Oh,” you gasped, one hand flying to his hair, the other twisting in the clean white sheet beneath you.

Dex made a sound against you that was almost a groan, almost a laugh. His hands tightened on your thighs, holding you open for him, keeping you there like he was afraid you might disappear if he let go. He was not gentle, like he used to be. He was focused, hungry, and touch-starved enough that every reaction you gave him seemed to make him worse.

“Fuck,” he breathed against you, voice rough and ruined. “You taste so fucking sweet.”

Your whole body went hot. “Dex—”

He didn’t let you finish. His mouth returned to you, and the room became nothing but the wet heat of him, the harsh sound of his breathing, the narrow bed creaking under the way your hips moved despite yourself. The sterile little room had no right to hold something this filthy. 

He was still so good, it was unfair.

Dex had always been terrifying when he focused. When he learned something, he learned it completely. And you realised, breathless and shaking, that he remembered everything. Every place that made you gasp. Every rhythm that made your hand tighten in his hair. Every tiny, helpless sound you tried to swallow and failed.

You tried to move back once, overwhelmed, but his hands slid under you and dragged you closer with a low, possessive sound that made your stomach twist.

“No,” he murmured. “Stay.”

So you stayed while he buried himself there like he could spend hours between your thighs if time were not an issue. You stayed while his fingers dug into your skin, while his mouth made you forget the guards outside, the transfer, the years, the ugly world that had kept him from you. You stayed while he took you apart with the kind of devotion that felt less like softness and more like obsession given a mouth.

At some point, you said his name too loudly, and Dex groaned like that was the point.

Of course he wanted them to hear. Of course he wanted the men outside that locked door to know that whatever they thought they had taken from him was still his. You were still his. 

When you finally broke, Dex did not stop right away.

He held you through it palms spread over your thighs, breathing you in like the end of the world had tasted sweet and he couldn’t make himself pull away.

Only when you tugged weakly at his hair did he lift his head.

Dex looked up at you like he had just crossed the first thing off a list and still had every intention of finishing the rest.

Number two on the list should have been obvious when he suddenly looked shy. 

“Can I ask you something?” he murmured.

Your breath was still uneven. “Dex.”

His mouth pressed briefly to the inside of your knee, like he needed one more second to gather himself. “I want your mouth.”

Oh.

Your stomach flipped so hard you almost laughed. Who were you to deny this man anything? 

You slid off the bed and onto your knees in front of him, and Dex went very still.

His hand came to your cheek, careful at first, thumb brushing your skin like he needed to touch you gently before letting himself want. His breathing changed when you looked up at him. His pupils were blown wide enough to make him look almost feverish.

“Baby,” he said, voice rough.

You smiled before giving him what he asked for.

Dex’s hand stayed in your hair, not forcing, not taking. His head tipped back. His throat worked. His eyes squeezed shut and opened again because he seemed to hate missing even one second of you.

He was big in every way you remembered and worse because you had missed him.

Too much, almost. Overwhelming enough to make your eyes water, enough to make your hands press at his thighs when you needed a second, and Dex stopped immediately each time.

His hand softened in your hair. “Too much?” he rasped.

You shook your head, breathless, stubborn, and a little ruined yourself.

Dex looked like that might kill him. Then you kept going, and he fell apart beautifully.

He moaned your name like a warning, like a plea. His hand stayed on your cheek against your cheek, his thumb brushing away the wetness at the corner of your eye with such tenderness that the gesture felt obscene in context.

“You’re perfect,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Fuck, you’re perfect.”

You felt him getting close, and you wanted nothing more than feeling him down your throat, but he pulled back, stopping himself so abruptly you almost protested.

Dex stared down at you, chest heaving, eyes wild, mouth parted like he had just survived something.

You blinked up at him.

He gave a rough little laugh, almost pained. “No,” he said, voice hoarse. “Not yet.”

You smiled slowly. “Not yet?”

His gaze darkened again. He reached down, thumb brushing your lower lip, still shaking from the effort of denying himself.

“I have two more things on the list,” he reminded you, making your thighs pressed together.

Dex helped you back onto your feet with hands that weren’t quite steady, then kissed you so deeply you tasted the restraint he had forced himself to keep.

“Bed,” he murmured against your mouth.

Number three on the list was taking you from behind, of course. 

He turned you toward the bed with hands that were still shaking his mouth at your shoulder, your neck, the back of your ear. 

He moved slowly at first, because even like this, rough and ruined and half-mad with missing you, Dex was still Dex. He still listened to every breath, every shift of your body, every little sound that told him whether you were overwhelmed or wanting more. The stretch of him made your hands fist in the sheet, your body tensing around the sheer shock of having him again after so long without. His mouth pressed to your shoulder. “Breathe,” he rasped. “I’ve got you.”

He took his time even though you could feel restraint burning through him. The way he cursed softly against your skin when you finally relaxed into him, when your body remembered him properly and pulled him closer.

“Fuck,” he breathed, voice breaking. “You’re so—”

He cut himself off with his mouth against your shoulder, like the words were too much, like saying them would make him less controlled than he already was.

Then he started moving. God, he hadn’t forgotten you, so of course you were loud almost immediately.

The first sound broke out of you before you could stop it, your whole face burning. Dex’s hand tightened at your hip, and the next lewd mewl came worse. He made a low sound behind you, smug and satisfied in a way that made heat crawl up your spine.

You bit down on your own wrist, trying to muffle yourself.

His hand slid up your body and gently pulled your arm away. “No,” he said, voice rough. “I waited three years to hear you.”

Your whole body went hot. “Dex—”

“Let me hear you.”

And then he made sure you did.

He got rougher, hungrier. His body covered yours, his mouth dragging over your neck while his hands held you exactly where he wanted you. The bed creaked under you. The sheet twisted beneath your fists. Your voice filled the room because he kept pulling it out of you, again and again.

At some point, there was a knock on the dorm but unfortunately Dex did not have enough self control to stop.

You looked over your shoulder, cheek pressed flush into the sheets.

The little window opened and a guard looked in. They were worried, you realised. You had been so fucking loud.

The humiliation should have swallowed you whole. Instead, your stomach flipped.

“You okay?” the guard called. 

You could barely speak. “Hmmph, Y-yes!” you managed.

Dex’s hand slid over your stomach, keeping you pressed back against him.

The guard moved away when he realised what he was seeing, face red.

The second the shadow disappeared, Dex’s mouth was at your ear. “You liked that.”

You shivered.

“You liked him checking,” he murmured, darker now. “Liked him hearing what I do to you.”

You should have denied it, but you could not bring yourself to lie, Dex made a rough, broken sound against your neck and moved again, deeper into the heat, rougher now because he was jealous, because some stranger had seen even a glimpse of your face like that and Dex couldn’t stand it. He kissed your shoulder hard and held you like he could erase the guard’s eyes from the room by making you forget anything existed except him.

“Mine,” he breathed. 

You answered with his name, exactly how he wanted it.

Number four on the list started with him denying you an orgasm.

That was how you knew prison had changed him.The old Dex, the one who melted when you praised him, the one who went doe-eyed and obedient under your hands, had been buried under three of whatever this was.

Dex flipped you over before you could come undone.

Your gasp broke against his mouth as your back hit the narrow mattress, the white sheet twisted beneath you, your body sore in the best, most aching way. You were already too close and he knew it. Of course he knew it. He knew your body like he had studied it for a test he refused to fail.

“Not yet,” he murmured.

You made a helpless little sound, half protest, half plea. Dex’s hand slid up your waist, and he was inside you again in no time. 

Oh. you realised, he wanted to look at you when you came. That was all. So sweet. So cute. 

But then you felt him twitch, and you realised that he was close before he did. Or maybe he knew, and he was just too far gone to care about anything else.

“Dex—” Your voice caught. “Dex, I’m not— fuck, I’m not on birth control.”

He didn’t stop completely. His whole body stuttered above yours, rhythm faltering, breath punching out of him like you had hit him in the chest.

“Hmph—fuck.” His forehead dropped against yours. “I know.”

Your eyes snapped open. “You know?”

His hand slid over your stomach, possessive, and the sound that left him was almost pained.

“I know,” he said again, rougher. “I know, baby.”

The words should have sobered you, but you loved him, and you loved that he was still above you, still shaking, still so close you could feel every tremor of restraint tearing through him.

“Dex,” you gasped.

“I thought about it,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “Every night.”

Your body went hot. His hand pressed a little firmer over your stomach, not forcing, just holding there like the thought had been living in him for years.

“You in our apartment,” he murmured, words breaking between breathless little sounds. “My wife, wearing my old shirts. Sleeping alone. Fighting for me. Sitting across from lawyers and doctors while I sit in a– hmmphh— a fuckin’ box.”

“Baby—”

“And all I could think was… fuck—all I could think was I should have left you something.”

Your breath caught so hard it almost hurt.

A baby, he meant.

A living tether. Something that would tie you to him in a way no prison door, no court order, no transfer file could undo. And sure, if you were going to leave him, you would have done it already. No court in the world would blame you for divorcing a killer. No friend, no family member, no sane person would call you cruel for walking away.

But you stayed. And fuck, somehow, staying was still not enough for Dex. He needed proof that some part of him could still belong to you permanently. 

In his mind, twisted and tender as it was, this was not a trap. It was a gift.

His eyes locked on yours, blown dark and terrifyingly attentive even through the haze.

His mouth was against yours, then your jaw, then your throat, never settling anywhere long enough to be gentle. He kept touching you like he could not decide what he needed more: your face, your waist, your hips, the heat of your body. 

“You feel that?” he rasped, voice wrecked as you squeezed him a little. “How bad you want it?”

You did want it, but you could barely answer. Every breath came out wrong, caught somewhere between a moan and his name. Your thoughts had gone useless, scattered apart by the obscene tenderness of his palm resting low and possessive like he was already imagining the seed taking root there.

“Dex—” you sighed, trying to bury your face in his ned

“No, baby.” His mouth brushed your ear, rough and hot, as he pulled your hair back gently to look into your eyes. “Don’t get… shit— shy now. Not after that. N-not after the sounds you’ve been making ‘f me.”

Your face burned, but your hands only tightened on him.

His voice dropped lower, filthier, the words breaking between harsh breaths. “My pretty girl wants something from me, huh?”

Your whole body went hot.

Dex’s palm pressed a little firmer over your stomach. “S-she wants me to leave her with something.” His breath hitched, and for a second his voice almost failed him. “Wants to walk out of here carrying more than m-my… hmm— fingerprints.”

You made a helpless sound.

“There it is,” he murmured. “You like that, fuck! You like thinking about it.”

“Dex-please—”

“Yeah?” His mouth found yours, messy and desperate, before he pulled back just enough to look at you. His pupils were blown wide, his face flushed, his control hanging by a thread he was clearly ready to let snap. “My pretty girl wants my baby, huh?”

Your breath caught so hard it hurt.

Dex saw it the way your body answered before your mouth could.

His face changed, hunger folding into something sickly sweet, almost tender in the worst possible way. “Fuck,” he whispered. “You do.”

Your eyes stung.

You hated and loved how well he knew you all the same.

“Wants something of mine when they t-take me back,” he breathed, mouth dragging along your cheek. “Something they c-can’t put in a cell. Something that— hnghhh — still has me in it.”

You were shaking now, overwhelmed and aching and so far gone that language felt like a thing happening on another planet. Dex was talking to you like he knew exactly where every dark little want lived under your skin, like he had spent three years locked away with nothing but the memory of you and all the ways he wanted to make himself permanent.

“Say it,” he murmured.

You couldn’t, not properly. Dex’s eyes darkened further.

“C-can’t even talk,” he whispered. “That’s okay. I know you.” His thumb moved slowly over your skin. “I know what my wife wants.”

Your breath broke.

His forehead pressed to yours, and for one second, under all that hunger, he was shaking with the effort to hold himself back.

“But you gotta tell me,” he said, voice raw. “Tell me no and I’ll stop.”

The restraint from him was phenomenal. Your hands slid up to his face, holding him there, forcing him to look at you while you gave him the answer.

“D-don’t you fucking dare stop,” you whispered.

“Yeah?” he asked, like he needed it again, like one yes was not enough to survive on.

“Yes–Fuck! Yes, baby.”

His mouth crashed back to yours, swallowing the rest of your answer, and the room disappeared into heat and the terrible intimacy of choosing this with him. His hand stayed over your stomach the whole time, almost reverent, like the fantasy had become real the second you let him have it.

He kept talking against your mouth, the words coming apart as badly as he was.

How good you were. How much he had missed you. How he had thought about you every night. How he wanted to leave something behind. How you would be going home with him in a way no guard could take from you.

You clung to him through it, nails catching on his shoulders, then his back, then the scar along his spine. Dex shuddered when you touched it, a broken sound leaving him before he buried his face against your neck and held you closer, closer, closer, like he could press three lost years into the space between your bodies and make them disappear.

When he finally came with you, he did it with your name on his mouth and his eyes fixed on yours, like he needed you to see every second of what he was giving you.

His forehead dropped to yours afterward, both of you breathing too hard.

For a while, neither of you spoke. The guards outside were silent. The room was wrecked in small damning ways: twisted sheets, scattered clothes, your blouse half on the floor, the black lace halfway off the bed.  

Dex kissed your cheek. Then your jaw. Then the corner of your mouth.“I missed you,” he whispered, and this time it sounded almost broken.

You closed your eyes and held him there. “I missed you, too.”

—

The knock came fifteen minutes later, and you hated it. “Poindexter,” a guard called, “Time.”

Dex was still against you, face buried in your neck, one arm locked around your waist like pretending not to hear it might make the door stay shut. For a second, neither of you moved. His breathing was still uneven against your skin, and your fingers were still in his hair, and the narrow bed beneath you looked absolutely ruined.

Another knock. You touched the back of his neck. “Baby.”

“I know.”

He didn’t sound like he knew. He sounded like leaving you there might kill him.

You both moved in a rush after that, half-dressed and breathless, trying to put yourselves back together before the guards came in. The sheet was twisted. Your skirt was crooked. Your blouse was missing buttons because Dex had been too impatient, so you had to clutch the fabric closed with both hands while smiling like an idiot anyway.

Then the guards stepped in. One of them looked at the bed, then at you, then at Dex. His face went carefully blank.

“Hands,” he said.

You stepped forward before Dex could turn around.

The guard sighed. “Ma’am—”

“One second,” you said.

Dex bent instantly, like he had been waiting for permission. You kissed him once. Then again. Then to his nose, because one kiss was not enough and never would be.

“I love you,” you whispered.

He looked like he might cry. “I love you, too”

Then they cuffed him.

You hated the sound of metal around his wrists. It meant the world taking him back. At the door, Dex looked over his shoulder, and you stood there still holding your blouse together, still smiling, still ruined.

The guard muttered, “Filthy animals,” as they disappeared into the hall.

Then you heard Dex chuckle, low and rough and proud. Like being filthy with you was the best thing anyone had ever called him.

You stood there for a second, and then you laughed under your breath, too.

Because you loved it. You loved being disgusting with him. Loved that the room looked wrecked. Loved that the guards knew. Loved that Dex would carry that insult back to his cell like a compliment, and that you would go home with the same stupid, shameless pride in your chest.

Filthy animals.

Yeah. You smiled to yourself, still holding your blouse together. Maybe you were.

—

You were pregnant.

You found out before the transfer, while Dex was still in prison, still waiting to be moved to the secure psychiatric facility you had spent three years fighting for. For three days, you carried the secret around yourself like a forcefield. You went to work, answered emails, helped patrons at the public library. You smiled politely at everyone while your whole body felt like it had become a locked room with a miracle inside.

When you told Dex, he knew something was different before you even sat down. His eyes went to your face, then your hands, then the way you kept pressing your palm nervously against your stomach. “What happened?”

You laughed once, shaky and soft. “Nothing bad.”

Dex didn’t relax, so you reached across the table and took his hand as much as the cuffs allowed. His fingers closed around yours immediately. “I’m pregnant.” For a second, it was like the whole visiting room lost sound. Then his eyes dropped to your stomach. “What?”

You smiled through the tears already coming. “I’m pregnant, baby.”

The chair scraped back before the guard could stop him.

Dex moved toward you on instinct, cuffed hands reaching for your face, not violent, not thinking, just desperate to touch. The chain between his wrists caught on the edge of the table, but he barely seemed to feel it. His palms found your cheeks, and then he was kissing you across the table like the whole room had disappeared.

“Poindexter,” the guard snapped.

Dex didn't hear him. Or he did, and for one dangerous second, he didn’t care.

You kissed him back, crying into his mouth, fingers gripping the front of his prison shirt because this was your husband, your baby’s father, and he was making this broken sound against your lips.

Another guard came over. “Back. Now.”

They had to pull you apart. Actually pull you apart.

They had one hand on Dex’s shoulder, another on his arm, dragging him back while his cuffed hands strained toward you and yours reached for him across the table. His eyes stayed locked on your face the whole time amazed and almost frightened by the size of what he felt.

The transfer happened not long after.

The institution was better than solitary. You reminded yourself of that every day. He had doctors now. Treatments, structure. He was not locked alone in a box anymore.

But he still was not free. He wasn’t there when your stomach first started to show, but the institution had better visitation rules than the prison, and the first time you came in visibly pregnant, Dex was allowed to touch you. His hand settled over the curve of your stomach so carefully it made your throat ache, like he was afraid the smallest wrong movement might cost him the privilege.

He wasn’t there when the baby kicked for the first time either, but later, during one of those visits, the baby kicked beneath Dex’s palm. Dex went completely still, eyes dropping to your stomach.

Still, he wasn’t there for the smaller, lonelier things. He wasn’t beside you in the maternity shop when you cried because nothing fit right and you wanted him there so badly it hurt. He should have been there making some too-serious comment about proper shoes, back support, and whether the changing room bench was structurally safe enough for you to sit on.

But even then, you told him everything. Every appointment. Every craving. Every scan. Every tiny development you could turn into words and carry to him.

Then Leonard was born. Leo, for short, named for his father.

Dex wasn’t allowed to be there.

That hurt him in a way he didn’t know how to hide. You didn’t know this, but one of the nurses told you he had become erratic after the call came through that you were in labour. Not violent, but frantic, pacing, asking the same questions over and over, trying to negotiate with people who had no authority to give him what he wanted. By the end of it, they had to force a couple pills down his throat so he could just calm down.

So when you finally called, exhausted and crying, with your son against your chest, the silence on the other end felt too careful.

“He’s here,” you whispered. “He’s here, baby.”

Dex didn’t answer right away. For a moment, all you could hear was his breathing, thin and controlled, like he was holding himself together by force. Then, very carefully, he asked, "Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Is he okay?”

“Yes.”

You could almost picture him sitting there, hand curled too tightly around the phone, trying to make himself calm enough to deserve hearing this.

“Tell me,” he said.

You told him Leo had blonde hair. You looked down at the baby curled against you, tiny and furious, with pale hair against his head and features that already made your chest ache because there was no denying whose child he was.

“He looks like you,” you whispered.

Dex didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded stripped bare.

“He does?”

“Yeah, baby.” You smiled through tears, touching Leo’s tiny cheek. “He looks like his father.”

Still, after weeks, then months, then years of hearing about Leo through you, Dex began to know him in fragments.

Children were not allowed inside the institution, so Leo had never met his father. Dex knew him through the stories you told him in visitation rooms, through the photographs you were allowed to bring, through the change in your voice whenever you said his name. You gave him a picture of Leo asleep with one fist tucked under his cheek. Leo with blond hair and your eyes. Leo scowling at the camera in a way that looked so much like Dex it made him go silent the first time he saw it.

But he didn’t love Leo properly yet. How could he? He had never held him. Never felt the weight of him against his chest. Never smelled his skin, never rocked him through a cry, never watched him fall asleep in his arms. Leo was still partly an idea to him, a child made real through your love before Dex could reach him with his own.

But he loved Leo, in a way, because you loved him.

That was easier. You loved that baby, so Leo mattered. Your face relaxed when you spoke about him, so Dex learned to relax around the sound of his name too. And somewhere in the darkest, neediest part of him, he thought he owed Leo his life because he made you stay.

Leo was Dex’s gift to you, because he didn’t want you to be alone. 

So Dex loved Leo in the only way he knew how at first: because Leo was yours, because Leo was his, because Leo looked like him, and because Leo kept a piece of him in your life while the rest of him was locked away. He loved him for your sake, before he knew how to love him for his own.

—

Leo was three years old when Vanessa Fisk made Dex kill Foggy Nelson.

He was three, serious-eyed, stubborn in the exact way that made your mother sigh and say, “That’s probably his father,” under her breath. Leo had Dex’s watchful stare, Dex’s unnerving ability to go quiet when he was thinking too hard. But he was still a toddler, so the quiet never lasted long. One minute he would be silently studying the wheels of a toy truck like he was investigating a crime scene, and the next he would be shrieking because his banana had “broken wrong.”

He loved dinosaurs, but only “scary ones.” He refused to wear socks that had seams in the wrong place. He called the moon “the night light” and cried once because you explained he couldn’t take it home. He had Dex’s face in miniature and your habit of talking to himself while concentrating, which meant you spent most mornings watching your tiny blond child line up toy animals on the floor and whisper, “No, no, you go there. No, you not listening.”

You were a good mother. You packed snacks. You remembered nursery forms. You cut grapes in half. You kept emergency wipes in every bag you owned. You sang the same bedtime song three times if Leo asked, even when your throat hurt and your body felt hollow from work and worry and loving a man the world had never stopped punishing.

Dex knew all of that through you. Leo liked peas this week. Leo hated peas this week. Leo asked why cats had no eyebrows. Leo threw a shoe at the wall because bedtime was, apparently, “a bad idea.” Leo had asked about Daddy again.

You and Leo had become the one fragile architecture that kept Dex going. Vanessa understood that because Vanessa Fisk understood devotion, even when it was ugly. 

So when she found out about you and Leo, it was over.

She came to Dex with ammo in her metaphorical gun.

This was no way to live, she told him, taking away the meds. Was this what he wanted? To hear about his son in secondhand stories? To let you raise a child alone while other men opened doors for you, helped carry groceries, taught Leo to kick a ball, to ride a bike, to be brave? Raising a child was hard, wasn’t it? You were young. Lonely. Exhausted. Beautiful. How long before someone else started looking less like help and more like a replacement?

Didn’t he want to be a husband? A father? Didn’t he want to come home?

Then, she gave him a photo of you at home, hair tied back, Leo on your hip. How… did she get this photo?

Then she gave him structure: Kill Foggy first. Then he could go to you and Leo.

That was the order of how it went. It was a task, a reward, a way back to the only life he still cared about. And Dex had always been most dangerous when someone took his pain and turned it into a sequence.

So he killed Foggy Nelson. And afterward, when they dragged him back into court, you wanted to see him.

Not because you excused murder. Not because Foggy didn’t matter. But because you were his wife, and you knew that Dex didn’t kill like that out of nowhere.

He wouldn’t simply go on a rampage. He didn’t wake up one day and decide he would burn every bridge that led to you. He loved you too much for that. So you came to the conclusion that someone must've reached into the most frightened part of him, and aimed him again.

You knew that, but the court didn’t care. This time, the court issued an order. It was for your son’s sake, they said. An injunction, no contact. You and Leo were not to be in the same room as Benjamin Poindexter. Not in court, not in visitation, not anywhere a judge could prevent it.

You stood very still when they told you this.

Leo was at home with your mother, probably refusing lunch because the sandwich had been cut into triangles instead of squares.

You didn’t cry. Not when the injunction was read. Not even when Dex was sentenced for the second time. You just listened. Then you got to work.

Because crying would come later, probably in the shower, probably with one hand over your mouth so Leo wouldn’t hear. But right then, there were lawyers to call, motions to file, and records to request. You knew your husband. You knew what manipulation looked like when he was the one pointed like a weapon.

And after court, you went back to Leo. He was sitting on the living room floor in dinosaur pyjamas even though it was the afternoon, blond hair sticking up at the back, one sock on and one sock missing for reasons nobody could explain. He looked up when you came in, toy stegosaurus clutched in one hand.

“Mama,” he said seriously, “Nana said no more crackers.”

You knelt in front of him, your knees cracking with the exhaustion of the day. “Your grandma is probably right.”

Leo frowned like you had betrayed him on a legal level. “I need snacks.”

“You had a snack.”

“I need more snacks.”

“You need dinner.”

He considered that, then lifted the stegosaurus. “Dino needs crackers.”

“Dino can have pretend crackers.”

Leo stared at you with Dex’s eyes. For one awful second, you almost laughed and almost cried at the same time. Instead, you reached out and smoothed his hair down. It sprang back up immediately.

“Daddy has that face too,” you whispered.

Leo blinked. “Daddy?”

You had never lied to him. You told him Daddy was away. Daddy loved him. Daddy couldn’t come home yet. All true, and yet, none of it was enough.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “Daddy.”

Leo looked down at his dinosaur, then back at you. “Daddy like dinos?”

You smiled even though your throat hurt. “I think Daddy would like whatever you like.”

Leo nodded, satisfied by that, and shoved the stegosaurus into your lap. “Then Daddy like this one. He bite.”

You held the toy carefully, like it was evidence. “Yeah,” you whispered. “He bite.”

Leo climbed into your lap after that, all knees and elbows, and you wrapped both arms around him. He smelled like shampoo and the strawberry yoghurt he had somehow gotten on his sleeve. He pressed his face into your shoulder for exactly four seconds before wriggling away again because three-year-olds loved affection on their own schedule.

You let him go. You watched him return to his line of dinosaurs, babbling to himself, head bent in concentration.

You opened your notes app and started another list: Lawyer. Injunction appeal. Facility records. Contact restrictions. Dex’s medication logs. Visitor records.

You could be heartbroken later. Right now, you were Leo’s mother. Dex’s wife. And someone had used your family to turn your husband into a weapon again.

And you were going to find out why.

—

A year later, you were watching the news while Leo played on the carpet.

Not watching, really. You were letting it sit on in the background while you moved through the living room with half your attention split into a dozen places at once. Leo’s sippy cup was on the coffee table. His toy dinosaurs were arranged in a careful little line near your foot. There was a basket of laundry on the chair you had been meaning to fold since yesterday, and your laptop sat open on the sofa beside you, full of documents, court filings, old visitor logs, psychiatric reports, and all the research you had been collecting like ammunition.

You had been working for weeks. You had names, dates, transfer notices, facility records, connections that were too neat to be coincidence. You had followed the clues until your stomach turned. Dex was going to be moved into general population, and it was not an administrative error. It was not random. It had the Fisks’ fingerprints all over it, even if she was careful enough never to leave them where a normal person could see.

After all, it hadn’t taken you long to find out about the Red Hook charter. That part had been almost laughably easy. Child’s play, really.

The public library had a stack of old municipal records tucked away in the back, half-forgotten beneath outdated notices and donation forms. Someone had slapped a label on the box years ago — NEEDS TO BE SHREDDED — and then, by some miracle of underfunded bureaucracy, no one ever had.

So you had done the one thing you could think of and sent Matt Murdock an anonymous tip. You didn't give a signature or explanation. It was just enough information to make him look where he needed to look. It was just enough to prove to him that Dex was not acting on his own.

Matt went to see him that morning. You knew because you still had someone inside the prison willing to tell you what the official channels never would. A friend, barely. A contact, more accurately. 

Then, that night, the news broke: Benjamin Poindexter had escaped from prison and attempted to assassinate the mayor.

Your husband’s name was on every channel again. Your husband’s face was dragged back into the world as a threat, a headline, a monster with a body count and no context anyone cared to say out loud.

You stood frozen in the middle of your living room, remote in hand, while the news anchor spoke over footage you could barely process. On the carpet, Leo lifted his plastic stegosaurus and made it bite the sofa cushion.

“Rawr,” he said seriously.

You looked down at him and how completely unaware he was that his father had just broken out of prison and tried to kill a man.

Leo was too busy frowning at the stegosaurus with Dex’s whole face in miniature, pale brows pulled together, mouth pressed into a stern little line. “No,” he told the dinosaur, pushing its plastic nose away from the triceratops. “No bully.”

The stegosaurus apparently disagreed, because Leo made it chomp again. Then he gasped, offended by his own storyline. “No. Bully bad.” He picked up the stegosaurus, turned it toward the triceratops, and shook it gently. “You say sorry.”

You stared at him.

Leo bumped the stegosaurus’s head carefully against the triceratops. “Sowwy,” he said in a deeper voice.

Then he made the triceratops pat the stegosaurus on the head. “Okay. Be kind now.”

Your chest tightened so hard you had to sit down.

Leo looked up. “Mama?”

“I’m okay,” you said too quickly.

He stared at you with your own eyes, unconvinced.

You turned the volume down, but not off. You couldn’t make yourself turn it off. You sat there with Leo at your feet and the whole city falling apart on-screen, trying to understand the sequence. Matt’s visit. The transfer. The Fisks. Dex escaping. The mayor. None of it random. None of it was out of nowhere, and you probably were the one to set this into motion the second you gave the anonymous tip.

“Mama,” Leo said again, holding up a toy. “Dino hungry.”

“Dino is always hungry,” you whispered.

“Need snack.”

“Okay,” you said, because your voice was already too close to breaking and arguing with a four-year-old about a plastic dinosaur felt like the one thing you could actually survive. “Let me check what we have.”

You stood and crossed into the kitchen, still listening to the news. The fridge light came on cold and white across your face. You stared into it without really seeing anything: half a punnet of strawberries, Leo’s yoghurt, and Leftover pasta. A little container of cut grapes.

The news anchor said Dex’s name again. Your hand tightened around the fridge door.

You reached for Leo’s yoghurt, then stopped because he had asked for a snack for the dinosaur, not himself, and for one absurd second that distinction mattered enough to make you laugh under your breath.

Then you realised that Leo was… silent. He wasn’t babbling. He wasn’t talking to his toys. Is he okay?

Worried, you looked back into the living room.

Leo was standing in the middle of the carpet, one dinosaur clutched in his hand, his small body frozen in a way that made the back of your neck prickle.

He was waving at the window.

No. Not the window. The fire escape.

Beyond the glass, half-hidden in the dark metal lines of the fire escape, was his father.

Oh.

Little did you know, Dex had already been there for fifteen minutes.

Fifteen whole minutes of being half-hidden in the dark, one hand braced against the cold metal railing while he looked into the life he had only known through your stories. At first, he watched you, moving through the living room with the television flickering against your face, beautiful and alive, one hand absently touching your wedding ring while you tried to hold the world together through the sheer refusal to give up on him.

But when his eyes found Leo, Dex forgot how to breathe.

He knew what his son looked like from photographs. He knew he had blond hair, serious eyes, and that little frown you always said was his. But seeing Leo in person was different. It was jarring, how much he actually looked like him. Leo was now a real person to Dex, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in dinosaur pyjamas, scolding a plastic stegosaurus for biting another toy.

Dex watched Leo make the dinosaur apologise. He watched Leo say that bullying was bad. He watched his son choose kindness with no one guiding him toward it.

Oh. Leo looked like him, but he was good in a way Dex had never been able to be without help. Dex had always needed a North Star, someone outside him to point toward right when his own internal compass spun uselessly in the dark. He would always need you that way, always look to you when the world blurred at the edges and everything started to feel lost.

But Leo did not need a North Star. Leo had one inside him. Leo had a functioning moral compass in a tiny body with Dex’s face and your kindness. Dex’s focus, but not his emptiness. Dex’s intensity, but not his fracture. Dex, if someone had loved him correctly from the start.

And that was when Dex understood that he loved him. And not in the distant, complicated love he had forced himself to. Not just because Leo was yours, or because Leo was his, or because Leo had kept you tethered to him while the rest of the world tried to take him away.

Now, he loved Leo because Leo was a good version of him. Because protecting Leo suddenly felt a lot like self-preservation. Like if Dex could keep this child safe, if he could make sure the world never reached into Leo and broke the compass before it had a chance to grow, then maybe some part of himself could be saved too.

Then Leo noticed him.

Dex saw the exact second it happened. Leo’s head turned, eyes lifting past the kitchen table, past the window, to the dark shape crouched on the fire escape.

For one breathless second, Dex couldn't move. He had been caught. Not by the police. Not by guards. Not by Daredevil. By a four-year-old boy. 

Leo didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. Of course not. He was your son, too. He was brave, like you. 

He only blinked, then lifted one small hand and waved.

Because Dex didn't want to scare him, because he did not know how fathers were supposed to wave at sons they had never held, Dex lifted his hand and waved back.

That was when you noticed.

And fuck, he couldn’t wait to be in your arms again.

The second you got the window open, Dex came through it, one hand catching the frame, the other already reaching for you. The sniper rifle was still strapped across his back, cold against the warmth of your apartment.

You barely had time to say his name before his hands were on you.

He pulled you into him so quickly your feet left the floor, spinning you half across the living room with a strength that startled a laugh out of you before it broke into a sob. His arms locked around your waist, your hands flew to his shoulders, and then his mouth was on yours. The kiss was clumsy in the way only grief and longing could be clumsy. He kissed you like every locked door, every court order, every year stolen from you both had narrowed into this one second.

He tasted like blood and rain.His lip was split. One of his teeth was missing. There were stitches along his forehead and dirt at the edge of his chin, but he was here. Your husband was in your living room with his body against yours and his hands on your back like he was trying to convince himself you were not another trick his mind played against him.

“I missed you,” you breathed against his mouth.

Dex made a broken sound and kissed you again. “I missed you.”

“No, baby,” you whispered, laughing and crying at the same time as you pressed kisses to his mouth, his cheek, the corner of his cheekbones, the scar you’ve yet to trace there. “I missed you. I missed you so much.”

His forehead dropped to yours. For a second, he just held you there, eyes closed, breathing you in like he had forgotten the world. His fingers moved at your waist, not quite gripping, not quite letting go, that old helpless need in him trying so hard to be gentle and failing only because there was too much feeling in one body.

Then a small voice behind you said, “Mama?”

It went through him all at once, the way a person remembered fire after touching a flame. His hands stayed on you, but his whole body locked up, breath caught, eyes opening with a kind of fear you had never seen in him. 

Because no, Benjamin Poindexter had no defence against a four-year-old boy in dinosaur pyjamas.

Slowly, you turned in his arms to see Leo stood in the middle of the carpet with one sock missing and his stegosaurus tucked under one arm. His round little face was serious, sleepy, and curious. He looked much like Dex, it made your chest hurt, but he was smaller, untouched by every cruel thing that had made his father into a weapon.

“Mama,” Leo asked, pointing the dinosaur toward Dex, “who’s this?”

Dex’s breath hitched, you felt it under your palm.

For a moment, you couldn’t answer. You had imagined this introduction a hundred different ways over the years. Maybe in a supervised visitation room. Or through a phone call. Maybe one day in some future where paperwork finally gave way and Leo was old enough to understand more than he should have to. You had not imagined Dex standing in your apartment with a rifle on his back, blood at his mouth, wanted by half the city, looking down at his son like the universe had placed his missing pieces in a boy that looked like a mirror.

You swallowed.“Leo,” you said softly, voice shaking. “This is Daddy.”

Dex inhaled like the word had gone straight through him.

Leo blinked up at him. “Hi daddy,” he repeated, testing the shape of it.

Dex was still trying to keep himself held together with force and habit and whatever discipline had survived. But a foreign emotion moved across him as you felt your own eyes fill again.

“Hi, Leo,” he whispered. His voice was wrecked.

Leo studied him with the grave suspicion of a child encountering an adult who looked both interesting and badly assembled. His eyes moved over Dex’s face. Then his little brows pulled together.

“Your teeth is missing,” Leo said.

You made a small sound, half laugh, half sob.

Dex blinked at him. “What?”

Leo took one step closer, stegosaurus still tucked under his arm like backup. “Your teeth is missing. Are you okay?”

And that was what broke him.

Not the years he had lost. Not even the word Daddy, though that had nearly taken his knees out. It was the concern in his son’s voice, the immediate, unprompted softness. The way Leo saw something wrong and, instead of flinching from him, asked if he was okay.

Dex lowered himself slowly to one knee, as if sudden movement might shatter the moment.

The rifle shifted against his back, so violently out of place beside your son’s little bare foot on the carpet. Dex seemed to realise it too. His hand moved as if to take it off, then stopped, uncertain, afraid to do anything too fast with Leo so close.

“I’m okay,” Dex said carefully.

Leo looked unconvinced. “Mama has plasters.”

Dex looked up at you.Your hand went to your mouth, and you cried properly then, because Leo had no idea what he was offering. No idea that his father had come through the window carrying a weapon and a history no child should have to understand. No idea that asking about a missing tooth and suggesting a plaster was the kindest thing anyone had said to Dex all year.

Dex looked back at him, and saw a person. A tiny person with Dex’s hair and Dex’s nose and Dex’s mouth, but he was human, in the way he never was. He was kind.

Leo was everything Dex had wanted to be and never knew how. Leo was a good version of him.

For the first time in Dex’s life, he looked at someone smaller than him and thought, with stunned humility, that he might have something to learn.

From his son, his better self.

Leo tilted his head. “You want Dino?”

Dex looked at the stegosaurus like it was sacred.

Then he held out both hands, slowly, carefully, letting Leo decide.

Leo stepped closer and placed the dinosaur into his palms.

Dex took it as if it weighed more than the rifle on his back. As if this battered little plastic toy had more power to undo him than any weapon ever made.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Leo nodded, satisfied by the manners, then moved closer. His small hand lifted and patted Dex’s cheek, not quite where the scar was, gentle in the imprecise way of toddlers trying their best.

Dex’s eyes snapped to yours. There was panic there. Wonder. A silent, helpless question: What do I do?

You sank down beside them, one hand on Leo’s back, the other reaching for Dex’s face.  “You’re doing okay,” you whispered.

Leo patted him again, then leaned forward and, with the sudden trust only children could offer, pressed himself into Dex’s chest.

Dex stopped breathing. Then, slowly, so slowly it made your heart ache, his arms came around your son.

Leo fit against him like he had always belonged there, his same-colored hair tucked beneath Dex’s chin. Dex held him as if the whole room might punish him for wanting it too much, as if any wrong movement would prove he didn;t deserve this.

You watched his hand spread carefully over Leo’s back. The same hand that had hurt people. The same hand that had held weapons. That same hand that now shook from the effort of touching his son gently enough.

Leo looked up from Dex’s chest. “Are you cold?”

Dex swallowed. “A little.”

Leo considered that, then turned to you. “Mama, Daddy need blanket.”

You laughed through tears. “Yeah,” you whispered. “Maybe he does.”

Dex closed his eyes.

His face bent toward Leo’s hair, and for a second he didn’t quite kiss him, He only breathed there, close enough to smell the child he had made and never held. Shampoo. Crackers. Life. His son smelled like life.

When Dex opened his eyes again, they were wet. He looked at you over Leo’s head, and the room seemed to fold around the three of you. 

“I missed everything,” he whispered.

You moved closer, pressing your forehead to his shoulder, one hand covering his where it rested on Leo’s back. “You’re here now.”

It was not enough, you both knew that. It was nowhere near enough.

But Leo wriggled in Dex’s arms and said, “Daddy, Dino hungry,” with the complete seriousness of a child who had accepted this new adult into his world and immediately assigned him responsibilities.

Dex looked down at him. Then at the dinosaur. Then back at you, for instruction. You tilted your chin like, go on.

“What does Dino eat?” he managed.

Leo gasped, scandalised that his own father didn’t know. “Crackers.”

Dex looked at you, and you nodded, so he also nodded, “Okay.”

Dex knew now that he was meant to love Leo because Leo was his second chance in miniature. 

And Leo had no idea his father would burn the world to keep him safe. Because in the end, that's what makes him a good man, right?

—end.

Extra note : I keep getting distracted from my Dex x reader / ex!Bucky fic, but I promise it’s on its way. In the meantime, my immediate thought after writing this is a sequel where Reader and Dex finds out Leo has powers (is a mutant) and that’s why Dex starts killing anti-vigilante task force. Because he wants to protect his son. (No promises, but let me know if anyone’s interested!)

 every time you went out in public with your husband, you earned a significant amount of stares. i mean, who wouldn't? a grouchy, silver fox with his stunning girl, who seemed a little young for him, but still clung onto him regardless.

you never asked for anything outrageously lavish. sure, there were small things like overpriced hair appointments, boutique dresses, and new makeup drops. but that’s just how it was in your relationship! and of course, dex never cared. he would spend endlessly on his girl without hesitation.

you paused in front of the new boutique that had just opened downtown. your soft fingers that laced through dex’s calloused ones slipped through for just a moment to move towards the glass display. a mannequin wearing a soft, pearl slip dress that would be perfect for a night on the bayou. the straps were thin, and no padding was in sight.

you could imagine dex’s hands masquerading all over your figure before he shed the winded silk. you peeked at the price tag and turned back to dex, lacing your hand back together with his. 

you kept walking, but dex did not. 

“go try it on,” he urged.

“it’s okay, dex, ‘s too much.”

“you ain’t the one buying it, doll,” he simply said before gently pulling you towards the entrance. 

you bit the flesh of your cheek to hold back your cheeky grin. 

the dress looked like it was sculpted around you, fabric spilling in all the right places. when you came out of the dressing room, dex was sitting on the chaise with arms crossed, legs spread wide, and curved lips. 

“spin for me, princess.”

you did a little twirl, looking behind you in the mirror. the posterior side of the dress was open-backed and quite low-cut. thank goodness you wore a thong.

“do you like it, dex?”

“looks beautiful on you, baby. c’mon.”

you silently squealed, rushing back inside the dressing room to change back.

once you came out, dex took the dress from you and pulled out his card. you held onto his bicep with a bright smile, pressing a quick kiss to it. dex handed the cashier his card without looking at the white plastic tag.

on the way home, your legs were propped up with a gift bag and the sparkliest tissue paper possible. you leaned across the center console to lay a kiss on dex’s cheek, leaving a little shine of pink lip gloss.

🗡*ೃ༄ 𖣠

sunday mornings may have been your favorite part of the week. everyone was gone for church in the neighborhood, so it was just you, dex, and the sunrise of the south. golden light came through the bay window where you sat, reading a new romance novel your friend had recommended to you. the record player was spinning Tanya Tucker at a low hum.

your hair was loose, not bothering to style it until later, when you went to the farmer’s market. around you, dex’s shirt draped over, as well as a pair of his old boxers. 

dex came into the kitchen and put down his cup of coffee before making his way to you. he sat at the edge of the window seat. he was still in his sweatpants and an old shirt from quantico that he wore last night. 

dex stared at you like you hung the moon, never getting tired of you. his beautiful north star.

you looked up and smiled, seeing dex stare shamelessly at you. “what?” a giggle escaped.

his cheeks warm, “nothing.”

dex now put his legs up, facing across from you.

you looked up from your novel, “whatcha thinking about?”

“just you.”

you put your thumb between the pages you were between and climbed into dex’s lap, resuming your slow sunday morning.

🗡*ೃ༄ 𖣠

you had a decent amount of followers on your instagram, mainly because of your old sorority sisters and your aesthetic. you never posted anything too dramatic, just lifestyle, some things you found cute, and your husband. last night, you posted a photo of you two at dinner. you were leaning into dex’s arm, with his other hand on the back of your chair. it was candlelit and golden, just like the natural glow of your town. 

dex had instagram, but it was the most plain and boring account you’ve seen since you stalked your professor from your freshman year. he had a profile picture that consisted of you and him, no posts, like a hundred followers at most, and a bio that consisted of your handle with a heart next to it.

you read him the comments on your post, lying your bare legs across his lap on the couch.

“this one says, ‘the age gap is a need’.”

a pause, “what does that mean?”

“it means she wants a relationship like ours!”

“here,” you said, showing him. “thus one says ‘he definitely carries all her shopping and grocery bags.’”

“i do carry all your bags.”

“that’s why i love you. anyways, this one says ‘my roman empire.’ aw, karen commented that!”

“why?”

“‘cause we’re cute and i guess matt isn't from her roman empire, i don’t know,” you laughed with no ill intent. 

he looked down at you with raised brow, but he wasn’t displeased by the comments on your posts. his old man self just didn’t understand the new slang. 

realizing you never showed dex the original post, you faced your phone towards him. he took the phone and squinted, yet looked at it from far away, something you noticed older people did a lot. 

“you look gorgeous, angel.”

“we both look good.”

“you do,” he doubled down, stroking your thigh.

🗡*ೃ༄ 𖣠