Just An Equation
Benjamin Poindexter x ex-FBI female!reader.
summary: She told herself she was over it — over him. Over the version of Benjamin Poindexter she’d invented in her head. Then he ends up cuffed to a bed in their hideout. She realizes he’s not the man she used to know.
tags/warnings: 3rd person pov. Minimal use of “Y/N”(2). Angst? Internal monologue heavy. Not canon-typical Fisk behavior. Strangulation/choking (non-sexual). Loss of a loved one. Emotional breakdown. Gun violence. Attempted murder. Complex dynamics. Past trauma/assault. Mild sexual tension.
a/n: This is my first ever fanfic. I’m in my bullseye phase and I’ve been scouring Tumbler for some good fics. Found many great ones, but then I saw this and I had to do it. I have no plans in the future to write anything else, but let me know if you guys like this one!
credits: ty @mcrdvcks for the gif <3
She hadn’t been there when it happened.
By the time Matt got Dex to the hideout she was already there, halfway through her workout. Matt had given her the short version —boxing event, Vanessa shot him, Fisk would have killed him, I got him out—
Vanessa’s bullet went through his torso. He’d lost blood getting here. Matt had done what he could on the way.
She doesn’t know why she volunteered. Matt hadn’t asked. She’d just crossed the room and grabbed the kit from her bag. Matt dropped him onto the old military field med bed, some kind of a makeshift bed with cushions that they had, and she crouched beside it without a word.
She cleaned the wound, stapled it, and dressed it, not letting herself think about whose skin she was touching or why her hands weren’t shaking.
She had put the gauze there. The same clean white gauze he’s wearing now, already gone pink at the center.
It’s been 12 hours since Matt dropped him off. The safehouse is quiet except for the sound of a train going by. It rattles the walls on its way past; a low, distant thunder that shakes the dust from the ceiling and disappears just as fast, leaving the silence feeling heavier than before.
She’s been in this chair for an hour.
She had gotten up five times since this morning. Told herself she had things to do, places to be, that sitting here was a waste of time she didn’t have. She even made it as far as the door twice.
She always ended up back in the chair.
She watches the video of him at the boxing ring over and over again. The shaky vertical footage was already circulating before the venue had even cleared out. She watches it four times before she puts the phone down. Then picks it up and watches it twice more.
It isn’t the violence that got her. She had seen violence, she had been in the field long enough.
It was how clean it was.
That was the thing about Dex that nobody who hadn’t worked with him would understand. He doesn’t fight the way other people fought. Dex didn’t have that half second. For Dex, there is no gap between seeing and doing. The target existed and then it was handled.
She watches him move through that crowd and felt something cold settle in her stomach.
Pausing the video on his throws, she zooms in on the grainy footage until the pixels blurred. He’d thrown into a crowd, bodies packed together, movement everywhere, angles shifting by the second, but every single throw landed exactly where he’d intended.
Not close. Not near. Exactly.
Right in the center of their foreheads, every time, clean and precise in a way that defied what a human body should be capable of under those conditions.
No hesitation. No error.
Because for Bullseye, there is no margin of error. There never had been. She’s known that about him ever since he told her stories about his time in the Army. And then she saw it for herself when he saved Fisk from the Albanian’s ambush. The way he dropped those bodies without even having to reload.
She used to find it impressive. Now, it’s just terrifying.
She puts the phone in her pocket and leans back on the chair. She isn’t sure what she’s waiting for exactly.
To see if he remembers her. To see if she feels anything.
He’s been out long enough that she’s memorized the room around him: the rust around the bed frame, the streak of sunlight beaming across the room kissing the ends of his hair, the way the cuffs have left faint marks on his wrists where he must have tested them in his sleep. She’s catalogued every detail because looking at details means she doesn’t have to look at his face.
Not yet.
But then he stirs.
She uncrosses her legs but decides to stay seated. Her foot kicks the frame, not hard but just enough.
“Get up.” Her tone blunt. Rude.
He comes back to consciousness slowly, the way Dex always does everything; measured, controlled, even now. The cuffs rattle as he shifts his weight. He tests the restraints without urgency. Just cataloguing. She watches his eyes travel from the ceiling to the room, and to her.
Something crosses his face.
“Hello, Y/N.”
It lands wrong. Too familiar. Too easy. Like no time has passed, like they’re back in a federal building hallway and he’s holding a door open and she’s pretending she doesn’t notice the way he looks at her sometimes.
“Hello, Benjamin” She says it on purpose. She knows he doesn’t like it.
He grunts, face contorting slightly as he forces himself to sit up on the bed.
She watches him take in the state of himself the same way she did. The staples dotting his torso in a line, the dried blood that’s gone dark and rust-colored across his skin, the gauze on his stomach that she put there.
“Your staples,” she says. “They hurt?”
The sarcasm comes out like muscle memory. Easy and sharp, the way it always was between them, years ago. Almost like she’s forgotten, for half a second, what she’s doing here. Almost like the last few years didn’t happen.
He chuckles softly. Low and coarse. His head lowers and his eyes drifts down to the pistol resting in her lap. He looks up at her, unfazed, and there’s a slight pull at his lips.
“Are you gonna shoot me?”
The silence stretches.
“Probably.” she replies
“Go ahead.” His voice is even. Stripped of everything. “I had to get my mind back.”
He pauses.
For a split second, he almost hesitates to continue “Your friend Foggy paid the price. Foggy for my freedom. Me for Foggy.”
The pause is deliberate.
Surgical.
“It’s just an equation.” He says.
And it slices right through her.
She stares at him.
She thinks about all the things she could say. All the things she’s rehearsed in the dark months since Foggy died, lying awake in rooms that felt too quiet, running through arguments with a man who wasn’t there. She had speeches. She had perfectly constructed sentences with weight and precision and everything she’d ever wanted to say to the man she once knew.
None of them come.
She stands, and instead of stepping back, she steps forward. She sits down on the edge of the makeshift bed, close enough that there’s nowhere else for him to look. The bed creaks and shifts under her weight. She can feel the warmth coming off him even from here.
“He sent someone for me first,” she says. “Before Julie. Did you know that?”
A pause.
His brows don’t furrow. His expression doesn’t collapse into guilt or surprise or any of the things she’d half-hoped for. But something recalibrates behind his eyes.
“I heard.”
Two words. Flat and honest, which is somehow worse than if he’d pretended not to know.
“He thought I was your North Star.” She lets the words sit between them. Watches them land.
She wasn’t his North Star. Dex knows that. Fisk had looked at the evidence and drawn the wrong conclusion, because the evidence had looked convincing from the outside. The closeness. The way Dex had gravitated toward her without entirely meaning to.
But it wasn’t what Fisk thought it was.
Julie had been something he wanted to become: a fixed point, a pattern to mirror, a life he could trace with his finger and follow step by step until it looked like his own. Normal. Good. He didn’t love Julie at all. He had loved the idea of becoming a version of Julie.
She was different. She was something he didn’t have a category for.
He hadn’t been trying to become her. He hadn’t been studying the architecture of her life so he could replicate it. It was simpler than that and more frightening than that.
She made him feel good.
She’d walk into the room and something in the atmosphere would shift and he would notice it before he noticed anything else. The same way he always noticed things other people didn’t, except it wasn’t threat assessment or pattern recognition. It was just her.
He remembers the heat that would crawl up the back of his neck when she complimented him. Something small and offhand that she probably forgot the moment it left her mouth.
Good job out there today.
Your hair looks nice.
She never knew how long he held onto those. He’d turn them over for days, quietly, the way you keep a stone in your pocket just to feel the weight of it.
He remembers the electric shock of her hand brushing his. Reaching past him for a file, or falling into step beside him in a hallway, or that one time when her fingers closed briefly around his forearm when she was laughing and needed something to hold onto. He had felt it in his chest for an hour afterward and hadn’t known what to call it.
He had talked about her in his therapy sessions. They worked together for two years before getting put on Fisk’s detail. And when Fisk wanted to twist Dex into working for him, he had thought she’d be the one to make him vulnerable.
“Sent a man to choke me out in my own apartment. Broke two ribs, punctured my lung, shot me, and left me for dead on my kitchen floor.” She tilts her head, just slightly, and tries to ignore the phantom pain she feels in her abdomen from where the bullet penetrated her.
“Fisk thought that would break you.”
The silence that follows is a particular kind of quiet.
“It didn’t,” Dex says, matter-of-factly.
A lie.
It might not have broken him but it affected him. She’s known Dex long enough to understand the specific stillness that settles over him when he’s performing composure rather than feeling it. She knows the difference. She used to think knowing the difference meant something.
“I know.” The fight goes out of her voice for just a moment. Just a breath. “I know it didn’t.”
Because you didn’t look for me
It was a miracle she survived. And she decided she wasn’t going to go back. They thought she was dead, so she went underground. Laid low in the way only someone with federal training knows how to, knowing exactly which threads not to pull, which corners not to turn, which names not to say out loud.
And then somehow, she had found her way to them. Or they’d found their way to her. Matthew Murdock and his people, the ones who’d been pulling at Fisk’s foundation from the outside for years. Franklin Nelson with his coffee and his unwavering belief that the law still meant something. Karen Page and her particular brand of righteous fury.
She’d slotted in like she’d always been there.
Like she’d been looking for exactly that, not just a mission, but a reason. People worth fighting beside. Something to pour the anger into that didn’t require her to become what she was fighting against.
“Show me,” he says.
She looks up.
His gaze is steady. Open in the particular way Dex gets when he’s not performing anything.
“Show me what he did to you.”
She searches his face. Tries to find the angle, the calculation, the thing he’s getting out of this.
She’s not sure he’s playing at anything. She’s not sure that makes it better.
She should say no. The word sits right there in her throat but she doesn’t say it.
She moves instead — slowly, deliberately, giving herself every chance to stop. One knee crosses over until she’s straddling his lap, careful to keep space between them. His cuffed hands are useless beside him.
Her hand rises toward his face. Her fingertips almost graze his cheek. She watches something in him shift, a microsecond of anticipation, the faintest lean toward her hand like a reflex he catches just before it completes itself.
She moves past it.
Her fingers find the hair at the back of his head and close into a fist. His head jerks back involuntary, the one uncontrolled thing he’s done since waking up, and suddenly he’s looking up at her, chin lifted, throat exposed. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, slow and deliberate, like he’s making sure she sees it. Like he’s offering it.
She searches his face, looking for something she still can’t name. A crack. A tell. Any sign that this costs him something. His eyes find hers from beneath and hold there, open and unreadable, that same stillness she’s never known what to do with.
She still doesn’t know.
Her grip on his hair loosens. His neck relaxes as she moves her hand forward, one palm and then the other hovering just above his throat. Close enough to feel the heat radiating off his skin. Close enough that her own hands are trembling slightly in the space between them. She waits for something in her to pull back.
Nothing pulls back.
She closes around his neck.
Dark. Her apartment was dark. She hadn’t turned the lights on when she got home, too tired to bother, just dropped her keys on the counter and turned toward the kitchen. She didn’t hear him. Then the fist was already in her hair, yanking her head back so hard her vision whited out before she even understood what was happening. The wall came up fast. Her face hit it and she tasted blood.
But she was already moving, already fighting. His arm came around her throat from behind. She had training. She knew the move. Her body just couldn’t execute it fast enough, and the air was already going thin. She kept going until she couldn’t. Until her legs stopped holding and the fight went out of her hands.
For a moment, she came back to consciousness on the floor, and Fisk's assassin kicked her down. She felt something crack. Her ribs screamed when she tried to breathe. She’d been on the floor, barely conscious, already neutralized, and he shot her anyway because that was the job. Because Fisk’s people didn’t leave things unfinished.
She felt the bullet before she heard it.
Then she didn’t feel anything at all.
Her grip tightens.
Dex’s jaw shifts. A slow exhale through his nose, deliberate, making room. His breathing changes. Slower, controlled, settling into a rhythm like he’s decided to hold still for her. The tendons in his neck are taut beneath her palms and she can feel his pulse, steady and strong.
He remembers the day she didn’t come in.
Travel duty, someone said. She took leave. He thought she would be back. In reality, they knew. His corrupted boss knew exactly what had happened to her.
Days passed. Weeks. She’d been replaced on the detail by some guy that Dex pushed around all day to go get him coffee.
There was something missing from the air, some frequency gone quiet that he hadn’t even known he was listening for until it wasn’t there anymore. Dex hadn’t asked because asking would have meant admitting the silence was bothering him and he wasn’t prepared to do that. He’d gone through the motions and done his job and told himself it didn’t mean anything.
He was good at telling himself things didn’t mean anything.
But still, she wasn’t his north star. A north star was something you navigated by. Something fixed and distant.
What she was....is....he still doesn’t have the word for it. Something warmer. Something closer. Something he hadn’t known he was capable of, and had never known to protect.
Her breath stutters as she exhales, lips shaking ever-so-slightly as she tries to hold composure. Tears track down her face involuntarily. She isn’t crying yet. She’s just breathing, hard and shallow and broken, like her body is remembering what it felt like to not be able to. Remembering how the air was getting thinner and thinner, the way her vision slowly went dark, and the way she felt helpless in that kitchen.
She looks at Dex.
He’s watching her. Not afraid. Not taunting. Not calculating. Just there, holding her gaze, letting her push against the limit of what he’ll absorb. Something in his face has gone very still, very quiet, in a way she doesn’t have a name for.
Foggy.
She doesn’t know why that came to her mind. She hadn’t been thinking about him, she’d been trying not to think about him for weeks, but suddenly it’s there, vivid and uninvited.
The back of her throat tightens in a way she pretends not to notice.
She’s close enough to feel every exhale he makes against her lips, and he can feel hers. Close enough that if either of them moved forward even slightly it would mean something neither of them could take back. His eyes are steady on hers, not challenging, not cold, just open in that unnerving way and she is suddenly aware of the position she’s in.
Her knees bracketing his hips. Her hands at his throat. Her face inches from his like something out of a fever dream version when she used to imagine what it would feel like to be this close to him years ago, and it was never supposed to look like this.
He doesn’t look away. The cuffs chains rattle. His hands come up almost instinctively, trying to grab her legs that are around him. Not to stop her, but to ground her, keep her there.
Foggy’s dead
Her chin wants to tremble, but she won't let it. She presses her lips together hard against it.
She doesn’t realize how hard she’s squeezing until she sees it; the slow flood of red crawling up from his throat to his jaw, his cheeks, the skin pulling tight across his face. A vein has risen at his temple, thick and visible, pulsing with every heartbeat she can feel thrumming against her palms. His lips have gone from pink to something darker.
And his eyes are completely, utterly steady.
That’s what undoes her. Not the color in his face, not the vein, not the way his body is clearly fighting what she’s doing to it on a purely physiological level, it’s that his gaze doesn’t waver. Doesn’t panic. Doesn’t harden into survival instinct or anger or any of the things a person’s eyes do when someone is taking the air from them.
He just looks at her. Through the redness and the pressure and whatever burn must be building in his lungs, he just looks at her like she’s the only thing in the room worth looking at.
He isn’t fighting it.
He could. She knows he could, cuffed or not, Dex has always found a way when he wanted to. This isn’t helplessness. This is a choice. He is choosing to sit here and take every ounce of it, absorbing her the way he always absorbed everything.
Then slowly, finally, she realizes what this actually is.
An apology.
He hadn’t come for her. When Fisk sent someone to her apartment, when she was left bleeding on her kitchen floor. Dex hadn’t come. Hadn’t known in time, or hadn’t been able to, or hadn’t been Dex yet in the way that would have made it possible.
But he’s here now. Throat exposed. Face red.
Taking it.
All of it.
Like it’s the only thing he has left to offer her that means anything.
Her vision blurs at the edges and she blinks hard, once, twice, and it doesn't help. Her thoughts are tripping over themselves. Flashbacks. Memories. The silence between them carries everything that was never said.
Dex with two coffees every morning. One for her.
A coffee on her desk on a Tuesday morning with a sticky note that said “You look terrible, drink this” and she’d smile at Foggy’s horrible handwriting.
Late nights on the Fisk detail when she’d catch him watching her from across the room and look away before she could think too hard about it. The way she used to invent reasons to be wherever he was. The version of Benjamin Poindexter she’d built in her head
Foggy’s laugh, so hard he couldn’t finish the sentence. Her, Matt, and Karen leaning against the bar table laughing with him, the night at Josie’s. She hadn’t known it would be the last time.
She hadn’t known that a few minutes after that he would be lying on the ground in front of Josie’s, bleeding out. That she’d be a crying mess, hands covered in blood, trying to stop his bleeding.
The thought breaks something loose in her chest. Her face starts to crumble and her hand shakes.
Then she lets go.
The sound that comes out of her isn’t graceful. It’s ugly and sudden and too loud in the quiet of the room, the kind of grief that doesn’t care what it looks like because it’s been held down too long and has forgotten how to come out gently.
Her shoulders cave. Her whole body folds. She drops her forehead against his bare shoulder and her hands find the curve where his neck meets shoulder and she just…stays there. Sobbing against him.
Dex catches his breath. He says nothing.
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t offer anything so fragile as comfort. He just breathes, slow and even, and lets her fall apart in his lap like it’s something he knows how to hold.
“Feel better?”
She doesn’t respond. His skin is warm beneath her forehead, his chest rising and falling steadily under her, and she is acutely aware of every point of contact between them like each one is a small, quiet betrayal.
His shoulder is solid. For one terrible moment she feels something close to safe, tucked against him like this.
She didn’t expect this to happen. A ghost of something she thought she’d buried surfacing through the grief. A ghost memory of him smiling like a normal person, like a man with a normal life who did normal things, and her thinking he’s lonely.
Me too, she’d thought.
Me too, like it was something they had in common. Like loneliness was enough to build something on.
She’d been so wrong about that. About what he was. Now the whole architecture of it collapsed and she understood, finally, what she’d actually been looking at.
At exactly this.
A killer. The man who killed Foggy.
She lifts her head.
“Foggy for my freedom. Me for Foggy. It’s just an equation.”
She looks at his face—the dried blood, the little dip in his chin, the old scar on his cheek, the eyes that are watching her with that pretend softness— and something in her goes quiet. Very certain.
She reaches for the gun and presses it to his forehead.
This is it. There’s no version of this where she walks back out that door and returns to her life, half-consumed, going through the motions of fighting Fisk while the grief eats her from the inside.
The man she thought she once loved
no
The man she once knew for two years of her life killed her best friend of seven years.
She’s done negotiating with herself. Done watching the people she loves become losses in someone else’s equation.
She doesn’t care about this man. She doesn’t know this man. She thought maybe, somewhere underneath the anger, she still had the warmth she’d once extended toward him. But looking at him now she finds nothing.
Something moves through Dex’s face.
Not fear.
It was never going to be fear, she’s always known that. Fear requires something to lose and she’s never been sure what Dex has ever truly counted as his to lose. It’s something else. Something almost like the easing of a long tension.
His eyes are steady on hers, and slowly, he leans forward into the barrel. Accepting it.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. His eyes going briefly, uncharacteristically soft, and then catching themselves. The corner of his mouth pulling in a way that isn’t quite a smile and isn’t quite grief.
Relief.
Her finger finds the trigger, shakily.
“Me for Foggy.”
She doesn’t look away.
“It’s just an equation.”
This is the equation. This is what the math gives you, at the end.
Everything narrows down to the inch of space between her finger and the trigger. The sound of his breathing. The pulse she can still feel in her palms from when her hands were around his throat. The way he’s looking at her like she’s doing him a kindness.
She thinks about Foggy.
She pulls the trigger.
A baton hits the gun like a thunderclap. The shot cracks into the concrete pillar beside the bed, debris exploding outward. She yelps and holds her shooting hand against her chest, the gun tumbles 10 feet from the bed.
She stands up in the wreckage of what she was about to do and the rage that fills her is immense and immediate and has nowhere to go except —
“I can’t let you do it, Y/N.” Matt announces. His chest rises up and down, as if he rushed to get here.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” She turns on him, closing the distance. “You keep choosing the wrong people. Fisk, him,” She points to Dex “—over the people who love you!”
From the bed, Dex watches. The shot had gone off inches from his head and his ears are still ringing with it, the world slightly tilted, sounds arriving a half second behind where they should. He blinks once, slow, recalibrating. His breathing is even. Still cuffed, still shirtless, still bleeding faintly through the gauze she put there. Everything returns to normal. Like the last ten minutes didn’t happen. Like she didn’t just have her hands around his throat, her face inches from his, and her grief all over him.
“What—” Matt starts.
“Oh my God.” She presses her palm to her face, turns away from him. The grief and fury are inseparable now, braided together so tightly she can’t tell where one ends. “Oh my God, Matt.”
Behind her, she’s aware of Dex watching the two of them.
“How can you say that?” Matt asks, offended.
“Because it’s true.” The crack in her voice is something she can’t control and stops trying to. “Because you let them live and people die.”
She hears the chains shift again.
Not an attempt to break free, just Dex adjusting, making himself comfortable for whatever comes next. The sound of it crawls under her skin. He’s watching her fall apart and she knows that, she knows exactly what he’s doing, and somehow that makes her angrier. She can’t tell anymore if the anger is at Matt or at Dex or at herself for the ten seconds she spent with her forehead against his shoulder feeling something she had no business feeling.
She steps forward. “Please. Please just let me do this. Let me carry this for you. That’s all. That’s all you have to do.”
Matt drops his head and his voice is low. Careful and quiet in the way it gets when he’s trying to reach her.
“What happened to you?”
She laughs. Short and hollow, the sound of it not quite hers.
From the bed, she can feel Dex’s eyes on the back of her neck. Still. Steady. Like he already knows the answer. Like he’s known it longer than she has.
“I grew up.”
The room goes quiet. And Dex says nothing, which is somehow the loudest thing in the room.
She stands there for a moment in the silence. The bullet hole in the pillar. The gun still on the floor ten feet away.
She looks at Matt.
He’s watching her the way he always does, even with the mask on, like he already knows what she’s going to do before she does it.
She grabs her jacket off the chair.
He doesn’t move to stop her. Maybe he knows better.
She doesn’t say goodbye.
She gets to the door and stops with her hand on the frame, not turning around. The air from the hallway is cool. She breathes it in slow.
Behind her, the chains shift again. Quiet and deliberate.
She doesn’t turn around.
She walks out.
