Whispers of a Loud Soul

even when I doubt you i’m no good without you, no - twenty one pilots. “Doubt” Blurryface, 2015

April 2, 2026

Guilty. 

Of course the verdict was guilty. A couple of the AVTF officers clapped – they hadn’t liked Foggy Nelson specifically, but they were relishing the prosecution of a masked vigilante particularly. The rest of the room simmered with chatter and satisfaction, Matt patting you on the shoulder in congratulations, until the judge called for order. You felt full of stone and bile, looking down at your hands, clasped in your lap, like they belonged to someone else.

Dex stood as the prison guards motioned for him to exit the courtroom, muscles gathering in his back under the orange jumpsuit, face stoic. Always stoic. How did he manage that? How could he just always show nothing even when you most needed to see something from him? His eyes searched you out each time he moved in the courtroom now, but you wanted more than to just see that casual reserve eat you up – you wanted remorse, you wanted sadness. Not just for your friend, but for what the two of you could have had together – a life you alternately wanted and pushed away. You looked down at your lap, but still knew when Dex found you out, his gaze a physical trace on all that you were.

Matt was saying something to you, some bullshit about the justice system really working, but this time that urge to vomit was more than a hyperbole. Your throat felt tight with unshed tears and this terrible clenching warning that whatever you’d managed to choke down from the coffee cart that day was threating to come up. If you didn’t get to a bathroom right fucking then, retching up lunch until you could only dry heave would definitely not be just your problem.

“I – I have to go the bathroom.” You mumbled, holding your hand to your mouth and pushing your purse into Matt’s confused hands, knowing your soulmate watched you do it. “I’ll be back.” Dex wasn’t halfway down the aisle yet with his guards, but you couldn’t wait any longer. Fuck this whole place. You stumbled out of the courtroom, pushing the heavy wood doors open like a women possessed, and didn’t look back.

***

April 15, 2026

The only sound in the hallway was that of your shoe, tapping restlessly against the marble floor. The main entrance to the courthouse and the area around the courtroom was a shit show of reporters, prison guards and AVTF goons, families of victims. They all gathered and talked and cried because today, today Dex was being sentenced. Marci had encouraged you with a soft hand to the shoulder to attend and speak out about your experience, the trauma that she said was obviously inflicted on you that night. 

You sat in an empty hallway at the back of the courthouse instead, the path they walked prisoners through on the way back to prison. Preferring to be alone. Huh, hey old friend trauma. What should you say to the judge when making a victim impact statement?

“Your honor, I think about the convicted constantly. I see his eyes and his gun in my dreams and I’m afraid of how much I want him. He occupies all my thoughts until I can’t help but to fantasize about what he tastes like and how he sounds when he moans and also the gravel of his voice when he spoke to me the first time. Is that enough of a victim impact, your honor?”

Probably wouldn’t go over well.

Some allowances in understanding had to be made because sure, he was your soulmate. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that a far advanced entity had decided to make you want each other ravenously because they thought your jagged pieces went together. But thinking those things, those words, still made you just feel guilty. Made you think of Foggy, and how Karen and Marci and Matt and yeah, you too, suffered with his loss. Shouldn’t you be a good enough person to be able to not think about having sex with his killer on a consistent basis? The dichotomy made your stomach curdle, desire and remorse not meant to mix.

This was why you couldn’t go in there, couldn’t listen to Matt ask the judge to punish the man whose chain was your leash to the fullest extent of the law. You looked down at your hands folded in your lap, and couldn’t help when your knuckle remembered the drag of his teeth against it; couldn’t help when your fingers remembered the impossibly soft wetness of his tongue. Sighed heavily, putting both hands on the bench and leaning forward with locked elbows, waiting.

“Hey.”

There, standing just inside the nearest set of brown doors, was Karen. She wore all black, her gold necklace pulled out from under her shirt like a beacon. Looked worn, and you wondered if she had talked to Matt yet. “Hey yourself.”

“Not gonna go in? It’s almost done.” Karen joined you on the bench when you scooted to the side and patted the seat next to you.

You picked at your fingernails absently. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” It was such a relief to be able to speak freely about it. “What am I going to say – but your honor, I love him?”

The joke landed poorly, Karen stiffening. Unclear if her discomfort was from the idea of a joke at a time like that, or if it was because of what the joke implied. Her leg began to bounce on the floor, vivace tempo to your allegro. “You’re in love with him?”

“Ah,” you made the understanding noise noncommittally, nodding your head to know what she was aiming for. “I think in every single piece of trash soulmate media, someone inevitably says it’s hard to tell because how can you figure out what’s the bond and what’s you?” Hallmark was really getting lazy plot-wise in the soulmate movies lately.

A bailiff walked by, eyeing you both but saying nothing. It wasn’t uncommon for family members to wait there to say goodbye, after all. They passed through the door on the farther side of the hall, the sound echoing as it slammed shut. You and Karen weren’t best buddies after that disastrous meal following the funeral, but you were getting better; a sentiment only reinforced when she placed her hand over yours on the bench. It didn’t mean she was happy with it all; didn’t mean she didn’t want to rip you out of whatever this was and doom Benjamin Poindexter to a life of misery but at least she was trying.

You straightened in your seat, making an effort to say this strongly. “I’m not in love with him.” Just saying that made your words hurt, but it was true. Looked straight ahead at the dingy wall across the hallway as you continued. “But only because I haven’t let myself be. If I stop trying to resist, I will fall. Quick, fast, hard. However you want to say it.” This was also true.

Karen had nothing to say to that, and you knew she was probably locking her judgment up in a padlock to keep it in. You wanted to ask her how she fell in love with Matt – point out that it probably had just happened before she could even think twice so how could you be different? But didn’t. Better to not have another argument when Dex was due to be brought out at any moment. Better not to be a complete asshole again.

“Doesn’t it scare you? Doesn’t he scare you?”

“Yes, of course. I—” In that pub, the words had been hard to force out. Here they tumbled free from the height of a waterfall. “That boyfriend I mentioned, Michael, he took everything I was and made it what he wanted. Didn’t care if he fucked me up forever. When he left, I literally had to figure out who I was again. The possibility of that happening again is…”

The doors leading to the back of the courtroom opened, the sound of chains rattling filtered through, soft conversation, the click of boot heels from the prison guard uniforms. Your words fluttered, the rope jerked.

“—fucking terrifying.”

Dex emerged first, looking like a towering, angry god amongst mortals, his face in a deep, unimpressed scowl – all jaw and sneer and dark eyes. You wondered if he’d heard you, hoped for not.

He looked at you first, and those dark angry eyes – they softened, lightened just a little into the sticky, warm depths you first noticed. They dropped to your mouth, to your pulse, to your hands, and then ricocheted back to your face. It was not a big hallway, but the seconds between his steps stretched out as you noticed how he was held with even more cuffs and chains than before. The restraints secured too tightly on purpose until they squeezed him like a strait jacket.

The minute change in his face looking upon you was even more apparent when he saw Karen, and it reversed. His brow lowered, his lips compressed.  Although he smirked at her, antagonizing, his eyes went dim. Far away like an old master’s painting choked under layers of dirt and grime. “Hello Karen, it’s nice to see you again.” To Karen this time, for real.

The guards bringing up the rear shoved him forward while you sat frozen on the bench, heart stopped, a dove in a hawk’s claws. Dex was pushed forward again while your words beat a terrible rhythm against your skin; they called him convict as they directed him to the bus. But as he stepped through the door and out of the hallway, he looked at you again, one last time over his shoulder. Made an effort to do it too, like he needed that one final glimpse to get him through. Did he see how his little stunt had struck at your soft, vulnerable belly?

The door to the courtroom closed, and you were enshrined in silence again. Karen stood up, pacing for a moment before coming to stand in front of you, her arms crossed, looking like she was about to say something you didn’t want to hear. “I know.”  You cut her off at the pass, acknowledging what a shitty thing that was of him to do. “I know.”

“You don’t have to take this you know.” To your surprise, Karen crouched down in front of you, pencil skirt stretched taut over her knees. “So you think of that bastard every so often. So what. You have to live your life for you, not him. He’s not getting out. It’s done.” 

When you didn’t respond right away but for small nods, she stood up, smoothed her skirt down. Sighed. “I have to go talk to Matt. Text me later, okay?”

***

May 26, 2026

“How are you enjoying protective custody, convict?”

They’d brought Dex to one of the meeting rooms, emptied out and hollow in a way that rooms in prisons rarely ever were. He fully expected to die.

Completely and totally anticipated a bullet between his shoulder blades, a knife at his throat. The scent of his own blood as it soaked into his orange uniform, a group of guards standing over him to watch up close and personal, intending to be the last thing he ever saw. When they kicked his legs out from underneath him so he’d sit where they wanted and chained his cuffed hands to the table, Dex looked down at the metal edge of it. Contemplated just slamming his own face down over and over again until he took whatever pleasure there was in his death away from them. Kept that power to himself.

As the silence lengthened and thickened, for once, he didn’t resist the urge to think of her. That’s how he liked thinking of his soulmate, as her. If he was going to die, he wanted to indulge himself in the memory of her fingers and her taste in his mouth; of how wide her eyes were when he did it; the way she watched him like she wanted to soak in every single move he made. Would she feel it when his head met the tabletop? Perhaps there was a way he could do it quick, clean so it wouldn’t make it through to her. Painless.

But the voice behind him sent a thrill of absolute, complete, inhospitable rage through him. Worse, this was much worse. Cooled any thought of indulgence and forced Dex into the strictest attention, wary. Made him want to gather that connective rope and coil it all within himself to protect it.

Wilson Fisk slowly strode into view, enjoying himself, and took one long moment to stare down at Dex before settling into the chair across the table. He wore a dove gray suit, gold cuff links at his wrists; the black of his eyes matched the back enamel on the jewelry. The man dwarfed the space, the sheer force of his presence making it easy to understand how many had succumbed to his will, as dark as it was. “I asked you a question.”

“How did you get in here?” Dex was done playing guard dog, good puppy, manipulated freak for the man. He sat up as straight as the cuffed hands would allow, held eye contact. The Kingpin would find a different animal facing him: wrath.

Wilson sighed, looking away briefly, like this was but a small inconvenience he was enduring. “Did you really think I couldn’t get into this pit any time I wanted?”

They both knew the desired next questions were, ‘Well, what do you want? Why are you here?’ And they both knew there would be no such easy compliance between them ever again. Dex’s words throbbed then, choosing the worst possible time to worm into his psyche and convince him that he wasn’t alone. His right side seized as those damn words tried to drag him under to where the thought of her waited, and Dex shuttered his face completely to hide it. Purposefully set his teeth on edge instead, enjoying how it made him look sharklike. 

Fisk didn’t look impressed, but then they both knew how to hide things when they wanted. The bigger man adjusted his cuff links absently, purposefully not hiding the words printed there. ‘There’s an old children’s joke. You hold up a white piece of paper and you ask, ‘What’s this? A rabbit in a snowstorm.’ Mayoral candidate he might have been, but Fisk was also an animal, tenacious, a mongoose looking for the right weakness to exploit. Outside, other prisoners banged on the metal bars over the window as they walked by, guards shouted, doors slammed – but the two of them were alone together, both of them in their own ways entrapped.

“I’m surprised you have time to visit, given your campaign.” Dex finally said, voice low and feeling for the hidden snare trap that he knew was being set.

“I enjoyed your trial.” Wilson returned quickly, leaned further back in his chair, the metal creaking, and maintained eye contact. “A circus for the masses when what they want is bread.”

There was some sort of draw there, the snare was set, and a tricky one it would be; Fisk was waiting for him to fall into it. Dex held still, observed, catalogued. He itched to pick a knife, a pen, a nail file, anything – reach across and stab into the man’s face, his neck, rip until there was nothing but a corpse in that seat. Instead, he waited. ‘Wait, and he’ll reveal what he wants.’ “If you say so.”

“I observed,” Fisk began, drawing out the words in his trademark cadence, and Dex felt the satisfaction at the success of his strategy too early. “That you seemed… incredibly taken with the audience in attendance. Unusual for you, convict. To pay attention to anyone unless they’re important.” Fisk took special pleasure in the word convict, drew it out. Savored it.

Dex tensed, tried not to show his reaction, tried to recover. Felt the impulse to hide his words and seethed that he couldn’t. Tried not to think of Julie’s frozen face and failed. She screamed in his ears even though he knew she’d died quickly and silently; the voice, the face shifted, becoming her, became leverage his enemy could use. The shark grin disappeared, cold, dead, calm taking its place. “Can’t say I agree.” The nonchalant shrug looked wrong on him. “I don’t remember a single person with the guts to look me in the eye.”

Snap. Fisk smiled absently. The bluff was meant to make Dex more intimidating, but instead it betrayed him. The trap shut. He knew it the moment Wilson’s eyes lingered on his forearm, felt his blood turn to ice.

“Indeed.” The devil himself stood up, rubbing his chin by habit. “It would take a brave person to do something like that.”

Fisk had once told him about the pleasure of a primal scream. Inwardly, Dex imagined himself standing over the man’s gasping, flopping body and doing just that, bathing in his blood. The bigger man moved out from behind the table, adjusting his suit again before disappearing from sight. There was the sound of the door opening, of Fisk clearing his throat. “I shall have to review the trial tape. See if anyone did. I might want to meet them.”

The door shut.

***

May 29, 2026

“Sorry I’m late Mrs. Zhang.” You had roughly pushed open the door to the dry cleaners, all rush and apologies, but grabbed it before it could slam closed again. Customers stared anyway as you passed through the lobby trying not to sweat through your t-shirt, the bell at the top of the door chiming your entrance belatedly. You winced, shifting the tote bag on your shoulder further up.

May weather was starting to heat New York City with the blush of sunshine, spring making the city shift colors like a chameleon into something brighter, more hopeful. Zhang’s Dry Cleaning and Alterations – well, they felt no such aspiration. The shop was still the small, outdated space it had been last week, and the week before, and the decade before. Speckled white linoleum that hadn’t been replaced since the 1980s, pale green walls in dire need of a paint touch up, faded pictures of celebrities that the owners had sent away for but swore, truthfully – hand on heart – had visited the shop.

But familiar was good.

Mrs. Zhang nodded from where she stood at the cash register, writing out a sales ticket for an older woman, but you could see the little purse of disappointment in her lips – they must have been busy that morning too. To be fair, you did acknowledge it was probably a bad thing if you were late to your new job thrice in the first three weeks. “Go set your stuff down in the back and take over for me when you’re done.” Even as she said it, the line was growing with New Yorkers in search of a good fluff n’ fold.

Breathing deeply, you walked to the back of the store where the employees’ area was, and it was an experience in time travelling – the detergent, the vinegar, the mix of a thousand different soaps, the hot steam that always smelled faintly of bleach. Right back to your summers in high school, in college, when you traded having to stay up late and study for getting up early to help open the cleaners. Was it embarrassing to once again be working the same job you’d had in high school? Yeah, it sure as shit was.

But it was a job. 

It put food on the table – barely – and anyway, it was just a stepping stone. So some places didn’t want to hire a person like you, with your background. Soon, you’d make it back to a legal office or some other administrative position that needed you, but it would take time.

If nothing else, you were glad of the five days a week, noon to eight, plus alteration work. If anything, you were absolutely delighted that your mother had insisted you learn how to sew and make alterations as soon as you were old enough to learn. Just like she had, just like her mother had before her, and her mother before that and all that bullshit. Go to the pier with friends? No, learn how install an invisible zipper instead. What a normal thing to do.

That you hadn’t spoken to your mother in person in seven years was really the cherry on top.

Mr. Zhang was in the back, scrubbing something with a toothbrush, stopping to eye it every few back and forth flicks of the bristles. He wore large coveralls blotched with bleach marks and splattered with water. “Had some alterations come in this morning, when you’re ready.” This was your saving grace; on top of wages, you paid a percentage of the alteration prices to the shop and were able to keep the rest. Being located at the bottom of the Upper East Side meant there was a wealth of patrons looking to have waists nipped and skirts raised. And, best of all, someone from Rogers: the Musical started bringing in costume repairs that their regular guild members couldn’t handle with their workloads.

“Yeah, sure thing.” What most stung was that Matt had started an independent law firm with Kirsten McDuffie and then… not hired you? Not that anyone deserved to be hired automatically, but neither of them had thought to say anything to you as you searched for a job and suddenly, ‘Oh, sorry, we filled all the positions.’ At least Matt said something about another job in a few months but that had already been a few months ago. A lot of people liked to say they’d make something happen, and then never got around to doing it – you had a feeling this was one of those situations.

The prodigal teenage son of the shop lounged against a rumbling dryer, flicking through his phone with a bored expression on his face. Brandon came over when you dumped your tote bag on the table and pawed through it curiously before you could even think to say otherwise. “Damn. Are you fucking okay?” He held up the book you’d had in your bag, a hardcover with a blooming white flower on it, titled, Living Life Alone and Free: A Guide to Life After Soulmates.

Karen had sent it. She liked self-help books meant to soothe people mourning soulmates who’d passed away. Rationalized that since Dex was in prison, and it was absolutely, brooking no argument, 100% a bad idea to go see him at Rikers, this must be the next best thing. And if you had sent in a visitation request the previous month, slightly tipsy while celebrating your birthday alone, she didn’t need to know that. Officials hadn’t even let you know one way or another yet, so who cared? Well, you did, you definitely did.

After the Bulletin headline and the sentencing, you were tentatively becoming comfortable with each other again. More comfortable than ever before, even. Every few days, you’d get a text with a new link to an article or book or herbal tea or something that promised to help dull the link between soulmates. You rather suspected that she was really looking up things like that because, surprise surprise, Matt was being the definition of a bad partner.

So far, nothing had worked when you were persuaded to try it. Dex still pulsed under your breast with each breath, each step, every cadence of your life. He dogged your hands as you ripped stitches, his voice echoed in your ear when you stirred pasta at your tiny stove, the scent of him drifted through your shower each morning as you washed.

“Brandon.” Annoyed, but not upset because the kid was practically family. Quick as a flash – bet Dex was quicker – you snatched the book out of his hands, shoved it back into the fabric sack. When Brandon tried to pry more, you shoved it deep into a corner and plopped your lunch bag on top like it was fucking Mjolnir or something. “Don’t you have some work to do or what?”

Brandon did deliveries when needs must, but apparently, there was no current must. He shrugged and you went back to the front of the shop, stepping up to the cash register without acknowledging Mrs. Zhang’s huff of irritation – she’d be fine. The man waiting at the front of the line didn’t acknowledge the delay either, just draped a small pile of clothes over the service desk even though none of them looked dirty or wrinkled – looked perfect even.

“I have some items for cleaning.” The man was tall, dark haired, and his crusty British accent gave you pause. You might have once thought he was handsome, but a preference for dishwater blond hair and woodsmoke eyes prevented that thought from ever surfacing again. The customer was resting his hands on the counter, and Dex’s hands… what did his hands look like? Two nights prior you’d realized you had never seen them before, and the thought was hounding your every waking moment still.

The man cleared his throat, and it became apparent you’d drifted off into an embarrassing private fantasy. Now that you’d touched, the longer you went without seeing Dex, the more difficult it was to be, well, normal lately. Your cheeks heated, smiled awkwardly, tugged the clothes towards you like you did, in fact know what you were doing. “Sorry, I spaced for a moment. You were saying?”

“Several of the garments have rips.” He cleared his throat and reached out to indicate one inside the jacket at the very top of the pile, underneath the armpit, where you hadn’t been able to see it. “They’re of differing severity, and some may require a replacement lining; I’d rather not have to purchase a new wardrobe.”

Simple enough – you took stock of the items, writing each one down on a slip and calculating a rough estimate to give the man a vague idea of what you’d be charging him. He waited patiently though others in line didn’t, and pulled out a business card when you asked for his name and contact information. It was heavy cardstock, well made with embossed words. “Buck Cashman.” You said as you wrote it out, stapled the card to the slip for good measure. You looked up, impulsively, hand still poised to write, “is your middle name Dollar Bill, by any chance?”

“Indeed.” Though he smiled at the poor humor, it didn’t reach his eyes.

Brandon popped up from behind the counter, one attempt in a long line of attempts to scare the shit out of you at work. As with most other times, all it got him was a scowl and an armful of clothes to haul to the back. Gee, what a create impression you all were making. You smiled, plastering that customer service cheer over your face without stopping to think about if it would warp your features permanently. “We’ll give you a call when they’re ready for pick up.

But Mr. Cashman was the one guilty of not paying attention then. He looked at the back wall, tilting his head curiously. “Is that you?” He was pointing to a specific frame, and you sighed, knowing what it was without even looking.

When they hired you this time, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang framed a copy of the Bulletin with the article about your testimony on the front page. Hung it on the back wall amongst faded pictures of Danny DeVito and Tony Danza. Your face with burgeoning black eyes and swollen nostrils greeted each customer day in and day out, despite how you protested. Someone had written, ‘home town hero,’ on a piece of paper that was taped to the wall underneath. You closed your eyes briefly, asking the universe for patience, and this time the customer service smile nearly failed. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Good work that.” Mr. Cashman still hadn’t taken his copy of the dry cleaning slip, instead standing with his hands tucked in his pockets like he had all the time in the world. “He’s a nasty piece of work.”

“Yeah, sure.” Dex would not like this guy. ‘Don’t think about Dex while you’re at work.’ “Your slip? We’ll call you.”

Still, it was a long, awkward moment of thrusting the yellow paper further out while Mr. Cashman contemplated, it seemed, his place in the universe, the weather. World peace. Dinner that night. Who knew. Finally, he smiled casually like everything was very, very normal, took the slip of paper, and turned to leave.

‘Good afternoon, zogu.’ The man standing in line behind Mr. Cashman usually said when he arrived, always handing over several velour tracksuits and at least one of his wife’s evening gowns. But instead of greeting you like he always did, Mr. Jusufi stood his ground in line, starring directly at the taller Brit, and not smiling. 

They sized each other up in a shitty pissing contest while you all waited impatiently, drawing patterns on the scratched countertop; an older woman behind them in a huge wool coat far too warm for the weather tapped her foot on the floor; another person in a matching jogging set flicked her sunglasses up her forehead impatiently. The clock on the wall ticked loudly in time with your heart beat. After an eternity, Cashman cleared his throat, tugging at the wrists of his suit. “Of course, excuse me. Good afternoon.”

Still, Jusufi stood in place, shoulders stiff, holding his dry cleaning with a comically awkward grip for all that it failed to make him look socially inept. As the bell above the door chimed to signal Cashman’s departure, he finally stepped up to the counter. His eyes flicked down to your drawing fingers briefly as they traced, what else? Concentric circles on the laminate. “Good afternoon, zogu. I have to drop these off and run.”

Mr. Jusufi was a good guy – he never mentioned that he remembered you working there in high school, and best of all, he had never once brought up the Bulletin issue on the wall. “Sure, Mr. Jusufi. On the house like normal?”

***

August 15, 2026

The music boomed around you, blasting so loudly that the bass reverberated through your sternum and made your words shiver – for once – in time with the beat and not your pulse. Strobe lights blazed through the dark club at random and clouds of smoke plumed from different attendees on the dance floor, each skirting the no smoking sign on the back wall. Nose full of clashing perfumes and colognes; legs full of skittering, frenetic energy; stomach full of alcohol. You’d joined a women’s running club as their resident walker two months prior, and they’d finally managed to drag you out of your cave on a Saturday night.

The bartender you flagged down, a tall man with curly black hair and a bright white smile, set your gin and tonic down on the bar. Don’t drink often didn’t mean never drank, right? You smiled at him, picking it up and taking a sip through one of those tiny little red bar straws that only existed in dimly lit establishments like the one you were in.

“Can I buy you a drink?” He shouted over the roar of the DJ, currently remixing some Fast & Furious franchise song with an R&B hit from the 90s.

“What?” You yelled back, and leaned over the bar to hear him better, saw how his eyes dipped to your cleavage for a moment. Dex would have hit him.

“Do you want another? On me?”

It would be your fourth if you did. And your limit used to be one. Sweat was trickling down your back from the press of bodies, between your breasts, and another ice cold drink sounded great, free alcohol tempting. As a green strobe light blazed over his face, a part of your brain that was still reasonable refused because your alcohol intake was going up a little too much in the past year. It hit like a dart making the bullseye, with a thud. Maybe this was more of a problem than you wanted to admit. Time to be an adult and make a responsible decision.

You shook your head, hair swaying wildly around your face to the music. “No, thanks tho.”

The bartender shrugged, smiling again. UV lights flicked on and his teeth turned light blue under the effect. He wore one of those tight black t-shirts meant to look painted on to his muscles. Over the music, “You wanna get out of here? Go back to my place?”

This threw you for a loop, unexpected. Both the offer and the way you briefly considered it. It was possible – you could text the others in the club, leave with this stranger. Go back to his place and fuck him until your muscles gave out. Try to drive the sound of that voice out of your head. Leave in the morning and be totally done with it, neat and tidy like nothing happened. What had Karen said – live life for yourself? Yeah, you could do that with this man for one night. Even if this guy’s jaw was the wrong shape, and his eyes were too dark, and he wouldn’t raise goosebumps on your flesh from just a glance.

“No,” Could didn’t mean would, didn’t mean ready to. Didn’t erase the ghost sensation of callused fingertips drifting along your bare shoulders as you refused the bartender. But this was about not being in the mood for casual sex, not about Dex, not the sensation of that rope in your ribs unfurling.  “Thanks but I have a word match.”

***

September 24, 2026

KP 9/24/2026 7:01 pm EST [LINK] Doctor’s Don’t Want You To Know! Eastern Medicine Takes On Soulmate Bonds! KP 9/24/2026 7:02 pm EST Looks junky but my friend Colleen recommended it KP 9/24/2026 7:03 pm EST Couldn’t hurt to try, right 9/24/26 9:30 pm EST yeah

***

December 25, 2026 

Christmas had never been a friend to Dex. 

He remembered very little of his early life, at home, and holidays had not factored into family life. Very little had factored into it besides alcohol and belts held like a whip.

At Lyndhurst, there were half-hearted attempts at presents, and those he did remember clearly. Books, baseballs, clothing. Most of it useful items meant to support the foundlings through the rest of the year. And of course, there was that one year when Dr. Mercer gave him the headphones and cassette player.

In the army and in the FBI both, Dex found himself volunteering to work holiday shifts, spending the evening at a desk or at a post while others drank and made merry. Outwardly it was consideration for the others who had family they wanted to visit, but inwardly he just did not care. Why should he have to go spend a day alone in an empty apartment because of a holiday he had no one to spend it with?

Would he have ever cared if he did have family, a partner, someone to celebrate with? He would have sworn no, but knowing she was out there, celebrating without him, made him reconsider.

And in prison, there was always someone there, watching, even on Christmas. Prisoners, guards, lawyers. Others in protective custody and gen pop had visits from family members, loved ones, Dex had none. His visitation rights were terminated by order of the warden the moment he started his prison term, for behavioral issues, was the reason. Even if she’d asked, they’d never have let her in.

All for the better. Fisk’s visit had haunted him for six months, a constant reminder that a soulmate – whether he wanted or needed one  – was a weakness that could be leveraged at any moment. If Dex ever wanted to balance the scales – take his revenge against Fisk and do one good deed – the man could never be allowed to figure out who she was. Ever the more dangerous if he won his mayoral campaign.

Better to spend his time trying to think of her less. Better to wake up out of dreams on Christmas night that smelled like her perfume and tasted like her skin and think instead of revenge, and what he must need to do to achieve it.

***

December 25, 2026 – and still

You spent Christmas staring at the same little tree – except this year it was in a new apartment, with a small IKEA table for two and windows that leaked frosted air so badly that the wall unit heater was all but useless. Mr. and Mrs. Zhang had sent you home the day before with a plate of cookies in addition to your paycheck, and one was half eaten on a napkin. Holiday music filtered from your phone, plugged in to charge on the kitchen counter, but the lights were off and you sat only in the glow of the little tree and tiny plastic bulbs. 

You spent the day completing alteration work, several special orders having come in in anticipation of New Year’s Day. Bent over with a bright light shining down, eyes stinging, hands stiff in the cold. The work was hard to concentrate on when someone’s intangible fingers circled your wrist, tried to stop you from working when each individual hand stitch hurt your fingertips.

It was a far cry from Christmases as a kid when it meant a holiday ensconced in a family that laughed more than it spoke. A mother-father-daughter-son unit that traded presents before eating dinner and watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Snowball fights, sweaty children’s faces, and special holiday sips of spiced wine. Vick always got the last present because he was the youngest, and your parents always indulged him in it while slipping a final little wrapped box to you behind his back – an inside joke.

Next to the tree, on your table, was a wrapped present that dwarfed it by scale – it was also the last straw.

“No more.” You said, picking up the box; it needed to go in your closet. “This is done.”

You couldn’t even explain it – not to yourself, not to anyone. Only that amidst the holiday sales, in some kind of fever dream, you bought Dex a Christmas present. A nice one, that strained the limited reserves of your bank account and made you nervous for rent in January. Damn, why’d you do that? The man was in prison. ‘I’ll wear it myself. It’s for me.’ You promised, but knew that was a lie. 

A beautiful brown jacket in butter soft leather that his broad shoulders would look so good in, set off the sharp line of his jaw. Winters in New York were so cold, and the idea that you could keep him warm sent that little bird in your chest fluttering – what a trip this fucking soulmate bond was. The things it made you do. Well, the things you did, and then blamed on it. In a fugue state, you carried the jacket home and then looked aghast at the receipt with your credit card number on it, because truly, how stupid.

Okay, be honest, you could explain it, even if the explanation was uncomfortable. Michael liked things like that, when you were together. Expensive things that stretched your bank accounts but suffused you with a warm glow to give to him, because he was so appreciative when he received them. Until he began to drop hints about the next thing he had his eye on and you supposed it was just… reflexive. To purchase something nice for a man who was important in your life; and Dex, he was important – he just was in prison, and off limits – forever – and you shouldn’t have bought the jacket. Treated him like he was someone else, like he would act the same way, like he’d ever get out.

Brandon must have let something slip about that book he found in your bag, because all summer and fall the Zhangs had been making errant comments about letting go of people who were no longer with you. Casually bringing up how they weren’t soulmates but they were still happy, so did it really matter? The no pressure comments were more effective than any of Karen’s far more direct opinions, and only as you’d worried about paying next month’s bills had it truly dawned on you that you were falling into old habits again. Neglecting your own priorities for someone else, a man who’d never be there for you, when you needed to take care of yourself.

If there was any hope he might get out, maybe things would be different. Maybe you could get over this fear and these bad habits and these nerves. But there wasn’t, so this was it.

The box went in the back of your closet, behind a pair of shoes you never wore, and you swore someday you’d sell it. Dex would always exist in the back of your head, in the words that sunk through your flesh until they fell straight through to your spine; but you had to live your own life. Without him.

***

April 10, 2027

Candlelight flickered over your face while everyone stood around you in a clustered group, their voices refusing to harmonize as they sang you happy birthday. Before you sat a homemade chocolate sheet cake, swirls of white and blue icing decorating the top. In the darkness of your studio, the glow of the candles warmed your skin and cast everyone around you in the soft, hazy glow, sure to become a jewel among your memories.

Kirsten; Marci and her new boyfriend, Nat or something; Mr. and Mrs. Zhang with Brandon in tow; a friend from the running group named Lois; even Karen back from San Francisco – stood around you cresting the birthday song until they all waited with baited breath for you to make a wish. As you blew out the candles, the phantom sensation of a hand settled on the small of your back, encouraged you. Defiantly, you wished for a future without fear, not for one with him. Don’t be foolish.

“What’d you ask for?” Brandon poked immediately when you were done, and Marci affectionately flicked him in the ear for asking.

“I’ll cut the cake.” Mrs. Zhang took over, nudging you aside and reaching for the knife and spatula. The older woman knew you weren’t really in contact with your mother, and the kindness of the moment set a lump in your throat. Reminded you of another such crystalline moment in time – that night in the bar before the shooting. How the chord of happiness had risen inside your chest to flush you with heat and fondness. It was rising again, on shaky little wings in your heart, with the people who’d taken time out of their lives to kindly celebrate you. You, for once.

As the cake was doled out, Karen stepped away to take a phone call, walking over to stand by the front door. She’d come back to New York only recently, something about Matt and them patching things up. Honestly with their track record, you weren’t holding your breath – but who were you to judge?

Mrs. Zhang handed you the piece with the biggest swirl of frosting flowers; beside her, Kirsten reached over to stab a fork into the side of your cake with a smile. You returned it, pulling the fork out and licking off the filling as you stepped aside to let others have a turn. As much as you were afraid your friendship might be a burden to someone as accomplished as Kirsten, it was turning out that maybe… that wasn’t the case. 

It was nice. It was really nice. Everyone was in a good mood, joking and shoving each other, laughing. Even Brandon had refrained from trying to scare you, as a birthday present, he conceded. It felt almost like… having a family again.

“Hey, can I talk to you in the hallway?” Karen’s voice in your ear, startling you out of your thoughts as she took your arm and led you outside, cake still in hand. As you left, you heard Kirsten’s phone begin to ring as well, the ringtone the theme song for Law & Order.

The door clicked shut and cut off the cheerful noises of the group with the sharpness of a knife. Her face was solemn, ashen even, and you tried to dampen the automatic dread that began to crunch through your stomach like broken glass. Someone was stomping around on the landing below but otherwise it was quiet, secluded, and the two of you were alone with that trepidation. Back pressed against the door, you tried not to jump too far ahead. “What?”

Her cell phone was still clenched in one hand, knuckles white. “Karen, what?”

Her hand went up to hold her necklace charm again, a sure habit that things, in Karen’s estimation, were bad. After a dry swallow, she said, “He escaped.” 

Your head jerked back, adrenaline swooped through your stomach at a moment’s notice; sharp, swift, the sensation of falling from an airplane or not realizing the roller coaster you were on had an upside down loop. It turned the rope within you into a live wire that sent pulses to each of your thousands of nerve endings, screaming excitement. Your hands started to shake – it was a miracle you didn’t drop the cake, really.

It could only be one person, couldn’t it? Him. Dex. He was out. He was out and for the briefest of moments, the news didn’t dismay you, it thrilled you. Your words sang with the possibility of seeing him, of touching him, of kissing him. That internal reaction left no room for any thoughts rooted on planet earth – only for wishes that floated among stars. Of finally achieving all the things you’d yearned about before you’d met – a life, a relationship, togetherness. How rich that you’d just cautioned yourself about jumping ahead.

Wildly unrealistic things since the man would still be a wanted criminal who would, in all likelihood get caught and go right back to prison. A wanted criminal who had killed a close family friend. It was fucking insane. 

Wildly unrealistic for a man who lived his life within rigid confines of violence. Would he come to see you? Was he already there, watching, waiting to get you alone? Hope was beginning to flower, tiny little green leaves that could grow further if you let it – if not for the unfurled petals of concern. As the thrill faded, a tiny whisper of doubt grew, grew larger, because hadn’t you felt this way about Michael? Wasn’t this wrong?

 “Who escaped?” You knew, you did, but wanted her to say the whole thing out loud, be extra clear because of all times, this was not one for a damn miscommunication. That irritating hope was splayed across your face, no matter how much you might try to close it up behind your features, blatant. Not for long though - veins of fear were beginning to choke it as they crawled up your neck.

Karen looked around anxiously, like she too was expecting the man called Bullseye to appear with no notice and start shooting. “Poindexter. Your—you know. He escaped and tried to kill Fisk. Matt took the bullet.” 

***

April 10, 2027 – and still

Dex stood over his soulmate, in the darkness, with a throwing knife in his palm. She lay vulnerable and quiet in her bed, unaware that a hand of death stood over her.

The Black and White Ball the night before confirmed two things for him: that entanglements were weakness, and that he must free himself of them if he wanted to find balance in revenge, in his life after it was all said and done. Both Wilson and Vanessa Fisk, Daredevil,  that psychologist at the ball – they were all mired in entanglements – connections that weighed them down and distorted their abilities until they could not see the truth of the matter before them.

Murdock couldn’t see what needed to be done to defeat Fisk; he was caught in the myth of justice. Dex’d watched at the ball long enough to see that the psychologist couldn’t tell who she was closest too – she was too wrapped up in her conviction that training could defeat her trauma. The Fisks were so involved with each other that they were blind to the fact that their relationship was the pry point that could bring it all down.

Dex knew though. He knew that his soul mark was an unprotected flank in battle; a window left open at night for someone to crawl in; a back reinforced by cogmium but never exactly the same again. Her very existence would exert control over him and weaken him in the face of opponents he must be his strongest for. He didn’t want to do this—months in prison thinking of all the people who deserved to die and this was the one person he didn’t want to kill – but he would.

Staring down at her face, relaxed in sleep, feeling those words on his arm flicker like a lit candle, did not change that.

So after the ball he waited out the swarms of AVTF agents and then passed through the city, silent, until he reached the DA’s office. There were only a few guards on duty at night, and they died quietly, their access cards getting him into the right part of the building. By the light of a flashlight, he tracked down the files on his trial and then rifled through the paperwork with the expertise of a government agent who’d done this many times before, until her witness paperwork materialized. Where she’d written her information in the same slanted handwriting that wriggled under his skin.

Entered her apartment from the fire escape because the window there did not close properly – it would need to be fixed. Smelled her perfume, vanilla and wood smoke, and didn’t acknowledge that it was exactly as he remembered it a year later. His internal compass spun, spun, spun – unable to find true north – then stopped in quivering certainty as it, as the bond, pointed him to her, an arrow nocked.

He – gum hurting from where his tooth had come out, back aching in time to his pulse, split eyebrow threatening to break open again – turned in her direction.

Her bed was on the other side of the apartment – forced him to walk through the mélange of her life and ignore all the details it told him. Don’t pick up the coffee cup by the couch and know it was her favorite. Don’t examine the stack of library books on the table and pick out the authors she read. Don’t straighten the blanket tossed on the ground that she must enjoy using. Don’t look at the opened presents and shopping bag of ripped wrapping paper on the table and realize it was her birthday.

Her birthday. He was going to take her life on her birthday.

Sucker punch to the jaw, a blow to the chest, the emotional felt physical. Don’t – don’t – don’t – don’t. The word echoed in his head. Not think about what he was going to take from her. Not look at her skin, her face, her hair, her body. Not think about what ifs in this fucked up world.

But he could no more help it than he could help breathing as he stood over her. The desire to touch her, lay down and press himself against her body a persistent push in his brain that nearly got its way. She lay rumpled in her blankets, her legs and hips stacked for side sleep but her back twisted so she faced upright. Her hair was tangled, spread out around her, and one arm was draped over her head. There. A spot for him was just there.

Dex took a deep breath, thinned his lips, prepared himself. His lodestone lay before him, not a soulmate, not a future. He stood there for a long time, not moving, telling himself that this was right. That he remembered the exact memory of the sticking, suffocating sensation from the night at Josie’s. He remembered what drowning felt like, and the helpless panic at Fisk’s threats in prison. It had to be done. This was merciful because Fisk would not be – and bloody fucking mercy was all he was worth to her.

There was another window above her bed, opened an inch for fresh air, with the blinds half-drawn – she should stop doing that. A slant of moonlight cut a swath across her face, sharp enough to dissect across cheek and eye, leaving her mouth, her brow in shadow. One smooth leg draped over the blankets, and her other arm was tucked against her chest, between her breasts. Her shirt rode up and just there on her ribs was the very tail of a word. His words.

The knife raised, his hand moving of its own accord. He didn’t know how long he stood in that position, poised but frozen. A man standing at the precipice, deciding whether to throw himself off of it and care no more or turn around and fight to the death. His skin felt tight, his muscles hot, an ugly burn in his stomach as his arm moved.

Dex’s wrist snapped, his fingers released.

The knife buried itself in the wall above her bed, handle deep. His breath came fast and heavy now, that howling scream of regret in his chest won out, the little creature he’d long thought drowned in anti-psychotics and turned to ash by anger was latching onto the chain between them and refusing to let go. Fucking want. Another knife, quick, out of his belt and in his palm and between his fingers in two seconds flat – snap flick – and then it was buried in the floor.

He had plenty of other knives on him, he always did. Guns too. And even if he didn’t, there were any number of things that could be picked up and used. Her kitchen knives, her envelope opener, sewing needles, the scissors sitting half-open on the table, his own hands. He thought about each of them, in turn, lip curled in a snarl, because he just… couldn’t do it. 

His balaclava pulled off in one fluid stroke, the fabric revealing his face to a rush of cool air, stripping his world’s view till it was something new and fresh before him.

Sinking to one knee beside the bed, Dex leaned close, so close that his breath filtered through the hair tucked behind her ear. Smelled the scent of shampoo and toothpaste, examined the fine down hairs on her arms, traced his eyes along the path that those neon tears burned into his memory had taken. Down her cheek, then chin, then neck. His fingers followed the same trail, skin calloused but gentler than he could ever remember being before.

A single finger, moving along her cheek, reaching her jaw, sliding to her chin. Two fingers, like he was taking her pulse, running the length of her neck and shifting direction along her clavicle. Such an easy bone to break but he just wanted to map it. Find where it connected to her shoulder, trace back up her neck to where he could tangle his fingers through her hair.

Dex had done and did and would do terrible things with his hands; blood in every line and vein, and joint; but he reached up to place one of those hands against the one she’d flung above her head in sleep. Palm to palm, fingers flush, still wearing her ring, holy palmer’s kiss. Supplicant at an altar he hadn’t wanted to find. Trailed his thumb until it could press to the artery there and take proof of life in real time; shift until with two fingers he could trace the scar along her forearm, the suture marks faded, its placement a mirror of her words on his body.

His jaw clenched. Hated so deeply that he didn’t know what to do next.

when I met him, like an arrow like a bird in the heart, like a sparrow in the dark, snap, crackle, pop (snap) we’re a match, he’s just in my bone marrow - Del Rey, Lana. “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter.” White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter - Single. 2026

2025 – November December 2026 – January

It might be rude to call the rest of your year a depressive episode, but it was.

Wake up. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Lying in bed in pajamas, ordering food in, not answering phone calls. Sometimes spending hours with your left-hand pressed palm to words because you almost swore they were raised and tactile there on your skin. It felt like there was a hand on you, depressing your breath, the beat of your heart, and you wondered if this was normal for soulmates separated or if you were truly just a freak.

Coworkers stopped making small talk with you as they passed in hallways, stopped inviting you to sit with them at lunch. Your mother texted once to say, ‘Happy Holidays,’ and didn’t reply when you sent back a smiley face and asked how she was. Karen disappeared in December for some job in San Francisco and even her infrequent texts stopped. Kirsten was busy preparing for multiple trials including the exact one you did not want to think about – Benjamin’s – and you felt awkward trying to bother her into a real friendship.

Even if you were bound and determined to go to said trial, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a noose around your neck. Didn’t mean it wasn’t the reality of never having a life with your soul mark come to fruition. As the trial marched closer, Thanksgiving and Christmas passed lonely and in a blur. Marci’s father moved out of state after his wife’s death, and she went to him every year, not something you could commit to. The only Christmas decoration you put up was a tiny tree on your table, and the only present underneath it was a small box with a ring in it.

It was simple jewelry from a small local store. As the clerk checked you out one snowy, blustery December evening, you steadfastly refused to think about how you’d chosen a plain band with sapphire chips. Carried it home, huddled in your coat, and pretended it was nothing. Christmas morning, when you slipped the ring onto your right pointer finger, you told yourself to knock it off – it didn’t remind you of the blue of his shirt. The darkness at the heart of the sapphires didn’t call back to the darkness in his irises that night. It didn’t just feel right sitting there on your finger.

You were familiar with rotting in place until the world finally shook you loose like a pearl from a clam, but damn, 2026 decided to shake you hard. On January 1st, Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz downsized.

“We’re very sorry.” Your direct supervisor said while sitting flanked by HR professionals. “You know how it goes, last in, first out. We’ll give you a good recommendation though, don’t worry.”

Fuck. Marci was apologetic but not even her influence could change anything once the paperwork was issued. A good recommendation was worth jack all when jobs were hard to come by and you couldn’t afford your apartment any longer. Because of your landlord’s hesitancy, it was a month to month lease, and without income it would drain you dry despite a small severance package.

At least you were walking around and still functional; at least you sent out resumes and applied to jobs with some urgency; at least you tried. After Washington DC and the Triskelion, you’d fallen so far down a hole of depression that the entire year afterward was simply a tear in the fabric of your memory. Maybe even the year after that too. You walked, you talked, but as an empty form with no brain to process, no heart to beat. At least this time you didn’t require an intervention’s worth of family and friends to drag you back into the sunlight.

Which was good, because they were all gone. “Be an adult. Get out of bed. Send a job application. Look at the housing ads.” You said to yourself every morning of your last month in your apartment, wrote the list out each day on a post-it note and checked each one off with single-minded determination.

When an old friend of Foggy’s heard from Marci’s college roommate who heard from Marci that you needed a new place, he reached out with a lead, and you replied right away. Barely looked at the place before saying yes and congratulated yourself on not letting an opportunity dangle in the wind till it was too late. A year’s lease, an absolute miracle, on a studio at the very edge of Hell’s Kitchen; one of those no longer newish, cheaply built loft-style places that were beginning their descent into disrepair as they fell out of fashion and landlords stopped caring. It was tiny – tiny, but with a small kitchen delineated by an island, and a shower that didn’t make you feel claustrophobic. The cheaper rent would have convinced you to sign the lease even if the place was fucking haunted. You’d take what you could get.

2/2/26 3:27 pm EST got a new place in hell’s kitchen. you still live nearby, right Matt? maybe we could hang out sometime =)

You texted him because Karen was gone to sunny California, and you knew that Foggy would want someone to look out for his best friend. And to be totally honest, because you were tired of putting together secondhand IKEA furniture that would serve as your new table. As the cousin of Foggy’s ex-girlfriend, honorary little sister, and semi-family friend, you weren’t sure if that job should really belong to you, but you sent the message anyway. Matt didn’t reply.

2/4/26 10:43 am EST have you heard from matt? i tried to reach but he never replied. kinda worried KP 2/4/26 11:15 am EST I haven’t heard from him KP 2/4/26 11:16 am EST He isn’t talking to me KP 2/2/26 11:17 am EST Legal advice? 2/4/26 11:32 am EST no i just thought foggy would want us all to stay in contact KP 2/4/26 4:01 pm EST Yeah

Karen didn’t offer any more, and left you alone in your new apartment, surrounded by assorted boxes and a table that still wasn’t finished. Suffice to say, it was some surprise when that Friday, another text arrived. Not from Karen though, and certainly not from Matt.

KM 2/6/26 9:57 am EST Hi! It’s Kirsten! Matt gave me your number. KM 2/6/26 9:58 am EST Can you come by the DA’s office next week? We need to talk. 

It turned out that you were being called as a witness for the prosecution. Kirsten handed you a form on a clipboard to fill out with your contact information – she indicated a dotted line to sign on signifying that you consented, and that your testimony would be the truth and nothing but the truth. The sight of it, with a cheap Bic pen set within easy reach, strummed at your nerves like an anxious violinist. Behind you, the DA’s was abuzz with activity – couriers running paperwork, paralegals working on research, plaintiffs and defendants trailing after a veritable battalion of ADAs working to save New York City from itself.

You pushed the clipboard back to her, tilting a stack of loose paper accidentally. “I really don’t want to do this Kirsten. Please.” It wasn’t the first time you’d said as much.

The lawyer in question reached to stop the flurry of papers from toppling, but you imagined she glanced at the left side of your abdomen. You imagined she knew. Did she know? But how? Would she make you disclose your words in state court? Gore rose in your throat at the thought of having to say, ‘I’m – I’m not who you think I am,’ in front of a crowd of cops, robbers, and lawyers all waiting to make your life a living hell. In front of him.

‘Hello Karen, it’s nice to see you again.’ The possibility that they might make you say his words to you almost sent you running for the door, anxiety sending those strumming nerves into overtime. Paganini’s 24 Caprices when you couldn’t even handle a child’s melody.

“—has to do it.” Kirsten was saying, hands folded across her desk, pulling you out of those thoughts. Could hefeel that spike of stress running along that rope locking you together? “And you were outside when Foggy was shot, not just inside Josie’s. You saw the whole thing happen. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it.”

You smiled wanly, recognizing that she was making an effort to be comforting and explain to you that this was a function of the machine that was the DA’s office, not fate’s personal vendetta against you and your soulmate. A nod, a twist of your hands in your lap before you picked up the clipboard again. “You won’t… Well, you won’t ask anything about our um, our personal lives, will you?”

The question came out too softly, too timidly, for your liking but it was out. If Kirsten wanted to dig, this was the hint that would lead her to where the latch at your end of the rope dug into the flesh under your breast. Where a vice clamp squeezed your heart. But the ADA just smiled softly in return, a sort of understanding dawning on her face – again, that fear that somehow she knew – before Kirsten came around the desk to pat you on the shoulder.

“No,” she told you softly, nudging the pen closer. “We won’t ask you anything about the past. I’ll make sure it won’t be relevant.”

It took all your control to draw in a deep breath, slowly blow it out. Nod, like a normal person might. That hadn’t been what you were worried about, but you’d rather she thought it was. You signed the paperwork.

***

February 24, 2026

It was a blustery, cold day – more rain, more pinkened cheeks and damp shoes. New York City was hiding any hint of spring behind a curtain of clouds and dark evenings when most people were already impatiently waiting for even the smallest bloom of sun and longer days. You rather preferred the cold and the rain, better suited to your mood as you robotically showered and dressed in dark clothes as if for a job interview.

Ascending the courtroom steps made your heart beat near to ripping out of your chest. It felt like you were a pig impaled on a killing spear, a goat shot through by bow and arrow, each pulse of muscle pumping heart’s blood out onto the dirt. Sacrificial. Waiting in line for the executioner’s tender touch.

Security let you in without much comment, rummaging in your purse and sending you through a metal scanner, before giving you a visitor’s badge and pushing past to the next person. Too easy, to be let in to see your fate, the man aliens had tied you too, and hope he didn’t react with disgust, with hatred. 

Actually – if you were truthful with yourself, you had no idea what reaction you hoped for – both branches of the path ahead promised pain, sadness, loneliness. If he wanted to see you, wanted you, it would set you up for a lifetime of cold prison cell visits with each touch forbidden, each soft word eavesdropped upon. If he hated you, well… that would be akin to death by a thousand cuts, slowly bleeding out over years and years until there was nothing left of the soul trapped in a cage of his making. Neither would be merciful. 

Opening statements were due to begin and the courtroom was filling up, bodies boxing you into your seat on the aisle of the furthest section back, but also shielding you. Unbidden, you thought of Foggy and the last time someone else’s body had come between the two of you. Felt those misted drops of blood on your face. Looked at those around you and hoped you’d never know what their blood felt like. Kirsten spotted you as she walked in, frowning at your white knuckled grip on your purse and the tense set to your shoulders; still, she waved as she passed, and you managed the bare minimum of returning it.

Soft whispers rose as the judge arrived, the entire prosecution team, and then the defense lawyers. Finally, a door to the side of the room creaked open, and all those whispers hushed in concert, on cue. The rattle of chains slithered through the crowd like a snake, hissing and tasting the air until it found you and rattled that chain to your heart. At first you couldn’t look up, but like a moth couldn’t resist a bright light in the darkness, so to you couldn’t resist raising your eyes to see him clearly for the first time.

A predator moved through the room.

No matter that he was restrained, that his arms were bound to his sides with thick straps, that his feet were chained, that his hands were held in a rough cloth hood. No matter that he wore a bright orange jumpsuit, or that he was escorted by two guards with automatic rifles and sour expressions. This was a hunter, in a room full of people who could be prey. Was he the archer to your draining heart’s blood, his aim true? 

His nickname was Bullseye – his aim was always true.

He almost rolled in, until the room filled with presence. It suggested a sealed room on a sinking ship, water leaking in around the door until you found yourself with your face pressed to the ceiling, trying to gasp in air. Seeing him in person made the world tilt like a hallucinogenic horror scene, the court room ticking to the side mechanically until it was crooked in your mind’s eye, before righting itself violently with the banging of the judge’s gavel.

You could finally study his face in detail. See the ruffled, dark blond of his hair, clearly grown out from a military cut. The strong forehead, furrowed eyebrows, the long lashes that sheltered his eyes – not blue, not black – hazel. Syrupy was the right initial descriptor – endless and sucking; the color of wood polished till the grain shown. The harsh jaw made tough by his unimpressed expression, the angry red furrow in his cheek from a knife that hadn’t cared for a clean cut. The soft pink of his lips even as stiff as they were, the scar on his chin, the flash of white teeth beyond.

Teeth that might take you by the neck and shake you about. 

Benjamin Poindexter was the most dangerous person in the room. Again, those polished wood eyes slowly filtered through the space, taking in the lines of police officers in their black uniforms with mourning bands across their badges; the reporters with hungry faces and pens poised; the ADAs with their support staff and expensive shoes; you; the prison guards who positioned themselves at each—you.

You again. He returned to you, predator to prey, eye to eye. Again, as a snake with intricate scales displayed, mating dance and warning in one, so that you itched to touch him and feather your fingers through his hair no matter the danger. Your chest stuttered with breath, just as it had that night in front of Josie’s, and he caught it; your head tilted like your neck could no longer support you and he followed it; your lips parted before you swallowed, and he watched it; your eyes closed because they felt like they were burning, and when they opened again he had turned around. 

Sat down in his chair at the defense’s table, back straight, like he hadn’t said the words that were slowly eating their way through you.

It was much the same for the rest of the morning.

Staring at the back of his neck and wondering if your gaze was piercing him through too. Memorizing the tint and texture of his skin there because it was all you could see. Feeling that rope knotted about you as it yanked, yanked, yanked in time with your pulse because look how close you were to him. Look into the hunter’s eyes and convince yourself his next knife wouldn’t be for you.

At lunch they escorted him through the room in some sort of humiliation ritual, passing each row of people whose hearts were surely beating in their throats. Until he passed you, until his eyes flicked down to you and took in the rest of you – your tensed shoulders, crossed ankles, your damp umbrella. The scar on your right forearm from that long ago broken arm. Your words shining in your eyes, unbidden, like starlight shining through cut outs in the night sky.

You hadn’t thought to bring any lunch, and you couldn’t stay in the room when it closed, so slowly you unfolded yourself, slipped on your jacket amidst the soft rumble of gossip from the other attendees. Latched your fingers tightly around your purse because you didn’t know what else to do with your hands and tried not to react when you saw they were keeping him on display in the hallway. Grotesque humiliation meant to allow the gallows’ crowd to gawk and say their fill. 

Outside again, the cold air revived you, traveling through your lungs and veins until your breath was nothing but the scent of rain. Till you could think of something other than the man in the hallway. who had most definitely not watched you walk outside. But that comfort slowly faded as the lunch period dragged on, and your stomach began to rumble, and winter’s branches latched onto your exposed fingers and ankles.

There was a coffee cart on the corner and it lured you in, sent you digging in your wallet for a couple of loose dollars as you stood in line with other clerks and lawyers, all silent and too embedded in their own worlds to notice how yours shook. A couple of pastries sat in the plastic window of the cart, and yeah, you deserved one of those too, didn’t you?

“Hungry?”

You jumped, almost dropping your cash and spinning to see Matt Murdock standing behind you, leaning casually on his cane. “Matt,” you said, holding one hand to your chest. “I didn’t see you come up.”

He smiled, too casual and practiced to be truly real. “That’s okay. I didn’t see you either.”

A smile broke out of your face and so did a huffing laugh; it felt good to see him again, like seeing the ghost of Foggy Nelson appearing on the busy street amongst the traffic lights and honking cabs. The line moved, and you impulsively hugged him before he could figure out your intent, stiffening and then slowly relaxing into your shoulder. “I miss Foggy.” You said, without thinking about how it might hurt you both. “I know I was kind a… you know, not one of the guys? But I miss hanging out with you and Karen and the others.”

Matt nodded, he’d turned his head down but at that angle you could still see his eyes behind his red lenses. “Me too.”

“I got a new place. In Hell’s Kitchen. I thought we could all hang out sometime. Or something.” In your mind the offer made sense – he was like Foggy’s brother, you were like the man’s sister. Didn’t that make you some weird kind of siblings too? Wasn’t that enough to invite you out of the cold and into the warmth of a friend group?

Apparently not to Matt, who shifted awkwardly. Did he not have other friends? He was thinking of the text though, because as he reached for his own wallet, he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t reply to you. It’s been a lot.”

“Life has been hard lately. Really hard. I get it.” 

Matt nodded errantly. Up next, the coffee vendor took your order of a black coffee, two sugars, and bagel, tossing in a hand-packed serving size of cream cheese and a plastic knife. “Double it, please.” Matt reached around you to place his credit card on the counter, waiting for the additional coffee and bagel to appear. How he knew—

“Matt please, you don’t have to do that.” The tips of your ears were red from cold, from the consideration.

The lawyer shrugged, his tie tangled in the wind as he took the receipt and his card back from the coffee cart and nodded his thanks. “I know. I wanted too though.” Another pause, another smile where the charm hid how he bled underneath. “You’ll have to put my bagel in my pocket though.”

Hastily you grabbed up both warm paper bags, handed Matt his hot coffee, and took your own up before you could do something as foolish as even vaguely inconvenience everyone else waiting in line. “Thank you.”

Matt’s smile kicked at one side, and he started swinging his cane wide to clear a path back up to the courthouse, walking slow. The rain was just a drizzle at that point, but you unfurled your umbrella anyway and held it over his head dutifully. He bumped his shoulder against yours companionably, commented casually on those passing by as the courthouse loomed larger and larger over the conversation. It was clear the easy nearness of walking side by side reminded you both of better times.

The cardboard sleeve on your coffee was too big and kept slipping down, your fingers kept hitting the cup where the temperature was too hot and your skin started to sting. Still, it was warmth, and you enjoyed it, took a sip though it would burn your tongue. Eventually the two of you came upon the tail end of the security line again, and idea of going back inside to face your soul mark again seemed too big to swallow.

Matt paused a few feet away from where the guards were waving metal detectors over people, and tilted his head like he was listening to something far off. Lunch was winding down, workers returning to the building, and you knew you could either falter and leave or white knuckle your way through the rest of the day. “Going in?” He sounded like he knew the answer already.

In your purse, your phone buzzed with the telltale chime of a new email, and you hoped it was a job interview request that you should respond to. In your pocket was still the bagel and cream cheese, uneaten, its paper bag would be too loud in the courtroom. At the back of your skull, a headache was beginning to build that would pick all afternoon on your concentration. Walking back into the courtroom was your soulmate, his strong back to you, silent.

Nothing you technically couldn’t handle. But you’d proven your point, survived a morning without being ripped open by the only man who truly could. There’d be other days in which you could be strong; you could afford weakness right then. “No, no I’ve had enough. I’m gonna go home and subject myself to cheap furniture building.” The table was still sitting on the floor where you’d left it weeks ago.

Matt grinned, shrugged, prepared to enter the security line. “I’ll come back tomorrow.” You found yourself telling him, though it surely mattered not at all.

He nodded. “Me too.”

***

March 4, 2026

She’d come to court four times already. Each time sitting in the back row like he wouldn’t fucking see her right away, every single time. Not always staying the whole day, or skipping a day occasionally outright. But he always saw her.

Dex sat on the hard mattress of his prison bed, back to the cement block wall, and despaired. Like the old days, he felt the impulse to rage, to punch the wall, to panic until Dr. Mercer’s voice slowly towed him back from the edge. But that was then, he was a different man, and that shit wouldn’t serve him here.

Nor would it serve him to have the woman who was his soulmate keep torturing him in the courtroom – her name slipped out his mouth before he could stop it. A compulsion.

It was early morning, and weak light filtered into the small window they granted him. It landed across his hands, the self-same hands that channeled the accuracy and the strength he had, the self-same hands that reached to cover her words when guards were around, because they weren’t worthy of seeing them. Or rather, he wanted that weakness kept as secret as possible. It was that second one, surely.

With a thunk, his head hit the cement wall, the pain bracing and he did it again. He’d done all this so he could be his own man, so he was free to choose his own allegiances and his own actions and emotions. But each time he saw her in the back of the court, she set another hook into his skin. Not even by doing anything, just by breathing in that room.

At the thought of her, his arm braced as if against a physical force. But it was just that damnable fucking energy – a cable that wrapped around his forearm and knotted at his wrist, eating more of him each time he cared to feel for it; if he concentrated, he thought he might be able to trace it into the depth of his torso, so warm in his mind because more and more he could feel her. Feel her dripping down that cord until she dripped into his veins and he hated it.

He didn’t want to be filled with someone else again, he wanted only to be himself. 

Didn’t want it to be inevitable, or to feel himself soften against the idea, and this time he did reach out and grab the single paperback they allowed him. Threw it against the wall with a bang. Further down the cellblock, other prisoners yelled, angry their sleep was disturbed but fuck them.

Fuck all of it and fuck Vanessa Fisk. Fuck his soulm—

Her lips he thought about the most. How soft her cheek looked. Would her skin be this soft over his words? Could he set his hand in her hair and pull until all the parts of her were vulnerable to him? 

The way those impulses stopped Dex’s anger cold infuriated him all the more, made him want to get up, pick the book up, throw it again. Because the worst realization was slowly dawning upon him, a river carefully breaking through a dam, drop by drop.

Dex saw her for the first time, and he thought, ‘I don’t need her.’ He looked at her distraught face and heard the words on his arm and thought, ‘I don’t need this.’ And that was true. He didn’t need her, didn’t need the words or the bond or the way all the veins of his body were being slowly distilled by that damn woman. And again, it was true. He didn’t need her.

But he wanted her.

There was sense of dread to that realization, as it wormed into his psyche each day after court. Clawing its way into his cell until it could be ignored no more.

This was infinitely worse, something he had never felt before. Yes, Dex had wanted Julie but not like this, no... not like this. Want. So much more dangerous than need. So much more terrible. Because need meant compulsion, biological imperative, it meant it was out of his control. That something else was making the decisions and he was free to rebel against them until he could tear himself away and burn whatever held him down to the ground. Want though.

His brain took the image of her hands folded neatly in her lap, small ring on her finger, and made it a talisman in his mind.

Want.

He smelled her perfume each time he walked by her in court and was fetishizing it before he’d even left the room.

Want meant that he was complicit, responsible. 

That she appealed to something dead and buried inside of him, slowly raising it to the surface with the unholy magic of her dark, glossy eyes. With the witchcraft of her tears glowing neon. With the enchantment of her unsteady breath each time she saw him, like he meant something to her. The conjuring of her voice through his head every night as she said those words in his memories and the way he could see the tip of her tongue between her parted lips. A part of him that he had never expected, even as a teenager, knowing how differently he felt from everyone else; a hawk chick in a nest with sparrows.

Want meant that he could survive without her, but that a part of him readily refused to. 

Maybe if things were different. If those alien freaks never decided to be weird, eugenicist assholes determined to shape the population of earth as they saw fit. If he’d met her as an FBI agent, or in the Army, or at the facility, would he feel the same?

Dex grimaced. Rationalized that want was but an obstacle in his path, easily overcome and that he, Bullseye, would ensure that happened. The guards were starting to walk down the cellblock, calling out the time and to get the fuck up before breakfast arrived. Dex stood slowly, flexing his wrists in circles by habit, and went to stand by the door – appearing obedient by design. It was better for him to stay in prison until he could control himself, could take the right chance, get the right result.

The only positive to want was that he could set it aside; he was a professional, trained by men in the army who meant to break him into pieces and by a psychologist who had taught him how to mend whatever he could. Four and a half months later, that fire of revenge still burned in his belly and that was the one thing Dex would not let go to coals. The one thing he wouldn’t let be banked or broken.

Vanessa Fisk had fucked him over. Manipulated him into one terrible thing too far to keep the world spinning. So, he’d fix it. Someday. And he wouldn’t let the words on his arm hold him back.

*** 

March 5, 2026

Today, the gallows awaited you.

Or rather, your testimony. Dressing that morning presented a barrage of questions – did he… like this color? Would that be too weird for a court room? Should you wear heels instead of flats? Even though you questioned those thoughts, resented them even because you’d worked hard to be your own person again, they persisted until you finally dressed in all black and left it at that. Ben. You’d started thinking of him as Ben in your mind, a truly questionable decision. Ben. Ben. Ben.

But standing with Kirsten in the hallway before trial began, the reality of your situation hit like ocean spray to the face, bracing, but frosty. Your testimony would help put your soulmate away. For life, most likely – or even to death. You’d face him down, and you’d help end his life either way.

“Jesus, this is fucked.” You muttered, turning to look at where the usual parade of AVTF officers were blowing past security without a second glance.

“What was that?” Kirsten had a file open in her arms – the tag on the side said, Poindexter, Benjamin, and you briefly contemplated trying to lean over and see what it said. 

“I’m just nervous.” You said, grinning with concerted effort. And it was no lie. Just anticipating having to take the stand set your heart racing. Kirsten nodded, patting your hand comfortingly and then – well, the courtroom doors were opening and it was time.

As with every other day you’d attended, you took a seat in the back row, on the aisle. Matt settled in next to you a moment later, something he’d taken to doing most days after that conversation on the courthouse steps. You liked to think it was because he was considering that offer of friendship, the loneliness growing too steep for him. Especially with Karen gone. It had to be gnawing at him, you thought sympathetically. She’d appeared for a single day to testify, and then flown back to San Francisco with barely a look behind her. 

Not that you blamed her at all; Matt was being a right jackass to his soul mark.

The prosecution called Matt up to testify that morning too, and he handled it so calmly, with such composure that you envied him that mask he wore in public. He’d left to go find Cafaro, he told those assembled, looking around the room through his blindness but handily avoiding Ben. Walked there with no incident. The scene at Foggy Nelson’s apartment was chaos, Cafaro bloodied and bruised and barely aware. And that, your honor, was the extent of his knowledge until he’d returned to the bar and found Foggy dead.

Something about the way he phrased that set your hackles, a lie in plain sight that you just couldn’t figure out. Even if you knew he was telling the truth, why did that feel like a lie? Must be nerves.

Matt’s testimony took the lion’s share of the morning, and by the time he returned to his seat next to you, it was nearing noon. Each hour and minute that ticked by had ratcheted your nerves to such heights that you could barely sit still – so much so that even Matt noticed when he sat down, patting your arm absently. “Don’t be nervous.” He whispered. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

Damn, but it wasn’t. The defense called for a recess to accommodate the lunch hour and the judge agreed; in mere minutes there you were, sitting in your seat, watching your soulmate walk past you to the hallway again. Unusual, he stared you down with a kill shot of a glare, the storminess in his eyes akin to a redwood crackling as it burned alive, angry. His lip hitched as he passed, in disgust or disappointment, the clink of his chains punctuating each step he took and each place on your body his eyes catalogued before he was past you, out the door to the daily humiliation the guards subjected to him to.

With a start, you realized that Matt’s hand was still on your arm, his fingers lightly tenting your wrist, a picture of comfort. But when Ben was gone, the lawyer beside you moved his hand, timed perfectly. You craned your neck to look at the open doorway, crowding with people moving about their day to lunch like nothing unusual was happening. Nothing was re-shaping the actual fabric of your world to revolve around another human being and the way your heart pounded whenever he was near or his eyes traced your form like a target at 50 paces.

Matt excused himself as the two of you filtered out among those still lingering, saying something about paperwork he was preparing to present to Kirsten. That left you lingering in the hallway, alone, for the first time since the trial had started. You shifted your purse aimlessly up your shoulder, tried to avoid how alone and vulnerable you felt all of a sudden. You knew some people by name from your time at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz, but they were mere acquaintances, no one who would do more than nod politely on their way past. 

After a couple weeks of more of the same, the coffee cart was unappealing. But there was a bench on the far side of the hallway – more an extended entryway, really – and you sat down heavily, sighing. Your soulmate was clapped in irons in the same hallway, and you could be nonchalant about it. You could. You truly could ignore that picking, pushing sensation to find him. Crossing your legs and then re-crossing them, brushing your hair back behind your eyes, picking at your cuticles, rotating your sapphire ring – anything to pass the time. But fidgeting only did so much, so you leaned forward to brace your elbows on your knees and your chin in your hands, intending to people watch.

Not intending to make eye contact with Ben.

But there he was, staring you down again. His gaze nicked your skin each place it settled, hyper observant, till you could feel it like little cuts on the back of your hands, your neck, your knees, your fingertips. Each little imaginary cut would bleed just a little imaginary blood and he’d trace it dripping down your form before slicing you somewhere else. Your lips. Ben studied how your mouth slowly parted with one long, steady breath; you felt as if you’d swallowed a magnet, as if sitting still and away from him was all you could do.

He caught you looking at the cleft of his chin and the apple of his throat and smirked – the first time you’d seen that expression on his face. Your eye skated his biceps in the leather restraints, the white t-shirt peeking out from his orange jumpsuit, and the expression intensified as he tilted his head back. Again, you thought of a snake, slowly flaring its hood, casting an intricate scale pattern into the light of the sun to shine like liquid magnetism.

The prison guards who were apparently watching Ben were in point of fact standing in a loose circle a few feet away, clustered around a handful of videogames on little consoles. It seemed that they were too used to his general compliance to pay much attention, and anyway, the prisoner was in a courthouse – his hands were fully immobilized, and his leg chains were locked to the pipes beneath the old water fountain there – where could he really go? Nowhere. They didn’t notice the current that pushed the two of you together.

Didn’t notice when you stood up, leaving your purse on the bench. Or when you approached the fountain slowly, feeling like you were walking a plank, shark infested waters swirling below you. But Ben did, his back straightening and his eyes narrowing, all his attention on you and you alone. That rope was stuck through your ribs, shot through there as if with a black arrow that could not be removed, and with each step you took the rope narrowed and thinned to a tensile wire and vibrated, adrenaline and anticipation.

He felt it too. Ben did, his hands moving beneath the cloth case they kept him in. His head straightened, watching your approach, glancing to the water fountain as he figured your plan. Went alert to look around the area, checking to see if anyone else was paying attention to how stupid you were being, and as he turned his head, his cheekbones cut you too, down to the quick. So severe you wanted to see if your lips would bleed from kissing him there.

‘Calm down.’ You told yourself as you reached the fountain; and the hallway felt a thousand miles wide. Some thought about not being a complete and total idiot that evaporated when you looked up to see that he’d turned his head totally toward you, making the tendons in his neck stand out. Bridges from chest to jaw that you wanted to trace with your fingers. At this angle his eyes were too shadowed to make out except for bright pinpricks of light reflecting against the blackness of his pupils.

“Ben.” You murmured, turning on the fountain and bending over slowly to take a drink. The water was icy cold but it did little to quell the heat, the dangerous impulse that was slowly smoldering in the pit of your stomach, in your chest, under your breast where your words felt electrified by the proximity.

His eyes weren’t on yours, they were focused on the way you drank the water; lips glistening from each sip, your throat bobbing with every swallow – he too, swallowed. “Dex.” 

His voice was so low you might have barely been able to hear the words, except that every fiber of your being was attuned to him right then, your body the dowsing rod and his the ley line of energy.  You heard every minutia of sound. “Dex.” You corrected yourself, repeating the name over and over again. Dex. Dex. Dex. You could feel the word tattooing itself on the inside of your lip. 

The content of your words to him reminded you to tell him: “I’m—”

“I know your name.”  He’d torn his eyes away from you to survey the hallway again, ever a man trained in surveillance and strategy. “You were in the newspaper, at the funeral.” 

“Yes.” 

“You were friends with Nelson.” You’d bent to take another sip and again he watched you drink like a man sighting an oasis in the desert.

You sucked in a wet breath. “Yes.” When you wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, your skin tasted like remorse, penitence, shame. Guilt. What would Foggy think to see this? What would Matt and Karen – well, you knew what Karen would think. 

”Stay the fuck away from him.” She’d said at lunch that day. “He’ll use you up and leave you behind.”

There was a crowd of reporters coming back through security, gathering behind the metal scanners to pull out cell phones and notepads, tuck pens behind their ears. The lunch period was coming to an end, and so was your time talking to B – to Dex. “I’m sorry.” He said carefully after some hesitation, again pitched for just your ears. “That he had to die.”

Snapping your eyes to his, you struggled to bank a slashing claw of anger, ripping into you to expose that very guilt you felt before building into confusion. Affronted – had to die? No one had to die that night. “He didn’t have to—”

“Give me something.”

That stopped you, stared at him sharply as the request came out of nowhere, interrupting the righteous fury that might have finally pulled you out of that magnetic spiral you found yourself in. “Give you something.” Repeated slowly, after a moment.

Dex nodded, glancing back around the slowly filling hallway. He too, was aware that lunch was ending, that you’d be ushered back into the courtroom where your words might put a needle in his arm. Would you come back to the trial after you testified or leave forever? On his face you could see the question written there; an emotion you couldn’t fully identify was breaking through the supposed equanimity of his features to betray that he was not so unaffected as he might have pretended. Or wished to be.

AVTF officers were beginning to arrive. Time was truly running short, the proverbial clock ticking, the lit fuse approaching dynamite. Swallowing, “Give you what? I—I don’t have anything.”

Dex reached out suddenly, so quickly it was inhuman – to touch you, to caresses you, to grab you, to do something terrible, you couldn’t say. But he’d forgotten momentarily about the protective guard around his hands, the chains keeping his arms at his sides; his biceps bulged when he met the end of his tether. Like a dog on his chain, he bared his teeth suddenly, angry and disappointed. Yearning. God, he was yearning. “Give me your necklace.” His eyes were flicking quickly, almost frantically, over your person. “Your ring, anything.

He was stepping as close as the chains and the water fountain allowed, suddenly so tall over you that if you looked to the sky you’d only see his angry, desperate face. This close you could smell him, the scent of soap and sweat, a cologne you wanted to bask in forever. In your mind, Karen was screaming to stop being such a dumb bitch and can’t you see that he’ll—you shut the door on that firmly, aware of just how foolish you were being. You looked down at your hands, at the band glinting on your pointer finger. “The ring… then.” 

“Anything.” He repeated. That wire between you was writhing, twisting, trying to ply you both into one person instead of two. “Now, before they see.”

You looked down to see your fingers twisting that ring off already, slipping to the first joint, and then the pad of your finger where you pinched it in place with your thumb. He’ll use you up.

You’d already been used up before. And you’d rebuilt yourself. 

Your hand was raised halfway up before you stopped to wonder how he’d take the ring from you. He couldn’t grab anything, so in his uniform pocket perhaps? You started to reach for him, heart pounding, blood rushing in your ears because finally for the first time you were going to touch. God, fuck you were going to touch him. Maybe your hand could splay, maybe it could wander, just graze the skin of his collarbone and if you were branded for the rest of your life, so be it.

Dex’s eyes turned flinty in a flash, hardening into flat calculation as a voice rang out, “Hey! Step away from the prisoner.” The voice froze you, your hand poised between your bodies, trembling from adrenaline and temptation. From the way he had angled himself between you and the guards, they couldn’t exactly see that it was you who was trespassing, you realized. And from the way you were standing, those behind you in the hallway couldn’t really see either, but they’d soon be looking. They’d be staring to see what the commotion was and you’d be found out. 

Exposed, words and all, until the seams where your bond was trying to fit you both together were laid bare.

Dex hadn’t moved again, but all of his muscles had tensed, his entire body turning sharp in a way that made you vaguely uncomfortable with how much it stirred not fire or anger but desire. The sternness of his expression was hitting on something you’d have to examine later, in private. “Prisoner! Back. Away.” The guards were definitely now all paying attention, their loud voices drawing more eyes, reaching for batons and radios as they slowly approached like he was a rabid dog. Dex’s eyes flicked between the ring and your face, lightning fast, planning something.

It happened out of nowhere. Another motion so fast it made you question if you’d just dreamed it. Your soulmate leaned forward with his whole body, head coming down, and enveloped your pointer finger and thumb in his mouth. Pressed your fingers against the wet heat of his tongue that pushed itself between your fingertips. Bit down on your knuckle and dragged his teeth along your skin until he caught on the ring. Yanked it out of your grasp and rearing back, tucked it into his cheek as his mouth closed.

You stood frozen, gaping, completely paralyzed by the feel of his lips on you, the drying of his saliva on your fingers. That first touch that made the wiry rope between you wrap around your heart and squeeze until you couldn’t breathe. A boa constrictor bent on digesting you until you could no longer fight the attraction.

But the guards were yelling, coming closer and eyes were turned to the commotion more surely than they would have been if someone simply yelled, “Fire!” A flash of his face as he reared his head further back, the whites of his eyes visible, complete and utter ruthlessness shuddering down his features until it was all that was left and—

Pain.

Pain. Bursting across your face, your nose, your forehead. So great that you couldn’t even see, just stumbled back wildly, away from the man whose touch had rooted you in place only moments before.

He’d headbutted you. Dex had fucking headbutted you.

“Goddamnit!” The word screeched out of you as you stumbled back, clutching your face with both hands. “Motherfucker!” The word came out nasal as blood filled your nose and poured down your face, between your fingers to the front of your shirt. “Fuck.”

Officers were swarming him now, so many that you were pushed out of the way in their rush, barely able to see, off balance, and falling into the next wall. Hands caught you, gripping you by the bicep as more hands pried yours away from your face and tilted your head back. Two of the security officers who’d wanded you in that morning had run over and were cautiously examining your nose; one was searching every pocket before coming up with a tissue.

Even pushing it up to stem the flow of blood coating your mouth-chin-throat, pain blazed through your face. “Fuck I think my nose is broken.” You told them, hissing. “My nose is broken.” You couldn’t even pronounce the words correctly, everything was so full of blood.

There was movement in the corner of your limited vision, and Matt was there – where he’d come from you didn’t know –  immediately dropping his cane to reach out and place his fingers over yours. Hold the drenched tissue in place. He was patting his jacket with his other hand and came up with a handkerchief that he subbed in. 

“Why’d you get so close to him?” One of the guards asked, having radioed for medical to come.

The second one agreed, nodding. “The man’s feral.”

You didn’t have to ask yourself why – to you, the answer was obvious. Cover for the ring. If you were found out, there would have been very uncomfortable questions. Possibly charges for aiding and abetting a known criminal. And everyone would know about your soul marks, the way you and he were paired together, your words vulnerable to scrutiny. He had decided in that split second that this was the better option; this play in which you’d be left innocent – stupid, but innocent – and he’d take all the blame, the monster they called him.

Protecting you, in his way.

Matt said nothing for a second; you thought about how blind people swore their other senses increased and how he was probably tasting the iron of your blood in the air. “Don’t do that again, kid.” You and Karen were nearly of age, not a kid to him but he said it with measured affection and you let it go.

Medical arrived and you finally lowered your head to see Dex on the ground, his leg chains broken, straddled by a host of prison guards. He’d been beaten, subdued only with sheer force and the restraints on his hands and arms. Every guard gave thanks for those, knew how many of them would have died at the point of his precision otherwise. His face was bloody, dripping from his hairline where they’d hit him with a baton; he breathed heavily, blowing air out of his nose like it personally offended him but his lips were clamped shut. Around your ring.

Dex was hauled up bodily by his arms, thrashing. Dragged back into the courtroom and out of your sight as reporters clamored for comments. Kirsten ran up from some back office, swearing, taking her turn at tilting your head this way and that while EMTs unpacked their supplies. Once she knew Matt was personally supervising the paramedics, she stalked into the courtroom, absolutely ready to wreak havoc.

The defense objected to a postponement, arguing for the right to a speedy trial. Slapped a bandage on Dex’s forehead and assured the court that it could proceed. Kirsten in turn assured you, several times, that you didn’t have to keep going that day. Go to the hospital. But honestly? You knew it would be harder than ever to testify if they let you leave. 

The casual disregard for Dex’s care, his health, struck an unpleasant nerve; if he could be forced to go through this still, you could force yourself to do it too. One of the paramedics gave you an extra fire department shirt to wear since yours was clearly bloodstained, despite being black. Another gave you wet wipes to delicately clean up your chin, your neck, from the bloody nose.

And Dex’s plan, it worked. The next day, newspapers ran headlines about your broken nose, blackening eyes, your testimony. Naivety, they wrote. Said you’d just gone for a drink from the only water fountain there, were attacked savagely by a monster. They said you were brave, for still going on the stand. An inspiration to ordinary citizens everywhere.

Honestly? You remembered nothing of what happened, nothing of the stand. Nothing but the frightening sense that fate would not let you go until he was all the way inside of you, and the feel of his tongue on your skin.

***

March 30, 2026

They stopped trying to take the ring from Dex after he bit off a piece of another guard’s ear. After he ended up in medical so many times the following weeks that the prison doctor threatened to complain. His public defender complained too – how could his client appear before the court beaten and bruised on a consistent basis? It’s prejudicial, your honor.

No matter how they tried, they couldn’t get the ring from his smallest finger.

He sat in his cell, back aching from the beatings, and rotated it round and round, meditative. Want, not need. Want was still a four letter word to him, but he was growing used to it. Convincing himself that the path he wanted was still open to him. Autonomy.

The trial continued for weeks, the state prosecutors determined to let every person in a three-block radius that night tell the court what an abomination he was. What a fucking bastard. 

The only pauses were to accommodate him when he was trapped in the infirmary from another skirmish with the prison guards. And she came back to court too, sitting at the back of the room like always, and now he knew for sure it wasn’t just him with hooks in. He’d ensnared her, too. Or rather, the words had. Round and round in court, that gold band with sapphire chips on his finger went underneath the table, hidden in the shroud, and Dex swore to himself each day that it was still warm from her body.

a love that flows like blood does that i’ll search for through the years you speak through gritted teeth saying, “my darling, I’m right here” - Paris, Paloma. “Stem the Flow.” Stem the Flow – Single, 2026

the spiders all in tune the evening of the moon dreams are made, winding through my head through my head - System of a Down. “Spiders.” System of a Down (Deluxe), 1998

October 30, 2025 - still

Dex had once envisioned a life of perfectly performed adulthood. Of proving that he could train himself not to be what he was born. An army veteran in the FBI with a good job, maybe with a girl who could make him part of a normal couple, and the costume of average life snug but zipped up. When hellfire burst through his chest and brain, and words slowly spread like an oil spill across his right forearm, he watched them darken curiously. Starting at the inside of his wrist and centering over ulna and radius, they solidified in hasty, tilted letters, and his confusion darkened to anger.

It was not a good feeling to have that control over his own life taken away, not when that control was everything – the only thing –  he had to keep his moral compass from shattering completely. Though he generally regarded the idea of soulmates to be absolutely absurd, his disappointment that it wasn’t Julie tattooed on him – immense. His childhood had taught him that he didn’t deserve something nice like a perfect person just for him, but if it could be anyone – surely it was his north star. Surely if he just held onto to Julie long enough, tightly enough, maybe she was all he needed. Maybe he could force it – force himself into the mold of what she wanted, and her into the mold of what he needed. 

And how had that ended? It ended with her dead, a bullet in her brain, discarded like trash. He still woke up with Julie’s frozen face in his dreams, her mouth struggling to scream until it ripped wide open at the corners.

After that loss, came resignation. Someone else could come take her place, and he would force them into her same mold. He was grasping onto any thread he could find to keep himself stable, and knew it. But a thread was a thread. A port in the storm was still shelter.

That business with Fisk – rancid business – Julie’s corpse, Father Lantom dead in Clinton Church, his friend Ray raising a gun; the manipulation, the sick rage, the echoing crack of his back against the wall – it killed that hope with burning alive. For years then, the anti-psychotics drowned it, that little thrashing creature where a heart should be. Fuck whoever that was out there, none of it mattered. His future was lit only with the fire of revenge in a dark, starless night, even if his forearm plainly said otherwise. 

And just when freedom was in reach, it was snatched away like a trick shot in the wind. Vanessa withheld his medication, and it faded from his system, let other things wake. In his chest was an ache, and honestly it would have been preferable to get shot instead. In his lungs there was the sensation of drowning, like he couldn’t see which way was up, and had swum to the ocean floor without realizing it.

Here was this woman with a face half-lit by red neon, some fucking final girl shit who raised her red hands and spoke to him with red lips and cried red tears, but wasn’t afraid of Bullseye. As the stranger in Karen Page’s coat stared, his own thoughts of years past echoed back, a boomerang of, ‘Fuck this shit.’

She brought with her a sticking sensation, a glue trap that held him fast. A chain that latched on but wasn’t something Dex could climb to the surface with. In that moment it tied him up, and it held him down.

He wanted to sneer cruelly, laugh and not care, shoot and find freedom – a dead soulmate was supposed to excruciating, but what was pain to someone like him? He wouldn’t though, because Dr. Mercer wouldn’t have approved. But also, Dex realized in uncomfortable transparency, she looked so beautiful with those red tears in her eyes and on her face; they glowed like rubies in the neon. Like they were a kindness she was doing him when he knew sorely little of it. The sensation was… new. Ill fitting, and he didn’t like it.

Daredevil came, and Dex learned then that Matthew Murdock wasn’t just a pest, he was a vigilante. Dex fought for his life and his freedom but he thought about how he didn’t need that woman. He didn’t need to own her or be owned by her or need to be tied down or be held down in whatever this sludge was that he could feel under his skin that boiled at the sight of her. He only wanted freedom. 

Because he had to keep repeating those things to himself, he knew that they were a lie.

Fuck this shit.

***

October 30, 2025 – and still

Heat exploded under your breast. It was like you could feel each spare letter being carved into the skin and soft flesh there, and a choked, jagged sob ripped itself out of your throat.

You hadn’t even turned around yet but you knew. You knew that those words were directed to you. They weren’t a funny misunderstanding; they weren’t someone dialing the wrong number and saying the wrong name. Way back when, you hoped with every Karen you met. And god, when you’d first met this Karen you’d asked yourself if it was a sign that something might actually happen and yet this wasn’t--- 

‘Oh god, it wasn’t what--’ your thoughts as blaring alarm bells shrieked.

In the beginning, you wondered about a distant Page family member. As your acquaintance grew, you thought maybe a friend or ex-coworker you stumbled into while meeting Foggy and Marci at his office. A---

Fuck. Another serrated sob, you sucked in breath raggedly like you’d just been dragged onto a boat in the middle of the ocean, saved from drowning only to realize that your savior was a killer.

Fuck. That wasn’t a metaphor, now. He was a vigilante.

Eyes on the ground, you slowly shifted to the side, feeling rusty, a machine on autopilot who could no more control their actions than an average toaster oven. Even your breaths rattled around in your chest like it was made of steel plating instead bones and blood and flesh.  ‘Maybe if I never look up, never speak, this will all stop happening.’ Foolish. As you thought it, you knew nothing could stop this hurtling precipice approaching you.

“Just look up.” You muttered, to Foggy with his eyes closed, to yourself with eyes open. “Do it.”

A man stood only a few feet away, far closer than you’d realized. With a shaking hand you could have reached out to touch the long barrel of his gun, baptize it with his victim’s blood.

He was tall, yes, but looming in a way that had nothing to do with his height. Imposing. Broad of shoulder, narrow of waist underneath a tight shirt, dark blue and long sleeved; biceps too muscled for two hands to wrap all the way around. The gun strapped across his chest pulled the shirt tight enough to delineate each muscle underneath. His thighs were thick, half-hidden in combat pants except that the holsters strapped around them showed you just how powerful, how strong he was. Everything emphasized by the weapons attached to him, their positioning speaking of skill, experience, danger.

Underneath a matching dark blue balaclava, all you could see were his eyes, the ridge of his brow. Your soulmate’s eyes – they were dark and syrupy in the night and a distant, stupid part of you wished for sunshine if only you were to see his eyes clearly. But what you could see was the intensity of him just there, the focus of a sniper trained on you and only you, dispassionately pinning you like a specimen for dissection in a high school science classroom.

Your gaze skittered from one spot to another, not sure where to stop, unable to stop, agitated. A rope, invisible but tangible, stretched between you and began to snap into place with frightening finality, gouging into that skin beneath your breast; it felt like a chain latching you to him permanently, and that chain would never stop dragging you along. There was a sense of momentum around him, like he himself was the bullet hurtling from a gun and you only wondered if you were enough of an immovable object to stop him. 

Foggy’s body pressed still and heavy against your knees, and it was a shame of deep proportions that a selfish part of your brain whispered terrible things to you then, right then in that moment: ‘Where were his words? Show him yours, show him yours. Tell him your name. Touch him. Touch him. Touch him.’ Each thought reverberated too loudly, and then more slowly, ‘Speak to him. See the look on his face. Speak now.’

The world slowly filtered back into your perception, the smoke, the cold, the yelling and chaos in the dive. The red neon of the Josie’s Bar sign in the window, half-shattered but still blinking and casting hallucinogenic shadows on the fabric stretched taut over your soulmate’s face. His gun was still pointed at you, and on the backs of his gloves you saw raised concentric circles molded into the leather, perfect bullseyes.

Slowly, you raised your hands up, skin tight from dried blood, holding them above your head. His eyes followed the movement lazily before returning to your face. Plainly, he could see that you were not Karen Page, but words still needed to be said. “I’m – I’m not who you think I am.”

The reaction, you were waiting for the reaction – that sense of wonder to dawn across his eyes. 

Maybe you could see a real part of him then, smiling through nerves and the sudden realization that he too, was faced with his soulmate for the very first time. It was something you had spent many long months dreaming of in that first year of the words, a reaction canonized in countless movies and television shows since. He’d know, and he’d lower his weapon, and this would all be a big mistake because he was actually chasing the man who’d shot Foggy, and he’d help you then, hold you and listen to everything stuck in the back of your head and somehow everything would be okay.

But… there was no reaction. No flash of hope, no sudden grin. Just a raised eyebrow, a ratcheting of the knife thin precision with which he held you fast in his gaze.

“I didn’t expect this.”

This. Not you. This.

Something wet was on your face, and your legs were cold where the blood was coagulating in the fabric of your jeans. His comment lanced too deeply, and you blinked to clear your clouded vision. Slowly your hands lowered till they could grab onto Foggy’s wrist again and hold on. Even gone, your friend helped steady you, kept you still on the sidewalk and not hyperventilating into a paper bag in the next alley way over. The urge to run was intense but – run to the man staring you down or fucking run away? You couldn’t say.

But most urgently you gagged on this desire to scream at him to want you, to not dismiss you, to tell you that you were better than he expected. Like a lot of thoughts, none of that came out – you tied it down inside. Not the time. It was not the time for that nonsense because you had a job to do here, and that job was to stay with Foggy till help arrived, but damn. DAMN. It felt mildly like you were having an aneurysm and couldn’t trust your eyes to tell you what was really happening around you. 

“How…” You stopped yourself, a small, strangled gasp throwing itself out of your throat and into the limited open space between the two of you.

Crying. Someone was crying. 

You were crying, you realized slowly, each individual tear tracing a new path down your skin. Knew it only when you saw his eyes tracking a single drop down your face, along your cheek and then the line of your jaw, before sliding the length of your neck to settle in the hollow at the base of your throat. He took a step forward then, and another. You thought you could see him swallow beneath the thick fabric of his mask, thought there might be a slight tremor in his free hand for just the briefest of moments before he tucked what he could not control away and out of sight. 

When he spoke, that illusion of feeling was thoroughly buried and his hands were steady – one on the gun, the other resting on the holster at his waist.

“How what, not Karen?” His voice was gravel, deep and cocksure. It resonated inside you like an echo through an ancient chamber, to a place not discovered by humanity for a thousand years.

It was embarrassing, how unsteady your own voice was in comparison, small and wet. “How could you not,” You swallowed heavily. “Not expect me?” Me, not this. That was important.

He took another step forward, almost to the sidewalk. For the first time in your limited acquaintance, he looked away at something above both your heads. The freedom of release from his eyes struck you dumb with how uncomfortable it felt, how you wanted it back like it was something tangible you’d always had.

This killer, your soulmate, tilted his head, listening. He flicked his wrist without looking at the movement, and a gunshot burst from the barrel of the gun past your eardrums and into the bar before the weapon returned to you. There was a moment of perfect silence behind you, back in Josie’s, before glass breaking and shouting for an exit resumed and cut the night open. From somewhere down the street, you could hear screaming; the crashed vehicle was still blaring its car alarm, and further away, the distant squall of real sirens. It felt like you’d been staring at each other for hours, days but with sudden clarity you realized it was only seconds – the world had not yet spun past the atrocity of this night, and Foggy’s death. 

A roar sounded down the street, too big to come from the chest of one human being, and then a shape in red slammed into the moment. It was like you’d been watching a video on slow and then accidentally pressed fast forward, scrambling past the climax of the movie without meaning to. Watching the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen come out of nowhere to plow into the man who was your soulmate – in the scheme of that evening, it was not the most unexpected thing to happen. Daredevil’s chest heaved, drawing in each breath like it owed him money, glanced through you instead of at you, and threw him, the looming man in blue, into the broken bar window and out of your sight.

“I’ve got an active shooter. Active shooter at Josie’s Bar.” The voice belonged to a different man, older, a badge clipped to his belt – the lionized Cherry this night was meant to celebrate. Your head snapped over to him, saw his eyes take in Foggy’s slack face, the blood on your own features now streaked with tears. “He need a bus? An ambulance?”

Your face broke into what would become your first real, unclenched sobs of the night, freely released with scrunched forehead and wet eyes and open mouth. “No.” It was more a moan than a word.

Cherry nodded, solemn.

He was looking behind you, down the street, but his gun wasn’t raised and finally you caught on to the fact that the screaming was Karen.

She tumbled to the ground and half-rolled over to your side, her voice hoarse and hands immediately pressing down on the chest wound like it would still make a difference. “Foggy!” She was sobbing openly, her face pressing into his stomach as she collapsed over him. Her back was heaving, her skin sweaty from exertion, her phone cast to the sidewalk when she arrived.

Cherry was speaking into his radio again, but no one was paying any more attention; customers from the bar were filtering around from the back exit, through the darkened alleys to emerge onto a scene of chaos. Everyone not still in the bar ignored the sounds of combat, of yelling and smashing and breaking wood, except for you. Your soulmate was in there, he was in there, he was the cause of all this.

He was fighting Daredevil, a hero to the city. He was destroying Josie’s. He’d shot people in the bar. He’d killed Foggy, and yet you worried for him. A reflexive instinct in the same way that waves hugged shores to the moon’s rhythm. In your throat lodged a stone of fear that today you’d not just meet your soulmate, but you’d find out what happened when he died.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” You mumbled thickly through your own crying, as Marci stumbled around the nearest corner and then collapsed across from Karen at Foggy’s other side. You spoke to both women but couldn’t say what you were apologizing for. Your failure to save your friend? Or the man you could feel sewn onto your very being? 

“Oh Foggy Bear.” Marci said softly, resting one hand on his shoulder and the other on Karen’s heaving back. “Oh, Foggy Bear.” 

Sirens, close now, almost at the scene – for Foggy. Flashing lights in red and white began to bounce hectically against second story windows, illuminating the body laid out between the three of you, and the tiny, tiny, tiny words you only now could see. They were under his chin, mostly hidden by beard, but now you knew were Foggy’s words were – wished you still didn’t.

Wished that you couldn’t feel the persistent tug under your breastbone, or know in your gut there was a rubber band stretched between you and him, trying to snap you back to him.

As if that rubber band snapped, he appeared. Not appeared so much as flew. Not flew so much as fell. Not fell so much as was thrown. Watching the vigilante with your words hit the pavement only a few feet away was an image now burned into your mind, etched permanently and terribly. The sound made you flinch the way a gunshot hadn’t just minutes earlier. 

His strong body splayed and motionless, his head twisted so you could see the sharp angles of his face for the very first time. Though he was half-shadowed by the smoke and the darkness, and his features weren’t clear, the sight hit you as a gut punch. You gasped, hands coming up to cover your mouth, and both Marci and Karen looked up at you, confused. 

‘They don’t know. How could they realize he’s—’ Marci was grasping your own wrists, pulling you closer into a hug, which from your dear cousin should have been comforting. Should have soothed the great aching maw that was opening up inside. But it soothed nothing because in that pounding, endless moment of silence you expected to feel it – pain sliced open by broken glass as the newly formed rope was severed, as a limb you didn’t know you had was cut away without mercy. You felt like an exposed artery with a knife pressing down, so when she said, “It’s okay. Shhhh. It’s okay,” you knew it wasn’t.

A spark. Life appeared in that man’s body again, awareness returning, movement in his face. His eyes opened, dark and bottomless – they flicked across the tableau presented, past you – stop. Backtrack back; focused on you.

You didn’t even know his name.

***

October 31, 2025

You spent most of Halloween in a police station.

After the fifth hour, you leaned your head all the way back against the precinct wall, throat bared, and tried to calm yourself by breathing through your nose. In this position, the world looked distorted, but it also looked farther away, like you’d removed yourself to higher ground for safety. Not that you were a suspect in anyway, the desk sergeant had assured you after hour two – they just had a lot of witnesses to talk to, and the detectives were saving the lengthiest interviews for last. Also explained why Matt, Karen, and Cherry sat beside you on the wooden benches still. 

Even Marce was already done, coming out shortly after one of the boys in blue brought her to an interrogation room. “Text me if you need a lawyer.” She whispered into your ear on the way out. “Be safe.”

Every so often an officer would walk by and assure you all it would be just a few minutes more. Their eyes would catch Matt’s disrespectful head tilt, Karen’s bleak shrugs, Cherry’s feigned disinterest, and your hands folded tightly together over your stomach. It was obvious you all itched to leave, and you knew if you wrapped your fingers around that  intangible rope you could follow it like a life line to the right spot – to him. You could feel him in a way you’d felt no one else

Coffee tasted old and lukewarm when you drank it and Matt wrinkled his nose when you and Karen asked for some. Paperwork fluttered into out baskets on desks, waiting to be filed. Perps and witnesses passed by, an unending parade. The lights above were flickering, and the buzzing started to reverberate through your skull until it was all you could hear, not even your own thoughts. 

Small thanks for small favors. 

The four of you ended up escorted by four different cops to four different interrogation rooms at the same time. Funny how they suddenly had the wherewithal for that. 

Though you had scrubbed in the shower till the water ran clear all night and all morning, being led through the bullpen made you feel as if a sign was stapled to your forehead telling everyone you weren’t quite a victim; not not a threat. Powell took Matt into one room, in another, Detective Mahoney promised to ‘get you done’ quickly and kindly didn’t ask about the dead expression on your face that never wavered.

No officer, you didn’t know anything about what happened after Foggy was shot. You didn’t know Daredevil, nor Bullseye. You didn’t tell him about your words. You didn’t cry. And you didn’t make it out in time for that adult-only Halloween party at the shoe store.

*** 

November 4, 2025

The funeral was a sad affair.

What a stupid thing to think. Of course, the funeral was bleak, stuffed full of people but you still felt empty. Foggy’s family, Matt, and Karen, sat in the front few pews at Clinton Church, solemn and quiet. You’d never seen Matt so reserved – usually he tried to hide his true self with a modicum of polite charm even in the direst of circumstances, but here… here was just a blank canvas named Matthew Murdock. You hated it.

By contrast, Karen was a throbbing nerve. She twitched, she jumped. She turned her head too fast at every noise, spoke too quickly, crossed and re-crossed her legs. Always moving even if it was just a finger tapping against the wood of the pew’s armrest. As the service was being delivered, she shifted closer to Matt and rested her head against his shoulder, seeking comfort; when he stiffened and didn’t reciprocate, it pained even you to watch her pull away, wounded.

You sat behind the family with Marci, having clasped hands in condolences with Theo and his parents as they arrived. Guilt ate at you when they shook your hand so readily – you, a family acquaintance, Marci’s cousin – when your soulmate was their son’s killer. Would they recoil if they knew some part of Bullseye lurked beneath your skin? Sure, they would. 

Surprisingly, Josie entered the church on her own and chose the seat next to you. She nodded, stalwart and solemn, and then bent her head in prayer before the service even began, an action as out of character for her as you might ever guess. You knew Foggy would be tickled to see her do so.

Unsurprisingly, Matt stood up to deliver a eulogy after the family was finished, the entire church listening to the tick tick tick of his cane guiding him to the pulpit. To pin drop silence, he delivered words of charm and sorrow and love; stories from college about perseverance and bungled lessons in adulthood. Peppered among his remarks was humor and fondness that had most in attendance tilting their lips up in small smiles and shaking their heads at the antics. He even laughed, softly, as he recounted meeting his very best friend in the world for the first time.

But Karen could tell that it was fake. And because she could tell, you could too. A false shell to hide behind. A mask.

Outside, after, New York had devolved into a cold, wet, slippery topography; every building was sad and wilting in the slow, unrelenting drizzle. Every street sheltered puddles that would swallow your whole foot up the ankle if you weren’t careful. Trees drooped, their branches weighed down with raindrops, and the sky oversaw the city with a gloom that spoke to the proceedings in the church. Standing on the sidewalk, feeling adrift and at odds with the world, you watched New Yorkers stumble by under umbrellas mostly, but a few held days old newspapers aloft. The headlines screamed about politics and the mayoral race, but also an article titled, “KILLER’S CONDITION STABLE, TRIAL AWAITS.”

The paper – the headline – had stared at you for days from your kitchen counter, unopened.

You swallowed around a lump in your throat, trying not to focus on the bolded red words, fumbled with lint in the pocket of your rain jacket. Point blank, you refused to read about him and invade his life with any number of crime columns. What you knew about him, you wanted to know from him and not a nightly news report; even if that meant you might only ever know very little. Already, it was a game to pretend that this was a point of principle and not a gnawing desire to even just talk to him. See him. Anything.

In the week after Foggy’s death, the words under your breast pulsed angrily every few hours, sensitized. The chance of ever forgetting the mess of your life was slim to none. Did he feel it? Did he think of you? But the sensation was a cold truth to hold on to. You had a match, but no body to hold close, no lips to kiss, no smiles to share. 

That desire and despair was making it more and more difficult to stay silent, to tell no one. You were intimately familiar with the sensation of isolation, but that didn’t mean you liked it. Who could you talk to? Who would hear how scared but entrapped you felt, and not go directly to the authorities? Leaving you standing outside Clinton Church, by yourself, wishing for someone to talk to.

And it was cold again, and shifting back and forth in the rain felt like a personal punishment. Even with the jacket, ice water was sliding past your collar, and down your sleeves each time you reached up to grab your falling hood. Ostensibly, you were waiting for Marci to come out, her conversation with the Nelson family dragging on. But really that wasn’t the case – while every Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz employee present that night had been urged to take at least several days of mental health time following the attack, Marci was electing to go downtown and prep a witness in another case as soon as she was done at the funeral. Meanwhile, your leave slip took full advantage of the time.

That was one of those defined differences between the two of you – she’d always distract herself from grief with work no matter what the problem was. You were often content to wallow in it.

Hence, the rest of your day was free, and you could go as you liked. Even if go as you liked meant standing in place and staring at the bodega across the street.

Karen stepped up next to you, her toes edging up to the same crack in the sidewalk you stood along. She looked to the sky heavily, then rummaged in her purse for what turned out to be chapstick, smearing it on. Her cheeks were already red from the breeze, a few strands of hair plastered to her forehead from rain. You might ordinarily have expected Matt to be at her side, but he was nowhere to be seen. “So,” She began, sighing much as you wished to. “Do you want to get coffee? Or lunch or something? I don’t want to be alone.” 

The two of you walked to a small Irish pub some blocks away and had a corner booth to yourselves. It was ideal for important, wild conversations – the pub was smokey and fairly crowded, but the drinkers in attendance were focused on some sort of televised match from overseas. None would pay attention to anything either of you said about vigilantes and death and the impossible, inescapable nature of words from alien technology. Rain pattered against the window next to your head, as Karen took the opportunity to bite out her frustration over Matt’s behavior. The way he ignored her, and acted as if there was no word bond between them a knife in her chest.

You listened solemnly over a cup of hot coffee – two sugars – and knew that a kinship was developing between the two of you that you wanted to foster. An intimacy of knowledge born from that night, far beyond what seeing each other every so often in a group setting could do. She would listen to you? A little? You hoped.

The waitress came by, took orders of Caesar salad and fish n’ chips, then disappeared in the crowd. And then your friend, she sipped her own coffee with shoulders slumped and said, “I’ve been talking enough already. What about you? How are you doing?” 

It was the right moment, if ever there could be one. ‘God, please don’t let the Words ruin this.’ So you told her. About your soulmate, and the cumulative 32 words you’d spoken to each other that night.

It took a long time to say it all, to delineate out loud all the hard lines and sharp edges of it. As Karen listened, her eyes glossed with tears, and her white teeth bit into her flushed bottom lip. She rubbed her hands roughly over her face at least three times, that twitchiness from the church pews taking over her nervous system again. You could feel the table vibrating as she began to bounce the leg closest to you contemptuously, sitting in judgment as her lips folded in on themselves in a grimace.

“I feel like shit.” You finished, twisting a paper napkin into long strands and then ripping it into pieces. “I said his words, he said mine. I—I  feel like... I guess confused. I don’t know.” The sentence was heavily punctuated with a sigh.

“Confused.” Disbelieving. She sounded disbelieving.

“Yeah.” You looked up at her, seeing a halo of light around her head from the fixture above the table.

“He killed Foggy.” There was that anger you feared, raw.

Karen said nothing for a long time again, sat staring at her own hands folded on the table before straightening as the food arrived. She plucked a fork and a knife from the napkin to her left almost delicately, and took to methodically slicing a piece of grilled chicken in her salad into as many minuscule strips as she could. Her hands shook more and more, the knife scraping against the ceramic bowl. Just sitting there, listening to her with your own food untouched, shamed you. 

Made you a little desperate for some context, someone with experience to validate at least some of what you felt; take that loneliness you knew so well and rid you of it, so that it wasn’t just the beating mass of your soulmate inside.  It was always pulling. Unstoppable force meeting movable object. “When you and Matt realized that you were, you know, soulmates, what did—”

Karen slammed her fork down, cutting you off. Her nostrils flared as she slowly picked it up again and ate a small sliver of chicken. “His name is Special Agent Benjamin L. Poindexter. Well, I guess former Special Agent. That happens when you’re a murderer.” The message was clear: her words were off limits now.

Your body told you that this name was printed forever underneath his words, written on your ribs even if invisibly. “Benjamin Poindexter.” You repeated so you could taste his name yourself, burning your fingers on a flake of fish. Forbidden knowledge suddenly revealed to you. Your stomach roiled to be eating, but it was better than sitting with nothing to do. “He was in the government.”

“An FBI Swat agent.” Now a piece of lettuce sat on Karen’s fork, but she waved it around for effect instead of eating it, her eyes flat. “And you need to stay the fuck way from him.”

Of course, the waitress came by at just this moment to check on the table, and politely ignored the tension braiding itself tighter and tighter around the two of you. She offered up water, and napkins, and perhaps dessert? She left while you fixated on the spiderweb of raindrops on the window, and Karen handled the necessities of the conversation. Instead of pretending to eat any longer, your fingers began tracing circles on the tabletop – concentric. Small, medium, large, small, medium, large.

Karen watched your fingers go round and round, her lips half-curled into a snarl. Making some arrow of connection between you and whatever she saw in her brain. Finally, with contempt, “That bastard tried to kill me. He killed his last girlfriend, Julie. He worked for Fisk and he did fucked up, fucked up, shit. He’s the one who impersonated Daredevil to hurt people. He’s dangerous, and unstable. You need to never go near him ever again.” 

Small.

A heavy swallow, a shaky breath. The waitress had refilled your coffee, so you took a sip and let it burn all the way down. You weren’t— weren’t equipped for this, but the prospect of never seeing the man – Benjamin – again lit that match against your words. “He killed his last girlfriend?” 

Maybe he’d want to kill you. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe he’d want to overwhelm and subsume you completely until there was nothing left of the person you used to be. The thought set your teeth on edge, tensed your whole body till it hurt, like you were ready to run right then.

Medium.

For the second time, Karen’s cutlery clattered down, and this time her hand snaked out to grab your own – whip quick in mid-circle. “I’m not joking. He’s not a man. He’s an animal.”

“Could you let go of Matt?” You wrenched your hand out from her grip to hang onto the table edge, still tensed enough to run. You knew you were playing with fire. “It’s – how could you say that like it’s so easy?”

“Matt doesn’t kill people.” Karen hissed. She seemed to weigh her words, debated truth or venom – relented to truth in spite of herself. “Technically, he didn’t kill her. Julie. Fisk did because Poindexter worked for him. She’d be alive today if it wasn’t for that.”

“Oh.” Tension released from your neck, a small pebble from a mountain of worry that skittered down your spine and made you shiver reflexively.

Large.

“You’re a lot calmer than I’d be right now.” Callous. Karen began to eat like she didn’t abjectly hate the food in front of her, that pesky internal pressure gauge having let off now. The words weren’t said kindly, and the hound of her anger wasn’t gone, just given a fox to hunt.

You tried to follow her lead, eat, could barely take a bite. The urge to vomit or move to Spain or to shoot someone so you could have your lawyer appeal to move you into the same prison as Benjamin was too great. Silver fork clattered loudly when you tossed it down onto your plate, because if she could, you could. A passing man in a red and green soccer jersey, on his way to the restrooms, caught your eye with an irritated look.

It was like he’d waved a red flag at a bull.

Something about being disapproved of by a random stranger in combination with Karen’s comments set off a chain reaction inside. Yeah, now that you weren’t eating? That taste in the back of your throat was bitterness. Acrid and sharp like someone had rinsed your mouth with lemon pledge and told you to be grateful for it. That she was calmer now meant she knew her words would hurt you and still didn’t pull them.

Bitterness like curdled milk – soured from a few drops of acid when you still remembered what fresh tasted of. Because now the idea of your soulmate was clotted up with blood and shame when you remembered what clean pure hope felt like.

The sharp tang of bitter almonds on the back of your tongue like poison, that desire for someone to want you dosed with cyanide. Because what could have been a future with hands held close and mouths on skin, and stolen glances and secret touches was gone. That same future frightened you so much you’d been frozen alone for so many years. 

You chuckled but it was self-deprecating, and cynical; pressed your chin into your palm and curled a pointer finger over your lips but it fared poorly in trying to stop angry, wounded tears from trying to force their way out. Karen set her own fork down as you wiped a single drop away angrily and god, couldn’t she stop judging and just have some fucking understanding? Didn’t she know what mud and shit you’d climbed through and pulled yourself out of, the stairs you’d dragged yourself up for a normal life just to be pushed down when you reached the landing? 

“No, I’m not. I just know how to shut the fuck up about my actual problems instead of dumping all of my crap about a— a—a shitty boyfriend on someone else.” Impulsive, it came out in a rush between a breath and shake of your head.

Karen flinched, and you pinched a section of your bottom lip between two fingers so hard the skin was sure to burst. Someone scored on the pub TVs and it felt like a world removed, your table an isolated rocket ship falling through space until there was nothing left. She began to rummage through her purse as if preparing to leave, ignoring the near full salad sitting neglected on the table in front of her, and it was clear to both of you, immediately, what a piece of shit you were for saying that. “Yeah, well,” Karen cleared her throat roughly. “Fuck you too.” Because she knew she’d been a piece of shit too.

“Jesus.” You deflated, and reached out to grab her forearm, feeling like you were crossing a gorge to do so. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I reacted and I didn’t think.” A whip of white lightning split the sky in the window behind her, intensifying winter’s hold on the city. Think about the shit and mud Karen had pulled herself from, the stairs she’d climbed, and try not to push her down. “I am really sorry for saying that.”

Karen sat crumpled against the table ledge, but she looked you in the eye, evaluating. Anger still simmered, but it was tempered with pity. The food was pushed to the far side the table, leaving space for feuding, for rage, for weeping, for understanding. For the surrender of someone too tired to sit upright, as you folded your arms on the waxed tabletop and laid your head down upon them.

As if in a dream, the bar goers cheered from the background.

“I know you didn’t choose this. I know that feeling of… wanting someone who’s not good for you. Dangerous.” This felt like knowledge you weren’t supposed to have, an insight that didn’t totally make sense. Matt wasn’t dangerous, but Karen’s own shit likely taught her that he was. The two of you must have looked like quite a pair at the table, limp, marionettes with strings cut. “It’s not your fault.”

The same man in the same ugly jersey passed again in the opposite direction, and you avoided even his gaze, feeling thoroughly shamed by your own bad behavior.  You cleared your throat roughly, sniffling. “Sure feels like it is.” What about you deserved this? What had you done wrong in your life that this fear dogged you? 

So far, she had delivered the first quick jab of a one two punch, and Karen made to follow it up with the dreaded right cross. “I don’t want to see what happens when a man like Benjamin Poindexter thinks you’re a toy he can play with. Do you know what I mean?”

Foggy’s face flashed in your sight, pale and bloodless. The horns on Matt’s head, the gunmetal of Benjamin’s gun, the bullseyes on his gloves. You could almost smell the smoke that had surrounded you like anisland battered by the sea. “I keep… thinking about him. No matter how hard I try. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that I’m done with this. As scared as I am.” 

You both knew what words meant, the way people reacted. It was well-documented after seven years living with the phenomena, and nothing you admitted was special. Still, a kernel of empathy seeded across the table. Karen grimaced again; she couldn’t think of how disturbing it must have been to face such cold eyes and savage violence, and to then know it was inescapable. Fate. “Try. I know it’s a lot to ask but try hard. A man like that will rip you up. And I’m not going to pick up any pieces.”

There was an expectant silence, and you knew that contextualizing everything you felt was penance for your earlier anger. The words tasted like chalk and you could barely get them out, but she was waiting. “Have I ever told you about when I lived in Washington, D.C.?”

Karen shook her head. You both knew you hadn’t.

“I had this boyfriend.” Your heart was beating fair through your chest; you’d have sooner ripped your own tongue out than continued. Your fingers started shaking against the table, too unsteady to do any more than tap rapidly on the wood. “My brother introduced us, you know? And they both worked on—"

God’s favorite you were not.

“Ladies.” You both looked up to see Officer Powell standing there, dressed in all black and carrying a half-empty bottle of Bud Light. You remembered viscerally how wrong it had felt to have his body pressed against your words in the bar. How he didn’t come out of Josie’s to try and help that night. “Funny seeing you two here.”

He was smiling, face shaded by stubble, looking between the two of you as if this was but a chance encounter between old friends. As if your face wasn’t surely frozen in an expression of mixed reticence and irritation. But even if you weren’t up for a fight, Karen was. “Leave us alone, Connor.”

It was most infuriating that he never let his smug grin waver, even when his eyes narrowed or his grip on his lukewarm beer shifted restlessly. “Hey, I’m friendly.” A decent impression of a decent person there, even if you knew what kind of slime the man was. “My friend over there told me you were sitting back here. I just came to chat.”

Karen turned her head sharply to look out the window, gathering herself, and then pinned the asshole with an unamused stare. “Jesus Christ, we just left the funeral. What is there to chat about?”

This time Powell’s smile did break, becoming more a baring of teeth than anything else. His eyes flicked between the two of you, always suspicious, trying to suss out what was going on. They settled back on Karen, but for a fleeting moment you wished for a chance to square up; berate someone, yell, say terrible things. “Hey, okay, don’t be such an asshole. I was coming to ask you about the trial since you’re handsy with Murdock. I heard they set a date for February. For that psycho freak.”

Karen’s voice was flat, accompanied by emphatically folded arms. “Yeah, they did. And?”

“And what?” Now he was back to trying to play it all off as nonchalance, poorly. “I’m gonna go, with the guys on the force. Should be a good one.”

“Goodbye. Powell.” At any moment you expected Karen to get out of her seat, expected to have to break up a fight.

Powell, shrugged, pretended to smile again, took a long swig of his beer, lingered. It was like he gained pleasure from extending his intrusion into their private conversation, their private thoughts. “See you there.” 

The two of you watched him saunter back to the bar, slowly, confident he’d provoked them enough for his own satisfaction. At the front, a bartender was calling for bets to be paid up, and a crowd of men pushed past each other in turn to slap money down on the bar top. Powell took his turn shoving through, dropping bills on the pile before disappearing to a table they couldn’t see, far from the TVs that were turned one by one to a basketball game.

Immediate, anticipating – reading the curious possibility of looking your word match in the eye, in person, right there in your face. “Do not go to that trial. I’m telling you, it’s a bad idea.” Karen was back to sitting upright, still feeling the fire of your encounter with Powell. By her expression, there was no fucking around on this, not in her opinion.

“Karen—” 

“Don’t tell him where you live. Don’t tell him where you work.” She was reaching across the table and signaling for the waitress to ask for to-go boxes for you both.

“Karen, I’m an adult. Is it really necessary for you to say this?” Your own bag sat neglected on the bench seat next to you, sadly rumpled from the rain, and you pawed through it for your wallet when the receipt was dropped off with empty food containers.

“Yes. You wanted advice, I’m going to give it to you.” At this Karen stopped what she was doing again, and looked you dead in the eye, leaned forward until there was nowhere to retreat to. She reached up to finger a small gold pendant on a chain, hanging from her neck, comforting herself. “Change jobs. Move. He may already even know where you are, because he’s a conniving fucker and, as I already said, he’s dangerous. He’ll use you up and leave you behind. So don’t go to the trial.”

You could have said you’d consider it, or that you wouldn’t go, but they both would have been blatant lies. Even if the idea of it scared you, this might be all you ever had, the only opportunity. And Karen thought you had a choice to let it slip by?

“Bad idea, huh?” Large circle, then medium, then small on the table with a single steady finger. Karen huffed, passing you some bills to cover her portion of the lunch, and didn’t press further even though she clearly wanted to. She was a smart woman, she knew it would be like talking to a wall.

February.

***

November 5, 2025

There was no freedom for Dex.

Stupid to not have seen that coming, and it left him bargaining for his life amongst the cutthroats and the animals, a stiff, frightened public defender his only shield against death. Vanessa Fisk had pulled him into the deep end with no warning and set him against an enemy he hadn’t expected; hoped for a bloody, public end to him. She also set him on a path to someone else – his lip curled in scorn – his soulmate. An unintentional blunder, but still, a blunder.

In the hospital, Dex tried not to think of her, with little success. They were afraid of what he could do with all those sharp objects that doctors tended to keep on hand, and sedated him around the clock. So drugged it made the psychiatric facility Vanessa had freed him from look like a pleasant haven. He spent days barely aware – not of the bright fluorescent lights, not the cold blankets, not the restraints that left him as physically immobilized as his thoughts were. What neither he nor they could do was erase that woman from his brain – in his mind’s eye, she floated at the surface and looked down to where he’d sunken.

In prison, at least they left him lucid, if only because, legally, he had to be able to assist in his own defense.

In prison, he could pretend the person with his words was living some pretty life out there, and that she didn’t need him, because he didn’t need her. Dex could ignore how he reached for someone in his sleep, hands grasping; and how the muscles in his arm kept twitching like he was aiming for a difficult target; and how his chest ached like he was bleeding out.

The morning shift was getting careless already, he was interested to note. They put a cloth covering over his cuffed hands whenever he left solitary and didn’t notice that if he tensed his forearms as they attached it the buckles stayed a little loose. They set things down where he might be able to reach them from his cell, like a dare. They stood with their firearms turned towards him, available. The morning shift assigned to him read newspapers that Dex could have ripped to long shreds and twisted together into a kind of garrote. They walked too far behind him during transport, daring him to run so they could shoot him.

An older guard observed red scuffs on his arm where he’d scratched at the words there. “Can’t believe some poor son of a bitch got a fucker like you tied to ‘em.” He announced loudly, to the amusement of the other guards on the block, smiling to see Dex’s jaw tighten. “Nothing to say, huh?” 

Johnson was printed on the man’s prison name tag, and Dex committed it to memory as he approached the iron bars of his cell. “No.”

He was part of the morning guard, so a paper was within reach. Johnson whistled, shaking it out with too much pomp and circumstance. “Just reading about your little day out, Poindexter. Too bad they didn’t put a bullet in your brain.”

Dex said nothing, unwilling to be goaded into any further response.

“The funeral was yesterday. See that?” Johnson held up the front page to the bars. “See what you did?” But Dex paid no attention to the taunts because – there she was. On the front page were a few photos of parishioners making their way up the church steps, umbrellas at their sides. The family, the coffin. And just there, in one of them, was that woman whose face still blinked neon red and beautiful in his dreams – shaking hands with Matt Murdock.

oh god, can you make me heart stop? hit me with your kill shot, baby I mean it, so serious god can you make my heart stop? honey, with your kill shot, baby? - Bay, Magdalena. “Killshot (Slowed + Reverb)” Killshot (Slowed + Reverb) – Single, 2021.

June, 2017 

When the aliens arrived, they did so quietly. Because naturally they expected to leave with a bang, you supposed.

But in any case, they silently observed in different spots around the world, and for some years watched and changed small things bit by bit in all the waterways they had access to, and everything was okay for awhile. No one seemed to notice, and the timeline of all this secrecy was still unclear to most people outside of covert alphabet soup government agencies, even years later. Then of course, their leader arrived. And well, he did not want things to change bit by bit, and he tried to blow up both the fucking Avengers Tower and the city.

Yeah, and it did not go well. For the aliens – most of them were wiped out handily, but there were consequences.

You remembered where you were when it all happened, downtown in a doctor’s office with your cousin Marci, helping her fill out paperwork while her mother and your aunt prepared for open heart surgery.

Metro-General was filled with sound – the squeak of rubber shoes; the snap of clamps on clipboards; the anxious, quiet conversation of patients. Sometimes there was even an errant laugh, as family members tried to amuse themselves in waiting rooms or medical staff entertained each other throughout the day. Sunlight filtered through dust motes and half-pulled blinds to warm people sitting in uncomfortable hospital chairs, and outside, New York City surged – abuzz and alive. It always seemed pregnant with this anticipation of action; and while some residents and all tourists seemed to relish that quality, most had learned to live with the low hum of nerves in perpetuity. After all, you never knew when you’d next end up trying to hide from Doombots or an enraged Frank Castle or some crazy person in a mask.

Of course, everyone in New York knew, sometimes, the anticipation had to break.

The building shook, followed shortly by your fingers and the beat of your heart. Marci’s hand trembled as she signed yet another form but this time more explosions began to crack, outside but nearby. As she dotted her I, the hospital you were both sitting in rattled alarmingly. People in the hallways and adjoining rooms cried out in surprise as the cycle of disruption began again. Ceiling tiles fell to the floor, dust and smoke filtered through air vents before it slowly filled up the hallways and your field of vision as you tried to flee someplace safe. 

It was already a warm summer day and sweat pooled at the small of your back as you searched for safety, and information. The air con had gone down immediately, and every face buzzing past you in the hallway was glazed in a sheen of sweat. You all were the rats in a maze, and any exit door that didn’t lead directly to an open fire or a structurally unsound stairway was the cheese. Marci’s face was ashen and her fingers clutched your hand tight as you turned another corner, hospital personnel streaming by on both sides.

“We’ve been hit!” One of them yelled, stumbling down to the nurse’s station and picking up the speakerphone option to the whole hospital. “Code Green! Follow evacuation procedures now. We’ve been hit!” His voice echoed through tinny speakers and then a ceiling tile fell and hit him directly on the head - of course by this point, everyone was too busy running to notice much. 

Across from the nurses’ station, a group of men clad in shades of black and navy stood with weapons pulled, though the smoke slowly turned them grayscale like everyone else. Even more waited in the hospital room, guarding someone, heads poking out into the hallway to see what the hell was happening. They were watching warily, braced against walls and speaking into earpieces and you had this insane desire to scream at them because aren’t they the fucking FBI so shouldn’t they do something? 

Anything?

Marci abandoned you for a doctor who was bent over rifling through paperwork and a stack of emergency kits under a desk, leaving you stranded like a leaf in a turbulent stream. You were coughing, your throat dry from panicking too quickly and your eyes burning from dripping sweat but inside your chest felt numb, distraught. You’d seen shit like this before – when you’d lived in Washington D.C. briefly, and the Triskelion fell. And the Helicarriers exploded. You still remembered the great blanket of ash and smoke that saturated the city, and all the funerals in the weeks afterward.

Just the thought of it, surrounded by such chaos, choked a sob out of you, and your eyes glassed over with budding tears, reflexive. Trauma didn’t just go away, you’d learned from that disaster. It hung on with sharp teeth and a sad, angry spirit until you finally gave in — and you were still a target in its sight. The screaming, the smoke, the pumping adrenaline all kept threatening to transport you back to a time you wished never to see again. 

A group of EMT stormed by, rushing a critical patient out on a gurney, and they clipped you in the side with the cold metal railing. Distracted, you stumbled with wheeling arms, and a disorienting moment later realized you’d tipped sideways into the grip of a black clad agent. Like gravity had abandoned you and only righted itself at his touch, he rooted you back to the floor and into reality, as terrible as it was. His fingers clamped down on your elbow, firm and so strong that you thought dramatically you’d bruise with his fingertips. So strong - was he one of the enhanced? Did the FBI hire those types of people? The foolish questions never made it out. 

He stared at you with lips pursed tight, eyes flinty and dark through the haze. Dusty, dark blond hair cut short severely, a face struggling to be impassive against whatever he held inside, the casual handling of a gun as if second nature. A moment of silence, electric, buzzed through you and the hysterical thought that maybe he felt it too occurred behind your eyes.

The moment shattered as windows splintered violently in the room behind him – another explosion – and the building rocked ominously. Shards of glass speared through the room and an errant few slid across the floor even as far as the hallway. More screams, more fear, more disorientation, more fucking trauma for a therapist you’d never hire — everyone staggered but you were held upright only by this disapproving man’s hold, cemented long enough that another agent yelled at you, voice breaking in the din. 

“Get out of here! Go!” He was not mean, simply urgent, a wash of panic over his face as things began to crumble further and further and further. Even this new agent’s warm skin looked pale under the fear and the fluorescent lights, able to tamp it down at all only because of his training. “The building is gonna go. Go!”

You were like a rag doll, the second agent’s free hand trying to yank you from the first – whose jaw had clenched, who had a bead of sweat sliding down the side of his face – and you lurched into Marci’s approaching grip on the other side. Marci. Your beautiful angel of a cousin Marci who always looked perfect, who always knew what to do, and who took you by the bicep and started jogging against the flow of traffic in the hallway whether anyone else hung onto you or not. The agent’s fingers peeled away from your other arm slowly, like rust had tightened all his joints and he couldn’t let go even if he wanted. “Come on!” She called out over the noise, yanking again and barely getting your name out in her hurry. Both men forgotten as a mission coalesced in front of you. 

“They said if we get to the cardiothoracic station quick enough, we can help them evac mom!” Her eyes didn’t look frantic enough for the situation, and god you admired that. Wished to emulate it and came up short. 

A barrage of gurneys and hospital beds were headed your way, all going in the other direction. The structure of the building creaked forebodingly with fractures breaking through the 1990s cream paint on the walls; lights flickered, and open doors swung haphazardly in their frames before banging shut and you swore that you hadn’t stepped into a damn Conjuring movie or some shit on accident. Someone was speaking over the audio system again, their voice trying not to be frantic but failing as they called for help to the NICU. And you would still have felt awash in the sea of chaos if not for the fact that Marci and Aunt Rebecca needed you on your fucking feet right then.

“Move!” You called, joining her in urgency at least. You felt your hair start to come out of its loose ponytail and instead of fixing it you braced yourself and raised an arm up to make a pathway through the crowd. “Move!”

But then you didn’t get there quickly enough. The results of that terrible day, even in your limited world, were manifest:

Rebecca Stahl died in the explosions. Marci lost her mom and you your aunt – but so did a lot of people, no one was special.

Your arm broke, falling down an unstable flight of stairs in the rush, and all you remembered for 24 hours afterward was a haze of pain as you both scrambled out. It took hours of triage at the next safest hospital and surgery to get you cared for. 

And finally: as the aliens were on the last gasps of their battle with the Avengers, they hit the panic button on their final plan. A burning sensation – a terrible, suffocating, blazing spread through the chests of everyone in the city, in the state, in the nation, in the world. People choked, cars crashed, planes spiraled out of control, the world went crazy for precisely 72 seconds. Everyone who’d drunk from those gently altered water sources – and there were a lot of them – frozen in pain and fear for enough time that those aliens left could escape and lick their wounds. And then it gently faded like the lap of waves on a lake, and was all over. The only remnant left? Words. 

The final plan was, of course, the words. The soulmates. This new fate. And no one escaped fate.

*** 

October 30, 2025

Dex’s back hurt and so did his arm. One of those things was normal, the other was not.

He was climbing up a fire escape, gloved hands steady on the steel rungs, boots barely making a sound with each step. Across his back was a loaded rifle; smoke grenades and 43 knives sat securely in the holsters around his waist, his chest, the small of his back, his thigh. His balaclava was tucked in a pocket; a smaller handgun was snug against his chest, the snap on its holster open so he could access it easily. He had his target’s location, and he had his ultimate goal in sight. 

Freedom. A mind that was his own, not subject to the control and machinations of others. Not the heavy blanket of medication that drowned him, not the orders of the federal government that held him back, or the manipulations of one Vanessa Fisk that strung him along. All that stood between him and what he wanted was one job, and he would let nothing stop him.

He set the rifle in position on the rooftop, hunkering down behind it and setting up the scope with secure fingers. Dex had expected to engineer a complicated shot, working within the constraints of his target’s position inside a bar, but here the man was, standing outside free and clear. The chill fall air snapped at his cheeks and lips, and the balaclava came down. It was all going to plan, easier than he expected.

Still. His arm hurt.

***

October 30, 2025

“Scientists as part of the Maria Stark Foundation announced today that their research led to a breakthrough in soulmate transmissions. Let’s join them on the—"

You let the so-called breaking news report fade into the background in favor of listening to those around you in the bar. Josie’s Bar, a neighborhood institution and one you wouldn’t usually feel nervous to be in. The bar top was sticky and scratched up, and the air smelled like that peculiar combination of cleaning supplies, limes, and cheap beer that haunted any good dive. Around you, everyone buzzed with this desperate desire to make their Friday night incredible – to stave off the Monday doldrums with alcohol and wild weekends they could remember fondly in between conference calls and deliveries.

A few people were paying attention to the soulmate research on the television, and honestly you’d been one of those people, at one time. Not so anymore.

The aftermath of The Words was a carnage of research and romantic entanglements and anger and questions regarding why and how and what the hell?

Marriages fell apart, marriages strengthened. High-profile crash outs on social media and quiet, sad announcements about relationships that no longer existed or, suddenly, did exist. Captain America showed the whole nation the words on his shoulder, indelible on his dark skin in beautiful handwriting – he didn’t say who it was. In LA, She-Hulk went on CNN to confirm that she’d met her soulmate. Spider-Man stammered awkwardly when cornered on social media and disappeared into the sky. On local broadcast, Wilson Fisk confirmed that his and Mrs. Fisk’s words told them they were soulmates – the first words they’d ever said to each other. Better for his mayoral campaign, you supposed.

Others had marks barely legible, like tattoos done in white ink. Not everyone was lucky enough to have a partner still alive, or alive for long.

The aliens, or Kree, or whomever – all so interchangeable at this point that it was only whoever they were not an actual desire to know – had well and truly fucked it all up. With the words. With the introduction of soulmates and this idea that you weren’t crazy, that there really was someone out there just for you. Before, a person might get called lonely or picky for being alone as long as you had been. Now, everyone just swore they were waiting for the right person. Their soulmate. Why date when you could just wait?

You’d given up. 

Easily, you were willing to acknowledge. 

Despite racking your brain, you couldn’t remember ever hearing the exact words on your skin from anyone else. And in the following weeks, months, and years, still no one had said what was imprinted in blocky, spare letters on your ribs. The words curved beautifully around the heaviness of your left breast, written in block letters by someone with an even heavier hand, and every so often they’d burn like they were pressed to a lit stove. Sometimes you woke to find your opposite hand was pressed in a fist against them and pretended to ignore it. Others vowed to wait a thousand years and you just… were tired. Let it go.

A beer glass plonked down on the bar in front of you, filled with – well, beer you guessed. You didn’t drink much anymore and only knew that it was dark gold, cold, frothy, and nothing you’d ordered. “Sorry Josie,” you said tracing a circle on the bar top with a fingertip. “I don’t think that’s mine.” “It’s yours.” Josie was wiping down the countertop with a rag that couldn’t have been making it any cleaner.  She eyed the way you kept circling a jagged scar in the bar, all concentric circles before starting from the beginning. “From the lady.”

Glancing over, you saw Marci had finally arrived – late like usual. She wore one of those outfits that she called a power suit and waved when she knew she had your attention before going back to her conversation with one Foggy Bear Nelson and one Kirsten McDuffie. Your smile could not have been more forced, but she didn’t even notice in the dim lighting and cigarette smoke shuffle of the crowded bar.

It wasn’t Josie’s Bar or the people rapidly getting drunk that made you nervous per se, you’d been there before – but more that you’d only just started an admin job at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz six months prior. Obviously, getting dragged to the retirement party of a cop you didn’t even know by coworkers you barely knew at all did not rate highly against your idea of the perfect Friday evening plan. But Marce had gotten you the job and kindly convinced HR that you weren’t so much of a fuck-up. She’d introduced you to all these people and then swanned off to court, confident you’d make a great impression and unaware that you’d immediately curl up like a roly poly bug in your little open plan cubicle and keep your head down.

Okay, yes, it was great to work with Marce. And okay, yes, Foggy Nelson over there was still a really nice guy you’d known for a long time, despite the break-up. And yeah, okay, he’d introduced you to some nice friends of his outside the firm in the last few months, and all the other coworkers were perfectly pleasant. It was, most likely, just your imagination that they all thought you were an imposter who wasn’t even qualified to file old briefs.

“…researchers have confirmed, finally, the existence of phantom sensations between soulmates. So that twinge you feel when your other half eats something spicy? Well, that’s—”

“Are you gonna drink that or are you just gonna sit on one of my bar stools that another paying customer could enjoy?”

You eyed Josie good-naturedly with a cautious disrespect for authority figures and opened your mouth to answer when a heavy arm slung itself over your shoulders without warning. Hot beer breath wreathed your face as a man pressed himself into your left side. The pressure of the wrong human being right there was vile. “Ye- yeah.” He slurred, “You gonna drink that? I can help you if you c-can’t.”

His arm slipped off you as you jerked out of the seat like a hit dog, lip hitching in poorly disguised disgust. Josie, your white knight, slapped at him with her bar rag before anything else could be said and braced one hand on her plaid covered hip. A drunk man with a badge was always a problem. “Get out of here Powell! Go collapse under the pool table or something.”

Not staying to hear the end of that sure to be contentious conversation, you grabbed the beer and slipped into the crowd, taking a roundabout way over to Marci’s small group. Most of the people in attendance were still fairly sober, though for how long, you knew not; they paid you no mind while you wound through their group chats and pool games. Several coworkers from HC&B nodded companionably, but your notoriety for being reserved was already strong enough to stop them from trying anything more. 

Only Foggy’s friends, Matt and Karen, tried to wave you over despite your hermit reputation. “I’m on my way to the cool kids table.” You said in passing, notching a thumb at where Kirsten was motioning for something from a bartender.

Karen grinned like this was an inside joke you’d stumbled into, her hand on Matt’s knee, and Matt just smiled companionably. You’d known him casually for awhile through Foggy and he was a nice guy – if strange – always listening too hard and asking questions like he already knew the answers. “Just don’t drink that stout too quickly.” He tapped his nose in good humor.

Ah, a stout.

Marci had already disappeared by the time you arrived, which was understandable. It must have been hard to find that the man you were living with and planned to marry didn’t have your words, and that you didn’t have his. Just because she was still friendly with Foggy & Co. didn’t mean she was eager to stick around all the time. Kirsten reached out and clinked her glass with yours before you could even greet them – though she didn’t work at either private firm, you’d delivered time sensitive paperwork to her at the DA’s office already on three occasions, and the appreciation was mutual. “Hey there new kid.”

“New kid?” Foggy slung an arm around your shoulders too, and his casual affection felt like the care of a friend, not the interest of a lecherous drunk. You let his arm stay. “This isn’t the new kid. This right here is the best little sister a guy could have. Show some respect McDuffie.”

“I’m not your little sister Foggy.” Your disgust had evaporated to a half-smile and a huffing laugh. The little sister thing was a sore subject but Foggy Bear never remembered and you’d never remind him. Finally sipping your beer, it tasted like, well, beer if someone had walked by it with an espresso a few times – you handed it to him as a show of favor. “I’m not even Marci’s little sister.”

Foggy’s hand tapped your shoulder companionably. “Tomato, tom-ah-to. Don’t argue with me, I’m a lawyer.” He too tried the beer. “Oh, I hate stouts. Here.” 

And so Kirsten tried it next – she seemed to like it. “Lawyers, amirite?” Her glance was conspiratorial. “Don’t think you’ll escape the conversation Foggy. What’s your game plan for court if you’re so confident?”

“I’ll keep my strategy to myself, thank you very much.” He was comedically trying to drink from his own glass with the same arm draped over your shoulders, half-strangling you with each drawn out sip as any good big brother would. “And no, you can’t worm it out of me. But yes did you know, Josie keeps a bottle of 20-year old O’Melveny’s behind the bar?”

The conversation continued, both lawyers ribbing each other competitively. You laughed with them, feeling yourself start to get hot and sweaty in the crowded bar as just a little chord of happiness rose up within you. Everything felt warm in that soft, golden way of old lightbulbs – it was one of those pleasant moments you knew you’d all talk about as you remembered when. Maybe real friends aren’t so out of reach anymore, you decided, coughing and wheezing because Kirsten had persuaded you to do a shot of whiskey with them. Your face was red but it wasn’t from the alcohol, it was from the inclusion. The cheer.

Damn, maybe this was going to be a good Friday night.

Foggy’s phone rang and the moment faded as he excused himself to take the call outside, the mantle of a serious lawyer settling over him like a funeral shroud. Kirsten made amiable small talk with you instead, asking about how you liked your job and life in a new city. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “I didn’t know you’d lived here before. I thought you were a total transplant!”

You grimaced at the connotation. “No, no, I was born and raised her like Marci and Foggy. I just saw an opportunity to travel some and live elsewhere for awhile and took it. Moved back and forth a few times.”

“How’d you like it? Washington DC, right?”

The thought of describing your time in DC as pleasant or a good thing or something you even wanted to remember made all those soft, warm feelings dissipate like so much mist. Another divot in the bar top, another set of concentric circles with your pointer finger. You shrugged. “It was okay, you know. But… it was hard. It was really hard.” Glancing at the small watch on your wrist you frowned; Foggy had been gone for several minutes too many for things to be totally okay. “Maybe I should go check on Foggy.”

“I’ll hold our spot.”

The transition from warm bar to chilly night breeze brought goosebumps out on your arms, the back of your neck. No jacket to shrug on because you were lousy with a sleep schedule and had bolted up to get ready for work at the last second possible that morning. How could you grab a coat when your left hand held sixteen different things in three fingers and your right hand was tasked with unlocking and relocking the apartment door?

Your breath puffed out, visible even under the streetlights, and man, you really regretted those last five minutes spent in bed. But the night was peaceful enough, a low hum of traffic and far off car alarms accompanied by the rattle of apartment cats daring to explore rickety old fire escapes. The soft roll of a small, seasonally early fog bank turned parked cars and pedestrians into blurry shapes out of a sci-fi movie, reminding you that it was almost Halloween. A few of the businesses on the street had already set out orange plastic pumpkins, their mouths and eyes spooky dark wells without the candles lit within. The shoe shop next door had a paper flyer in the window advertising kid’s trick or treating from 5 to 8 pm the following night – it promised an adult-only neighborhood party from 8 pm to 2 am a la Nightmare on Elm Street.

Matt and Karen had the same thought as you, it seemed, having left the bar to see what was going on. They stood in a huddled group with Foggy – though they had the wherewithal to have jackets on. Matt held his cane in both fists, his grip so tight that the flesh of his fingers was striped red and white with tension. Even his red lensed glasses seemed to be tilted at a disapproving angle towards Foggy, his brow furrowed and shoulders high up and tense. Karen’s hair was wisping around her face in a golden halo, and she stood between the two men like a bridge or an interpreter or a concerned white flag, trying to keep the peace. Her eyes caught yours briefly but she didn’t even nod you over like you might have expected at another time.

“Is everything alright? Can I help with –” You started, walking hesitantly over to them, trying to assume the best and offer yourself with good intentions of assistance.

Matt slashed you a glance, but he was talking to Foggy Bear. “What’s going on?”

Karen finally leaned over to whisper in your ear, breathy and nervous as the others continued to talk over you both. “Something’s going on with a case.” 

Your feet were getting chilled from the cold sidewalk, even through your work shoes, and you shifted from side to side hesitantly, rubbing your arms with even colder hands. “I’m happy to help or run to your office to get something, anything like that. Just say the word, you know that.” 

Karen’s eyes were impossibly blue and her nose was turning red in the night air but she nodded sharply and patted you on the shoulder; Matt and Foggy were still arguing – not angry at each other but going back and forth over some sort of case and client named Cafaro. The name was vaguely familiar from a few legal documents you’d filed or emailed out for signature as a third party was represented by Hogarth, but the exact nature of all this urgency was over your head. Foggy’s face was getting red with worry and exasperation at being questioned so harshly, Matt just kept gripping his cane tighter and tighter. A small pit of worry was seeded in your stomach, watching tension ratchet between them – Foggy didn’t get worked up like this for nothing.

“Here.” After another moment of shivering under the streetlamp – damn, could you just be a responsible adult for once in your life -- and Karen handed you her purse briefly before she began sliding out of her jacket. “I’ll make Matt give me his. Take mine.” 

“Oh Karen don’t, I couldn’t. It’s too cold.”

She smiled briefly, pushing the long, tan coat further into your arms and taking back her purse. Though she was smaller than you, it was oversized, and you did kind of hope to avoid turning into a human popsicle right then and there. “I told you. Matt will give me his. You can repay me with coffee this week and bring the coat back then.”

Karen had said that bit about Matt and his own jacket louder on purpose, trying to defuse the situation with a bit of a redirect, reached out even to tug the collar of his coat – but it immediately failed. Matt only glanced over with lips pressed tight together – only briefly taking in the jacket swap before he was stalking off down the street, cane dinging back and forth rapidly. Foggy stood across from you, holding his phone out in one hand like it was a snake that bit him, and you realized that it sounded distinctly like someone getting the shit beaten out of them on the other end.

“Just stay there. Keep trying to get him on the phone again.” Matt was almost a block away at this point, his voice echoing against the hard shells of the buildings around you, against the scratched glass of the streetlights. For a second, he turned his head as if to see them again – a blind bat using echolocation to find its safe perch in a dark cave – and from a trick of the light it almost, almost seemed like he had horns on his head. You blinked, and the thought was gone – probably that shot of whiskey back in the bar.

“Come on, Benny. Come on Benny! Benny? Benny?” Now Foggy was speaking directly into the phone, and Karen was leaning in close for warmth and to hear better, her breath clouding over the screen. You started to also lean in close, but a tingling sensation of awareness stiffened your spine.

Like fingers slowly climbing your vertebrae, fingernails pricking your skin with each step. Like a sigh sliding along the back of your neck when you thought you were alone. Like the sound of soft footsteps in an empty stairwell, like sighting a stranger at the far end of a dark block while you’re by yourself, like gooseflesh rising on your arms in a haunted house and listening to someone breathe on the other end of a quiet phone line and like and like and like – the sensation of being perceived by the unknown.

You looked up to realize that the others hadn’t felt it. “Someone’s watching us.” You mumbled, still tasting the realization on your tongue. Your words were warming rapidly against your heartbeat, as if they were sitting too close to a radiator, and you almost wished Karen had kept her coat. “Someone’s watching us.” Again, louder, but Foggy was still talking, growing more and more frantic.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about.” Foggy was finally looking at you, but he was frowning and you couldn’t seem to get out the words, again, that someone was fucking watching all of you. “He said someone’s looking for—”

Foggy’s blood splattered everywhere. Small, delicate drops like the start of a rainstorm that speckled your face and your neck and Karen’s jacket. Karen. Karen who had her hands clasped over her mouth in horror, smearing the blood on her cheeks as she screamed, high pitched. And Foggy. Foggy, his face a mask of shock and confusion, still holding that damn phone out like nothing had happened.

He collapsed as a sound like a cannonball on a collision course boomed through the street,  and through the smoke you could see that a car had hit the nearest telephone poll with a sickening crunch and a nasty car alarm. The driver hadn’t been able to see the road through the smoke.

Smoke, you realized, not fog. There was goddamn smoke everywhere, all at once, and as you slowly knelt next to where Foggy lay and Karen kept pressure on his chest, your brain whirled. What the fuck was happening? You felt like a statue being forced to life by a wicked fae creature, limbs moving for the very first time, eyes unblinking, skin overtly sensitive to that gaze upon you.

Inside the bar, people were screaming, and a few of them poured out in a rush of chaos – they too collapsed like ragdolls, bleeding. Karen’s left hand was splayed, pale but stained, over the growing red flower of blood on Foggy’s chest; her right was fumbling with her own cell phone, hitting the send button over and over and over again, 911 on the screen. She looked up at you with panic gleaming in every feature of her face, every strand of wild hair. “Jesus Christ! I can’t get the call to fucking go through!”

It was like a shock of electricity through your system. Ignoring the tears slowly dripping down her cheeks, you whipped her scarf off her neck and bundled it into a messy mass, pushing her hand out of the way and pressing down with both of yours against Foggy’s ribs, against his heart. He was aware, his eyes starring at Karen, at you, but his mouth opened and closed silently. You looked away, afraid that if you looked a dying man in the eye you’d lose it and never get it back, and swallowed thickly.

Karen was thrusting her phone in your face, without any rationale behind her movements at this point, and with a terrible, sinking sensation you remembered the car, and the telephone poll. “The cell service is probably out. Go! Run to the next block! I’ll stay with him!”

She jolted to her feet and then stopped, halfway up, eyes pinned to Foggy’s slowly waxing face. “Go!” You were screaming at her now, voice cracking while an anchor of dread tried to drown you at the bottom of the ocean or make you throw up, whichever came first. Your purse, and so your phone, were still in the bar with Kirsten, so it had to be her. “Run till you get to the next tower and call 911. Now!” Again, a hesitation, again a ragged yell. “Go!”

That did it, the order, the mission. You knew that always helped when a crisis came knocking. She was off like a shot, heels clacking against the sidewalk, her long legs taking her halfway down the block before you could blink. She’d make it, you told yourself. She had to.

Your hair was falling in your face, sticking to the blood on your cheeks, and you spared a moment to shove it back. Your hands were already gummy from the blood seeping through Karen’s scarf, and you wondered for the first time in a red fog of panic where the hell Matt was. You couldn’t be the one left to hold this man together with sheer will and tears, could you? It felt like you were choking, suffocating, an overwhelming pressure building in your ears while life leaked out from between your fingers.

Where were Foggy’s words? Who did they belong to? Who did he belong to? The thought made your skin itch, washed the world around you in a wave of cruelty.

Foggy was grasping your wrist now, his eyes were fluttering shut and they only opened again every time you slapped his cheek with one hand. Blood was pooling on the sidewalk and staining the knees of your pants, the edges of Karen’s jacket. 

“Come on Foggy,” you breathed out, leaning over him, holding him close to you like he was a brother because for god’s sake he fucking could have been. “Come on Foggy, don’t do this. Don’t do this now. Trade places with me. I’ll trade places with you, okay? Just—just don’t do this. Foggy? Foggy?”

Footsteps behind you, several feet away but growing closer, sure and heavy. You lifted your head to stare blindly through unshed tears at the brick wall of Josie’s Bar, bound in place. The heat against your ribs was growing and you wondered if your soulmate could feel it, the fear, the surge of adrenaline that was making you shake, the way your lungs burned like you’d run for miles and could go no more. Would they worry for you? Would they look to the night sky and hope you were okay? If you died too, would they mourn?

Again, the footsteps, the tink tink of something metal hitting the ground and then rolling, the building smoke.

“Foggy, Foggy I’ll trade places with you, please.” Your eyes were stinging, your voice hoarse, plea useless.

It almost felt like a train was hurtling towards you, a battering ram, because in your brain you swore the ground was shaking, rumbling with a sense of this is it. Of fate. It was all you could do to keep the pressure on Foggy’s chest steady, and with the scarf sodden now with heart’s blood, you tossed it to the side to press your palms down instead. The thought of him feeling the warmth of your body there instead of wet fabric almost too much to bear.

An oblong shape lodged through the front window of Josie’s and dusky smoke began to billow, coating the roof of your mouth and reminding you unpleasantly of a cheap Halloween carnival. The entirety of this strange pressure – both outward and inward at the same time, like suffocating, a pillow over your face in the night – stuttered your thought, your body. The footsteps were growing closer, but the miasma was dense, a whiteout of fear, and even as more people fell out of the bar in their haste to escape, it made you feel so alone.

Because Foggy was gone. You could feel it. In the way his chest didn’t rise any further, in the way the blood stopped pumping against your palm and his hand fell to the sidewalk. You were alone, with only whoever that was behind---

“Hello Karen. It’s nice to see you again.”

Horror. Dawning, clawing, ripping horror.

Your words.

Steve Rogers had faced HYDRA.

Aliens.

Ultron.

A homicidal assassin who had once tried to punch his way through Steve’s rib cage and who, admittedly, was now his best friend again.

None of those things made him quite as cautious as walking into your apartment.

Not because of you.

You were wonderful.

You were, in fact, the reason Steve willingly continued entering the apartment despite the very real threat to his personal safety currently sitting in the middle of your living room floor.

Steve stopped just inside the door.

The cat stared at him.

Steve stared back.

Small.

Black.

Green-eyed.

Perfectly still.

Completely unreadable.

Steve slowly closed the door behind him.

“Hi.”

The cat blinked.

Steve narrowed his eyes.

There were two possibilities.

Paris.

Sweet, affectionate Paris, who had decided within approximately twelve minutes of meeting Steve that Steve belonged to him. Paris climbed into his lap whenever he sat down, slept against his chest, purred loud enough to vibrate Steve’s sternum, and had once spent nearly twenty minutes kneading Steve’s stomach while Steve endured it with the patient expression of a man being blessed by a very small god.

Or Dakar.

Dakar was insane.

There was no kinder way to put it.

Dakar had bitten Steve’s ankle during their first meeting.

Not aggressively, apparently.

You had assured him of that.

“He likes you.”

“He drew blood.”

“He gets excited.”

“He ambushed me from underneath the couch.”

“He was playing.”

Steve had stared at you.

You had kissed his cheek.

He had decided to let it go.

That had been a mistake.

Dakar did not walk through the apartment.

Dakar manifested.

He appeared on top of bookshelves no one had seen him climb. He launched himself sideways off furniture for reasons known only to him. He attacked shadows. He screamed at closed doors. He once slapped Steve directly across the mouth at three in the morning and then sprinted away.

Paris had been asleep on Steve’s chest at the time.

Which was the only reason Steve had known exactly who the culprit was.

Usually, he had no idea.

Because they were identical.

Completely.

Utterly.

Infuriatingly identical.

You claimed there were differences.

Apparently Paris’s face was “softer.”

Dakar’s ears were “slightly pointier.”

Paris had “kind eyes.”

Dakar had “crime in his.”

Steve saw two black cats.

That was it.

Now, the cat in front of him flicked its tail.

Steve remained motionless.

“You Paris?”

The cat stared.

“Dakar?”

Nothing.

Steve glanced toward the hallway.

“Baby?”

“In the bedroom!” you called.

Steve looked back at the cat.

The cat looked back at Steve.

Neither moved.

Steve slowly crouched.

“Okay.”

One ear twitched.

Steve extended his hand cautiously.

“If you’re Paris…”

The cat leaned forward.

Steve relaxed slightly.

“…you’re a very handsome boy.”

The cat sniffed his fingers.

Steve smiled.

“There we go.”

A tiny nose bumped his knuckle.

Definitely Paris.

Steve scratched beneath his chin.

The cat purred.

Steve’s smile widened.

“Yeah. Knew it was you.”

The cat pushed eagerly into his hand.

Steve crouched lower.

“You’re my good boy, huh?”

The purring intensified.

Steve scratched behind one velvet ear.

“I don’t know why your brother can’t be more like you.”

The cat’s pupils expanded.

Steve stopped.

“Oh.”

The cat launched himself at Steve’s face.

“Jesus Christ–!”

Steve fell backward.

A black blur ricocheted off his shoulder, hit the floor, sprinted across the living room, jumped onto the couch, bounced off the backrest and disappeared down the hallway.

You appeared in the bedroom doorway.

Steve was sitting on the floor.

His hair was disheveled.

There was a thin red scratch along his jaw.

You looked toward the hallway.

Then back at your boyfriend.

“Oh no.”

Steve pointed after the cat.

“Dakar.”

You pressed your lips together.

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re laughing.”

“I’m really not.”

Your shoulders started shaking.

Steve stared at you.

You lost the battle entirely.

He sighed.

“You said Dakar doesn’t purr.”

“I said Dakar doesn’t usually purr.”

“He weaponized affection.”

That only made you laugh harder.

Steve pushed himself to his feet with as much dignity as a six-foot-two super soldier who had just been defeated by an eleven-pound house cat could reasonably manage.

“He deliberately tricked me.”

“He’s a cat, Steve.”

“He knew what he was doing.”

You came closer and touched the scratch on his jaw.

“He got you good.”

Steve gave you a flat look.

You smiled sweetly.

“Poor baby.”

“Thank you.”

“I was talking about Dakar. You probably scared him.”

Steve stared at you in betrayal.

You kissed him before he could protest.

That helped.

Somewhat.

Then something brushed against his ankle.

Steve froze.

He looked down.

Black cat.

Naturally.

Steve looked at you.

You looked down.

“Oh, hi, Paris.”

Steve immediately bent and scooped the cat into his arms.

Paris settled against his chest without protest, beginning to purr before Steve had even properly adjusted him.

Steve pointed toward the hallway with his free hand.

“See? This is a normal cat.”

Paris rubbed his face beneath Steve’s chin.

“He loves you.”

“I love him.”

A distant crash came from the bedroom.

Steve’s eyes closed.

You glanced toward the sound.

Another crash.

Then silence.

Steve opened his eyes.

“Do we need to check?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Something else hit the floor.

Steve frowned. “What does he have access to in there?”

“Nothing dangerous.”

A pause.

“To us or to him?”

“Yes.”

Steve stared at you.

You took Paris from his arms.

“Come on. I made dinner.”

Steve followed you toward the kitchen, casting one suspicious glance down the hallway.

Dating you had meant learning several things.

You stole his shirts.

You hated folding laundry.

You always forgot where you put your phone despite usually holding it while searching for it.

And your cats had somehow decided that Steve represented two entirely different things.

To Paris, Steve was furniture.

Premium furniture, admittedly.

Warm, broad, comfortable furniture with excellent hands for scratching behind ears.

Paris adored him.

If Steve stayed overnight, Paris slept with him.

If Steve sat on your couch, Paris occupied his lap.

If Steve arrived after several days away, Paris greeted him at the door like a soldier returning from war.

Dakar seemed to regard Steve as an interactive enrichment activity.

Steve never knew when an attack would come.

His ankles had become particularly popular targets.

“You could put different collars on them,” Steve suggested one evening.

You looked personally offended.

“They have different collars.”

Steve glanced across the room.

Two black cats sat side by side on the rug.

Both wore black collars.

Steve looked back at you.

“Different how?”

“Paris has the little silver moon.”

Steve squinted.

“Dakar has a star.”

He squinted harder.

“They’re the size of my thumbnail.”

“They're completely different.”

“From six feet up, they’re identical.”

You kissed his shoulder.

“You’ll learn.”

Steve did try.

God, did he try.

He studied them.

Paris was supposedly slightly bigger.

Dakar supposedly had a narrower nose.

Paris’s tail curved differently when he walked.

Dakar held his head “like he was planning something.”

Steve even took pictures.

This proved to be useless because every photograph became a small black void with eyes.

Bucky found the entire situation hysterical.

“You can identify me from my footsteps,” he said one afternoon at the compound.

“I’ve known you since we were six.”

“You identified six HYDRA agents through thermal signatures last month.”

“That was different.”

“You memorized the license plate of a car that followed us for fourteen seconds.”

Steve scowled.

Sam leaned across the table.

“But the cats got him.”

“The cats are identical.”

Bucky grinned. “Sure.”

“They are.”

“Whatever you say, punk.”

Steve pointed at him. “You haven’t met them.”

Bucky’s grin widened.

So Steve made another mistake.

He invited Bucky and Sam over.

Paris immediately jumped into Bucky’s lap.

Bucky looked delighted.

“Well, hey there.”

Steve crossed his arms.

“That’s Paris.”

“See?” you said. “You’re getting better.”

Steve nodded smugly.

Sam crouched near the other cat.

“And this must be Dakar.”

Steve opened his mouth.

“Sam–”

Too late.

Sam extended one finger.

Dakar sniffed it.

Sam scratched beneath his chin.

Dakar purred.

Steve watched.

Nothing happened.

Sam looked up at him.

“This the crazy one?”

“Yes.”

Dakar rolled onto his back.

Sam rubbed his stomach.

Steve’s eyes widened.

“Don’t do that.”

Sam looked confused. “Why?”

“He hates that.”

Apparently, Dakar did not hate that.

Dakar stretched luxuriously beneath Sam’s hand.

Bucky started laughing.

Steve looked at you.

“You told me he hated that.”

“With you.”

“With–”

Steve stared at Dakar.

Dakar stared back upside down from the rug.

The little bastard looked smug.

“He does this intentionally.”

Sam snorted.

“He’s a cat, man.”

“That's what she says.”

Bucky scratched Paris’s head.

“I think he just doesn't like you.”

Paris purred.

Dakar purred.

Steve’s jaw tightened.

“I am not getting bullied in my girlfriend’s apartment by something that fits inside a grocery bag.”

Dakar immediately got up.

Steve watched him approach.

“Don’t.”

Dakar continued.

“Dakar.”

The cat sat directly on Steve’s shoe.

Steve looked down.

Dakar looked up.

Steve hesitated.

Slowly, very carefully, he crouched.

Dakar remained still.

Steve touched his head.

Dakar leaned into his palm.

The room went quiet.

Sam whispered, “Holy shit.”

Steve looked toward you.

You smiled.

“There.”

Steve scratched Dakar’s ears.

The cat’s eyes closed.

Steve’s whole expression softened.

“See?” you murmured. “He likes you.”

Steve smiled.

“He does.”

Dakar opened his eyes.

Steve saw it.

That tiny shift.

That spark.

Crime.

“Oh, no–”

Dakar grabbed Steve’s wrist with all four paws and sank his teeth gently but decisively into his thumb.

Bucky nearly fell off the couch laughing.

Sam doubled over.

You covered your face.

Steve stared down at the cat attached to his hand.

Dakar stared back.

Then released him and casually walked away.

Steve straightened.

“Nope.”

You were laughing too hard to answer.

“I’m done trying.”

“Steve–”

“No. Paris and I have an understanding. Dakar and I are enemies.”

From Bucky’s lap, Paris meowed.

Steve pointed at him.

“Good boy.”

Bucky glanced down.

Then at you.

Then back at the cat.

His grin slowly disappeared.

“Uh, Steve?”

“What?”

You had noticed too.

You were biting your lip.

Bucky carefully lifted the cat’s collar.

A tiny silver star glinted beneath the fur.

Steve went very still.

Sam made a choking noise.

Steve looked toward the hallway.

Another black cat had appeared there.

The little silver moon hanging from his collar caught the light.

Paris.

The same cat who had wrapped himself around Steve’s wrist and bitten his thumb less than five minutes ago.

Steve stared at him.

Then at the cat sitting peacefully in Bucky’s lap.

Dakar.

Who had apparently been cuddling Bucky for nearly twenty minutes without committing a single act of violence.

Bucky slowly looked at Steve.

Steve’s face hardened.

“Don’t.”

Bucky’s mouth twitched.

“Not one word.”

“You called Dakar a sociopath.”

“He usually is!”

“And Paris bit you.”

Steve pointed toward the hallway. “He was impersonating his brother.”

Sam made a strangled sound and folded over laughing.

“You got attacked by the nice one?”

“He tricked me!”

Paris sat neatly in the hallway, looking entirely innocent.

Steve stared at him in betrayal.

“You.”

Paris blinked.

“You’re supposed to be my good boy.”

Paris meowed.

Sam wiped tears from his eyes. “Man, at some point you gotta accept the possibility that neither of these cats respects you.”

Dakar yawned from Bucky’s lap.

Steve pointed at him.

“And that one is still a sociopath.”

Bucky scratched beneath Dakar’s chin.

The cat immediately began to purr.

“Seems pretty nice to me.”

“He slapped me while I was asleep.”

“You probably deserved it.”

Steve looked at you. “See what I deal with?”

You slipped both arms around his waist from behind.

“They both love you.”

“One attacks me.”

“Apparently they both attack you.”

Steve’s head turned slowly toward you.

You were already smiling.

“That is not helping.”

“Paris only nibbled your thumb.”

“He betrayed me.”

“He got excited.”

“He bit me.”

“He didn’t bite hard.”

Steve gestured toward Dakar. “And his brother stole my sock.”

“He likes your smell.”

Steve stared at you.

“That is still the least convincing defense you’ve given either of them.”

You kissed the corner of his mouth.

Steve tried to remain offended.

He lasted approximately three seconds.

Then Paris trotted over and jumped onto the couch beside him.

Steve automatically reached down.

He stopped halfway.

Everyone watched.

Steve narrowed his eyes at the cat.

Then very deliberately checked the collar.

Silver moon.

Paris.

Steve looked into his sweet little face.

Paris blinked up at him.

“You bit me.”

Paris leaned forward and bumped his head against Steve’s palm.

Steve’s entire expression softened.

Bucky snorted.

“Oh, come on.”

Steve began scratching behind Paris’s ears.

“He apologized.”

Sam stared at him. “He absolutely did not.”

“He did.”

“With his head?”

Steve ignored him.

Paris started purring.

Steve looked smug.

“My good boy.”

From Bucky’s lap, Dakar opened one eye.

Bucky glanced down at him.

Then at Steve.

“You know, I think I’m starting to see the difference.”

Steve’s smile vanished.

“Shut up, Buck.”

“Coward.”

Steve looked at him.

“You wanna spend the night here?”

Bucky glanced toward Dakar.

Dakar was staring at him.

His pupils were enormous.

Bucky hesitated.

Steve smiled.

“Thought so.”

Later, after Sam and Bucky had gone home and you were curled against Steve in bed, he woke sometime after two in the morning to weight settling on his chest.

Steve opened one eye.

Black cat.

He did not move.

The room was dark.

No visible collar.

No identifiable features.

Nothing.

Steve stared.

The cat stared.

Steve whispered, “Paris?”

The cat blinked.

Steve swallowed.

“Dakar?”

Nothing.

Beside him, you slept peacefully.

Steve considered waking you.

That felt ridiculous.

Captain America did not need his girlfriend to identify a house cat.

Steve slowly lifted one hand.

The cat watched.

Steve touched the top of his head.

No attack.

He scratched gently behind one ear.

The cat began to purr.

Steve relaxed.

“Paris.”

The purring grew louder.

Steve smiled sleepily and let his hand fall back onto the mattress.

The cat curled into a ball on his chest.

For several minutes, everything remained peaceful.

Steve's eyes drifted closed.

Then a second weight landed beside his head.

His eyes snapped open.

Another black face appeared six inches from his own.

Steve stopped breathing.

One cat on his chest.

One cat beside his head.

He had absolutely no idea which was which.

The cat beside his face leaned forward.

Steve whispered, “Don't.”

A tiny nose touched his.

Steve remained perfectly still.

The cat licked his forehead once.

Then curled against his neck.

Steve blinked.

He looked at the cat on his chest.

Then the one beneath his chin.

Both were purring.

Neither was attacking him.

Slowly, Steve smiled.

Maybe you were right.

Maybe Dakar did like him.

Maybe this was progress.

Maybe…

The cat on his chest suddenly launched off him at full speed.

The one beside his head immediately followed.

They tore across the bed, used Steve’s stomach as a springboard, hit the floor, raced out of the bedroom and crashed into something in the hallway.

Steve stared at the ceiling.

You stirred beside him.

“Everything okay?”

Steve listened to another crash.

Then what sounded suspiciously like something rolling down the hallway.

“No.”

You sleepily pressed a kiss against his shoulder.

“Which one was it?”

Steve turned his head toward you.

“Both.”

You smiled without opening your eyes.

Steve sighed and pulled you closer.

From somewhere in the apartment came an unmistakable feline battle cry.

Steve closed his eyes.

He loved you.

He loved Paris.

And, although he would deny it under oath, he was beginning to love Dakar too.

The abrupt query had his brain examining everything he’d said and done tonight, relentlessly trying to identify the source of your skepticism. He let out a nervous laugh, forcing his body language to remain casual as he calmly set down his wine glass and gave you a confused look.

“What do you mean?”

“You showed up right at seven-thirty.”

Now Dex didn’t have to pretend to be confused, he genuinely was, and the creases in his forehead deepened.

“I told you that’s when I’d pick you up.”

“And you did. At seven-thirty. Not seven-thirty one, not seven-thirty five, seven-thirty on the dot. And not only were you punctual, you showed up with flowers that just happened to be my favorite." 

That decision had been a risk, but he figured it was a common enough flower he could play it off, like he fully intended to do. With a faint shrug, he flashed you a charming grin.

“I can’t take credit for the flowers. I asked the nice lady at the store which ones I should get, and she said tulips were more sincere than roses and lasted longer.”

“Did she tell you to get purple ones?”

“No, I chose purple.”

“Why?”

“Because your nails are purple, and so were your earrings last night. Seemed like a safe bet that purple was your favorite color.”

Dex wanted you to know that he was paying attention to you, he just didn’t want you to know how closely he was paying attention. He wanted you to feel desired, but not scared. Your doubt seemed to soften at his logic, and at the knowledge that even after just a few hours together last night, he’d already noticed little things like that. Seeing that you’d been caught off guard, he seized the opportunity to regain control of the conversation. Tilting his head to the side, he pretended to look at you in lighthearted puzzlement and spoke in a teasing tone. 

“Just so we’re clear, you’re distrustful of me because I…picked you up on time and brought you flowers? Is that right?”

“I didn’t say I was distrustful of you.”

“You did ask me what was wrong with me though. I feel like I’m being penalized for good behavior here.”

Tapping your finger against your wine glass, your gaze dropped down to it before falling further to your lap. 

“I guess in my experience, if something seems like it’s too good to be true, it’s because it is.”

Dex’s demeanor quickly shifted from playful to concerned like a switch had been flipped, sitting up straighter when he noticed how your posture deflated just slightly. His hand extended across the table almost of its own accord, but he caught himself halfway and placed his palm down against the white cloth. His fingers were itching to reach out the rest of the way to take your hand that was still loosely grasping your wine glass, but he didn’t know if that was too strong of a reaction to a vague statement like that. The playful lilt had disappeared from your voice though, and the teasing tone was also absent. Instead it had taken on a subdued and almost reflective intonation. Dex wanted to fire off a million questions, to get answers that he couldn’t find in a file or from watching you, but he didn’t want to push too hard too fast.

He had to be careful and patient. Dex knew how to manipulate answers out of people. He’d been doing it long before he’d been trained on interrogation tactics at Quantico. Lowering his voice to match your volume, he spoke gently with just the right cadence of hesitation that implied he was curious but trying not to pry, even though that’s exactly what he was doing.

“Are you…speaking from general experience? Or…did someone make you feel that way?”

He watched you take a subtle deep breath through your nose, straightening your posture like you were physically recomposing yourself. When you looked at him again, you had a tiny melancholic smile on your lips.

“A bit of both.”

Dex gave you a faint nod, glancing down at his own wine glass. He reached out to grasp it, wrapping his fingers around it while shifting his expression into something pensive, intentionally avoiding eye contact like he was pretending to think about a question he wasn’t sure he should ask, or didn’t know how to phrase. But Dex knew exactly what he wanted to ask, and he was going to. He was just waiting. 

There was a sweet spot of how many seconds normal people let pass before asking questions in delicate conversations. Two to three seconds was too fast, too eager, and could come off as impulsive, potentially insensitive. Anything over nine seconds was too long and could leave the other person feeling uncomfortable or anxious, ruining their willingness to keep talking. Five to six seconds was the sweet spot, a perfectly timed reluctance to perform respectful curiosity. 

“I take it there’s a bad ex in there somewhere?”

Dex spoke cautiously, waiting two seconds to look at you again to try and gauge your reaction. The sad smile slowly faded, but you didn’t look upset by the question. More…resigned. He watched you glance down at your wine again before bringing it to your lips, letting out a humorless laugh with a nod.

“A terrible one.”

He knew you were talking about Chris. There was a restless energy that filled him suddenly at the prospect of finally learning the truth, but he had to restrain himself. 

Slow. Patient. 

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Isn’t it bad luck to talk about an ex on a first date?”

Dex lifted one of his brows in question, giving you a rueful smile before mirroring your previous action to lift his glass of wine to his own lips.

“Not that I’m aware of. I mean, I’ve been out of the dating game awhile, but I thought it was normal to talk about past relationships. Besides, I’m not superstitious.”

Leaning forward, you placed your elbow on the table and rested your chin in your hand, looking at him in genuine intrigue.

“How long is a while?”

Dex glanced down at his glass, mostly pretending to take a pause, but he was surprised that he felt an actual flicker of hesitance.

“A couple years.”

“Oh…wow.”

He heard the surprise in your voice even before he looked up and saw it on your face. He watched your mouth open to ask a follow up question before you faltered, uncertainty evident in your eyes. Dex had planned for this. He knew the topic would come up eventually, and he hoped the story he had prepared would encourage you to be forthcoming about what happened with Chris. 

“My ex-girlfriend, she uh…she died.”

He caught your sharp intake of breath, and then you were reaching over to take his hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze, and he had to fight not to let his delight show on his face at that.

“Oh my God, Ben…I…I’m so sorry.”

Dex nodded, brushing his thumb over your skin, committing the sight of you holding his hand to memory. 

“It was a long time ago. Almost feels like another lifetime now.”

“I can’t…even begin to imagine what that must have been like.”

It took him a few seconds to realize your empathetic sentiment was more of a prompt. You were expecting him to say more, to talk about what he’d gone through. He had to play along if he wanted the reward of your own verity. Dex cleared his throat before speaking in a practiced somber tone.

“It was…hard. It was really hard.”

He almost felt bad seeing the sincere sympathetic look on your face, but it wasn’t the worst lie he was telling you, and there was a sliver of truth to it. Julie had died, and she had been important to him. The details regarding the true nature of their relationship were irrelevant now, and Dex could just pretend to be too grief stricken to talk about it. The way you gave his hand a comforting squeeze solidified his theory that you wouldn’t probe any further.

“I can see why you haven’t dated in awhile then. I’m sure it’s difficult to even think about getting close to someone again, after losing someone you loved.”

Dex didn’t even have to use his meticulously prepared lies. You were feeding him the perfect answers. He let out a deep breath and nodded, giving you a small wistful smile.

“It is, yeah. I guess I just kinda threw myself into my job after that, you know. Ended up isolating myself in the process.”

When he felt your thumb brushing across his knuckles in a soothing gesture, his act was interrupted and his attention was quickly captivated. His eyes fell to your joined hands resting on the table. Your skin was so soft and warm, and you touched him so gently. Dex couldn’t remember anyone ever touching him like that before. He certainly hadn’t felt anyone’s touch in a long time. It suddenly struck him then like a bolt of lightning that the last date he’d been on had actually been with Julie, and it had ended with her walking out on him because he’d been reckless. He’d scared her. He didn’t want that to happen with you.

Instinctively, he tightened his hold on your hand, trying to anchor you there in the moment with him so you’d stay.

“I haven’t really had any interest in getting involved with someone in a long time. Until you.”

He hadn’t meant for that to slip out. When he looked at you again, he saw the almost bashful smile that tugged at the edges of your lips, and how you tried to suppress it from turning into a grin. Dex pulled a face at his own words when he realized how they sounded out loud. He shook his head and let out a dry chuckle as he rubbed his hand down his face.

“God, that sounds like a shitty line, doesn’t it?”

You tried so hard not to laugh, but you couldn’t help feeling amused by how embarrassed he looked. Seeing the tips of his ears reddening, you squeezed his hand as you grinned at him.

“Normally, it would have, yes. But coming from you, it sounds sweet. I know you mean it.”

Dex really loved being on the receiving end of that bright smile. He never wanted you to stop smiling at him like that. Squeezing your hand back, he looked right into your eyes as he spoke.

“I do.”

A moment of silence passed between you, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Dex let the weight of his words settle before he let out an overly exaggerated sigh.

“Alright, your turn. What’s the story with your ex? Far less depressing, I hope.”

He felt you stiffen a little as you took a deep breath, forcing out a hollow laugh.

“It’s…depressing in its own way. I mean, I didn’t lose him tragically or anything, but it did end badly.”

Dex fought to keep his casual composure, even though that frenetic energy had returned full force and surged through his veins ardently.

Slow. Patient.

“What happened?”

He could practically see the oscillation happening behind your eyes, the indecisiveness on how honest you wanted to be. He was curious as to whether the delay in your answer was to protect his comfort or your own.  

“He…wasn’t who I thought he was.”

The reluctance in your quiet response made Dex feel a flicker of worry that you wouldn’t want to divulge any further than that. He knew he couldn’t rush this, but he was also hyper aware of the fact that it had been over a week since Chris hired him, and while Dex had managed to get him off his ass with a threat, that boundary wouldn’t hold long. Chris was not a patient man, and Dex wouldn’t put it past him to get fed up with waiting and hire someone else instead. 

Dex quickly ran through different options of how to gently nudge you down the path of vulnerability that would get him what he wanted. Humor was almost always effective. If you could get someone to laugh, it loosened the tension and made them lower their defenses. 

“Was it a rose colored glasses situation, or a full blown ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’?”

The question tore a surprised laugh from you, and Dex felt a rush of victory seeing amusement back on your lips.

“Um…definitely rose colored glasses…maybe a sprinkle of Mr. Ripley, just without the murder and the crime and the Italian coast.”

“What a let down.”

Dex flashed you a playful smirk, still keeping your hand grasped in his on the table. His thumb delicately traced back and forth over your skin, and the soothing gesture seemed to have its intended effect. 

“I mean, I can do without the murder and crime, but the Italian coast would’ve been nice.”

“Would you have been able to put those rose colored glasses back on though?”

A soft sigh escaped as you gave him a gentle shake of your head, followed by a tiny glum smile.

“No. No, once they were off…they were off.”

Dex let out a quiet hum of acknowledgement, nodding as he pretended to think over your statement.

“I assume Mr. Ripley was…charming at first, said and did all the right things, presented himself as the person he knew you wanted him to be, and had such a talent for lying, you never realized you were being manipulated. But then something happened to set him off, made him lose his temper, and showed you the real man behind the con.”

He watched your brows lift in astonishment before they knit together in puzzlement.

“Did we date the same person?”

That drew a genuine laugh from Dex, and he shook his head while giving your hand a faint squeeze.

“Dealing with sociopathic assholes was part of my job at the Bureau.”

“At least you got paid for it.”

“Not nearly enough. And I did have the murder and crime, but no Italian coast for me either.”

A grin stretched across your mouth as you slowly shook your head, leaning in a little closer like the two of you were sharing an intimate secret.

“What do we have to do to get some Italian coast around here?"

Dex’s eyes dropped to your lips for a moment before he met your gaze again, mirroring your grin as he leaned in himself.

“Book a flight.”

“I don’t know how much you think elementary school teachers make, but I admire your enthusiasm.” 

Dex was about to blurt out that he’d take you, that he’d use all the money that’s just been sitting there in his account and he’d pay for everything and you could stay as long as you wanted, but he forced himself to bite his tongue. That wasn’t something a sane person would say on a first date. Before he had a chance to respond with something clever or flirty, he heard you let out a quiet exhale and noticed you were looking down at your hand in his.

“He was just so…different, at first. I mean, I didn’t think he was perfect or anything, but I thought…I thought he was a good guy, you know. He could be a bit much sometimes, and there were moments where I felt…I don’t know, uncertain about him I guess. But I never imagined he would end up being…dangerous.”

Something ignited within him immediately, and it took an extreme amount of effort to retain his calm composure. He had to swallow down the venom to keep it out of his tone, and it was an immense struggle for Dex to speak in a gentle voice.

“Dangerous?”

He could see the apprehension in your eyes when you looked at him, and he hoped you couldn’t see the rage burning in his. 

“Like I said, it ended badly.”

There was a polite finality in the way you said it that told him it wasn’t a topic you wanted to discuss any further. As badly as he wanted to demand you tell him everything, he knew being too aggressive would ruin the progress he was making. Dex coerced himself to relax his jaw and let out a deep exhale through his nose, but in his effort to stay calm, he must have lost control of his expression, because you began to shrink away with nerves.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

“No.”

Dex instantly tightened his grip on your hand when he felt you pulling away, and he redirected all his focus to looking at you in tender concern.

“Please don’t apologize. I asked. And I’m…I’m glad you feel…comfortable enough to be honest with me.”

Your anxiety seemed to dissipate at his reassurance, but he could still see it lingering on your face and in your body language.

“I just…I like you, Ben. And I don’t wanna run you off.”

He struggled not to laugh at the absurdity of your trepidation. Looking at you with a wicked glint in his eyes, Dex brought your hand up to his mouth and pressed a soft kiss to one of your knuckles, offering you a sacred vow.

“Sweetheart, I promise that’s never gonna happen.”

𖣠  

One of the main things Dex had noticed after spending the past week watching you was how quiet your neighborhood was at night compared to his own, but strolling down the sidewalk with your hand intertwined in his, and your body leaning slightly into his shoulder, it felt even more serene. All the noise and chaos that plagued the streets of Hell’s Kitchen seemed to be restricted by the boundary of the East River, unable to infect the calm tranquility of Astoria. Being with you tonight, it was the closest thing he’d ever felt to peace, something he’d never experienced and was desperate to keep.

That inexplicable curiosity that had drawn him towards you initially had blossomed into an obsession, and twisted roots of it were now embedded right into the marrow of his bones. He’d made up his mind last night that he wasn’t taking the job, but after tonight, he wasn’t going to leave an opportunity for Chris to offer it to anyone else either. That was a problem for later though. Right now, he just wanted to prolong every second with you.

The moment you slowed to a stop outside the front steps of your apartment building, Dex was already turning to face you.

“Can I see you again?”

The amber glow from the streetlights caught the delight that gleamed in your irises, and his heart raced impatiently, longing for any kind of decipherable clue that tonight had meant something special to you too. He wanted to hear you say you enjoyed his company again. He wanted you to want more of his company, to be just as disappointed with the idea of losing it, even if it was just to an obstacle as simple as sleep. 

“Yeah.”

Dex stepped closer, his lips spreading into a wide grin at the sight of the coy smile you flashed him.

“Yeah? How soon?”

Glancing down, you took a step closer to bridge the small gap between you, letting your eyes wander up his figure slowly until you met his gaze again, this time with an inviting smirk curling at the edges of your mouth.

“How soon is…now?”

“Now?”

The close proximity and the look in your eyes kindled a cold ember that had long been forgotten and neglected until you struck that spark of desire. 

“The night doesn’t have to be over, Ben.”

“That doesn’t sound like pure intentions, sweetheart.”

“Completely impure, I promise.”

Dex held your face firmly in his hands as you stumbled together through the darkness of your apartment, kissing each other with fervent hunger. He didn’t protest when you broke the kiss to push at his chest, the back of his knees hitting the cushions of your couch before he fell backwards onto it. He was lightly panting as he stared up at you with lust blown pupils, watching how you tugged your dress up your thighs before stepping between his spread legs, reaching out to grab onto his broad shoulders as you lowered yourself down to straddle him.

His hands immediately flew out towards you, one hand gripping your waist while the other threaded his fingers through your hair to grab the back of your neck, pulling you in to kiss you deeply again. As you frantically began to unbutton his shirt, Dex felt your nails scrape against the bare skin of his chest and let out a grunt, the faint sting amplifying the pleasure already thrumming through him. He only relinquished his grip on you when you shoved the shirt off his shoulders, helping to tug it off the rest of the way himself to toss it aside carelessly. 

Dex reveled in the way you shuddered against his lips when his hands caressed your bare thighs, his fingertips slipping beneath the hem of your dress, eager to push it further upwards but anxious to be presumptuous or make the wrong move. 

“Can I take this off?”

The breathy laugh you let out made him still instantly, and he leaned back to look at you, his eyes searching your face for any indication of what he might have said or done wrong.

“What?”

Shaking your head, you grinned as you took his face in your hands and leaned in, brushing your lips against his.

“Nothing, nothing. I just think it’s sweet you asked.”

Capturing his lips in another kiss, you let your hands slip from his face to reach down and grasp onto his wrists, guiding his hands to push your dress up your thighs to your hips. Breaking the kiss momentarily, you brushed your nose against his and whispered.

“Take it off, Ben.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. Dex was torn between wanting to rip it off and wanting to take his time. His eyes wandered over every new inch of your skin that was revealed in complete reverence as if you were some holy relic, the heat of the moment burning every detail into his brain. When you lifted your arms so he could slip the dress over your head, Dex leaned in to press greedy kisses along your neck, and the way you tilted your head to grant him more of yourself drove him wild. You wanted this. You wanted him. That knowledge alone had him aching.

The only desire you didn’t seem to share was to draw out the moment. Your fingers were impatiently threading in his hair to tug him closer, your hips already shifting against his lap, making him groan low in his throat as his hands fell to your waist, squeezing gently but firmly to get your attention.

“Sweetheart, we don’t have to rush-”

“I want you, Ben. Touch me…please.”

You were already guiding his hand between your spread thighs, and there was no way in hell he was going to deny you, especially when you begged him like that. Dex would give you anything you wanted from him. The profound avidity you had for him set his blood on fire. He could hear how much you needed him, felt it in your frenzied touch and tasted it on your lips. It was intoxicating. He wanted you to crave him like this always, to perpetually need him, to have no capacity to ever want anyone else.

Obediently he hooked his fingers into your panties and tugged them to the side, immediately gifted with the evidence of your arousal slicking his fingers. He groaned against your throat, not wasting a second to spread you open with his index and fourth finger while his middle finger sought out your clit with perfect precision. Arching into his touch, you grabbed onto the back of his neck and pressed your chest against Dex’s, his expert touch eliciting a gratified moan from you. 

“Ben.”

His name dripping from your parted lips like honey had his cock straining uncomfortably against the zipper of his jeans. It was the sweetest fucking sound he’d ever heard. He didn’t waste time with teasing. You’d made it clear what you wanted, and he was more than happy to oblige. Dex began to trace quick circles over your clit, applying just enough pressure to make you whimper, and his other hand gripped your waist as you started to rock your hips against his hand. Dex trailed wet open mouthed kisses up your neck, dragging his tongue along the underside of your jaw, panting in your ear as he spoke in a husky whisper.

“Is this what you wanted, baby?”

“Yes…yes…”

“Does it feel good?”

“It feels so fucking good.”

Dex tightened his grip on your waist at that breathy confirmation, a rough groan rumbling in his chest as he nuzzled his nose against your throat. 

“Yeah? You want more? Tell me what you want, baby. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you anything.”

“More…God, more…please.”

You were so wet you were dripping down his fingers, making it effortless for you to grind against his hand and for his fingers to glide rapidly over your clit. He had already shifted the position of his hand to slip two of his fingers inside you, but your hands were suddenly fumbling with his belt, and he didn’t hesitate to follow your lead. He let you unbuckle his belt, pop the button of his jeans and tug down the zipper, and he assisted with lifting his hips so he could shove his jeans and briefs down his thighs. 

The relief Dex felt when he was finally freed from the confines of his jeans was immense, and he let out a ragged breath as his hard cock bobbed against his stomach, leaving a bead of own needy arousal on his heated skin. You were already shifting up on your knees to shove your panties down, kicking them off before reaching down to wrap your hand around him. The sensation of your touch on his sensitive flesh was electric, and he nearly lost it right then. A ruined moan was torn from his chest, and he gripped your hips tightly, digging his blunt nails into your skin.

“Fuck-”

Your grasp loosened as you looked at him in concern, noticing how tense he’d suddenly become.

“Do you want me to stop-”

“No no no, God no. Sorry…I’m sorry, it’s just…been awhile.”

Leaning in to press your forehead against his, you gave his cock a slow, gentle stroke. He let out a heavy ragged breath, a needy noise coming from his throat. 

“I’m sorry, I forgot. We can slow down if you want.”

Dex lifted one of his hands to cradle the back of your head, his labored breath warm against your lips.

“I just want you.”

Shifting forward a little on your knees, you positioned yourself above his cock.

“I want you too.”

Dex’s eyes nearly rolled when you slowly sank down onto him, and his head fell back against the couch while a wrecked moan left his parted lips. You’d been so drenched in arousal that he’d glided in with ease despite his size, and the snug warmth that enveloped him conjured a phantom tingle at the base of his artificial spine.

“Oh fuck…”

You let out a breathy whimper once he was fully nestled deep inside you, your own head dipping back as your eyes fluttered in pleasure.

“God, Ben.”

Wrapping your arms around his neck, you began to roll your hips in a sensual rhythm, riding him slowly. Dex buried his face in your neck, groaning as one of his hands gripped your ass while the other slowly slid up your back to tangle in your hair. He flexed his hips upwards to match your rhythm, and the living room was filled with the shared symphony of heavy panting and desperate need.

Dex had slept with his fair share of women, but this felt different. It felt better. It wasn’t just about getting off, and he wasn’t hyper fixated on making sure you were pleased with him. Normally he was in his head, vigilantly analyzing facial expressions and sounds, trying to identify anything counterfeit, but right now he couldn’t think straight at all. All he could do was feel.

The sound of skin gliding against slick skin shifted into your thighs smacking against his when you started to move faster. His hands fell to your waist, gripping tightly as he tried to complement your rhythm, thrusting upwards into you at the same pace. He moaned into your mouth, caught in a messy kiss that was all teeth and tongues. When your fingers slipped into his hair to tug his head back, a needy noise caught in his throat, and a string of saliva stretched between your mouths when the kiss was broken.

“God, you feel so good baby…”

He sounded as wrecked as he felt staring at you with heavily hooded eyes in complete awe. With your chest pressed against his, he could feel that your heart was pounding just as hard as his was, further evidence that you were bewitched by your own spell. Your nails dug into his shoulders, and he let out a sharp hiss at the delectable sting. Your breaths had gotten heavier and more ragged, and your face was scrunched up in pleasure.

“Ben.”

He could hear the urgency in your shaky voice, and it instantly had him tearing through the opaque veil of his own hedonism, his eyes sharpening back into focus.

“Yeah? What do you need, sweetheart?”

It was like you were trying to hold your breath, but shuddering broken gasps kept slipping, and your nails embedded further in his skin.

“I…fuck…fuck I’m so close…”

Dex quickly understood, and he banded his arm around your waist, pulling you impossibly closer on his lap as he began to snap his hips upwards. 

“You gonna cum, sweetheart?”

“Oh God…oh God right there-”

His other hand slipped between your bodies and his thumb went straight to your clit, rubbing back and forth with firm pressure. 

“Yeah? That feel good?”

“Oh my God Ben-”

He could feel your thighs start to tremble, how your hips lost their rhythm as you began to ride him with reckless abandon, your voice becoming breathier and higher in pitch the more tense your body became.

“I got you, baby. I got you.”

Seeing your eyes roll back into your head was the prettiest goddamn thing he’d ever seen, and the second he felt your cunt clench around his cock, he unraveled instantly with a guttural moan. Dex held you tight against his chest, his arm still wrapped tightly around your body with his other hand in your hair, both of you writhing against each other as pleasure crashed over your tangled bodies in relentless waves.

Dex felt almost lightheaded from the intensity of it all. He pressed his forehead against your shoulder, his breathing still heavy and his pulse erratic. 

“Goddamn.”

The laughter that had your shoulders shaking made Dex pull back to look at you, his brows furrowed in a faux display of annoyance.

“You think that’s funny? Ruining a man like that? You know, that’s the second time you’ve laughed at me in the past thirty minutes.”

You looked at him with a blissed out grin, letting your palms glide up his sweaty arms and shoulders before you captured his face in your hands.

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because you make me laugh.”

“Well that’s not exactly the most reassuring thing to hear after sex.”

“After incredible sex.”

Dex arched one of his brows, a smirk tugging at the edge of his mouth.

“Incredible, huh?”

Leaning in, you captured his lips in another deep kiss. When you pulled back a fraction to look at him again, Dex took note of how thoroughly sated you appeared, the almost hazy look in your eyes, and it had him stirring inside you again. That euphoric grin spread wide across your lips once more as you bit down on your bottom lip and nodded.

“Mm, mindblowing.”

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You also knew, as of yesterday afternoon, that it had been his birthday.

That part had been an accident.

You’d been coming upstairs with two grocery bags when Peter appeared behind you, jogging up the last flight because, naturally, the elevator was broken again. He’d reached around you to grab the heavier bag before you could protest, then carried it down the hall while insisting it was no big deal. “You know, normal people complain when they have to take six flights of stairs,” you’d told him.

Peter had glanced at you while shifting the bag against his hip. “I complained on four.”

“You said, ‘wow, again.’”

“That was loaded with emotion.”

“It really wasn’t.”

“It was for me.”

You’d laughed, and while Peter was smiling back at you, his wallet had slipped out of his jacket pocket and hit the floor. You picked it up before he could bend down, mostly because his hands were full, and his driver’s license had slid halfway out of the plastic slot.

You hadn’t meant to read it, his birthday had simply been right there.

August 10.

You’d looked at the date, then at him and Peter had immediately noticed. “What?”

You held the wallet toward him. “Is today your birthday?”

His expression had changed so quickly that you almost wished you hadn’t asked. It wasn’t sadness exactly, and he didn’t look upset, but there had been a brief hesitation before he shrugged. “Oh. Yeah.”

“You forgot?”

“No, I knew.”

“You said that like I reminded you.”

Peter took the wallet, shoved it back into his pocket, then reached for your groceries again. “I’ve been busy.”

“That’s a terrible birthday answer.”

“It’s not really a big thing.”

You had stared at him for another moment. “What did you do?”

“For my birthday?”

“Yes, Peter. What did you do for the other thing we were talking about?”

He’d smiled a little at that. “Went to… work.”

“And?”

“Came home.”

“And?”

Peter had opened his mouth, apparently searching for an acceptable third activity, then eventually said, “I had cereal.” You’d stopped walking, he made it another step before realizing you weren’t beside him anymore. “What?”

“You had cereal for your birthday dinner?”

“I also had a sandwich earlier.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It was a good sandwich.”

You’d taken your groceries back from him at your door and told him happy birthday before going inside. Peter thanked you, smiled, and disappeared into his apartment like the conversation hadn’t been particularly important.

Then you spent the rest of the evening thinking about it. Now it was the following night, and you were holding a cake outside his apartment, and beginning to wonder whether this was sweet or completely insane.

You knocked anyway.

There was movement inside almost immediately, followed by a strange metallic clatter, then several seconds of silence.

You knocked again. “Peter?”

Another sound came from inside before the lock finally turned. Peter opened the door wearing gray sweatpants and a faded T-shirt, his hair damp like he’d recently taken a shower. There was a bruise beginning to darken along his jaw that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday, although he’d angled his face slightly away from the hallway light as soon as he saw you. “Hey.”

“Hi.” Peter looked at you, then at the cake, then back to you. You lifted it a little higher. “Before you ask, yes, this is because I judged your birthday dinner.”

For several seconds, Peter said absolutely nothing. Then he looked at the cake again. “You made that?”

“I did.”

“For me?”

You frowned. “No, Peter, I regularly carry personalized cakes around the building hoping someone with the right name opens their door.”

A startled laugh escaped him, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “Right. Sorry.”

“Happy late birthday.”

Peter stared down at the icing. You had expected awkwardness because Peter was awkward about almost everything, particularly when attention was directed at him, but you hadn’t expected him to look completely confused by the fact that someone had baked him a cake.

That made you tighten your grip on the plate. “If you hate chocolate, this is going to be embarrassing.”

“No, I love chocolate.”

“Okay, good.”

“I just—” Peter stopped, glanced into his apartment, then back at you. “You really baked me a cake?”

“You keep asking that like you think I stole it.”

“No, I know you didn’t steal it.”

“You don't know what I do in my free time.”

That got another laugh out of him, quieter than the last one, and some of the stiffness left his shoulders. Peter opened the door farther. “Do you want to come in?”

You looked past him. You’d never been inside Peter’s apartment before. It was about as small as you expected, with a kitchenette shoved against one wall and a little table near the window. There were books stacked beside a battered laptop, a sewing kit open on the counter, and what looked like several pieces of electronic equipment scattered across the desk.

Peter followed your gaze and immediately stepped sideways to block some of it. “Sorry, it’s kind of a mess.”

“It’s cleaner than mine.”

“That cannot possibly be true.”

“You haven’t seen mine.”

“I've seen you open your door.”

“That is not legally admissible evidence.”

Peter smiled and moved aside. You stepped inside and he shut the door behind you, and you carried the cake toward the table while Peter hurried ahead to clear several notebooks and loose pieces of paper out of the way.

“You don't have to clean because I’m here.”

“I’m not cleaning.”

“You just threw a sock behind the couch.”

Peter froze with one hand still extended. “That could’ve already been there.”

“I watched you throw it.”

“Okay.”

You set the cake down and turned toward him. “Do you have candles?”

Peter blinked. “Candles?”

“Birthday candles.”

“Oh. No…?”

“Of course you don’t.”

“I didn't know I was supposed to keep emergency birthday candles.”

“You’re supposed to have a junk drawer.”

“I have one.”

“Then there should be candles in it.”

Peter opened the drawer beside the sink and both of you stared into it. There were batteries, three screwdrivers, loose wire, duct tape, a roll of quarters, two takeout menus, a flashlight, several small metal components you didn’t recognize, and one packet of soy sauce.

You slowly looked at Peter. “That is the weirdest junk drawer I have ever seen.”

“It has junk in it.”

“It has electrical components and soy sauce.”

“Both useful.”

You reached inside, picked up the packet, and held it toward him. “What emergency requires one packet of soy sauce?”

“I don't know yet.”

“You’re preparing.”

“Exactly.” You laughed and put it back. Peter opened another cabinet. “I might have matches.”

“That doesn’t help unless you want me to set the cake on fire.”

“Probably not.”

“Probably?”

“I’m keeping an open mind.” He found two plates instead, and after a little searching, one fork. You stared at the single fork in his hand and Peter looked at it too. “Okay, I can explain this.”

“I’m listening.”

“I haven't bought more forks.”

“That isn't an explanation.”

“I had more.”

“Peter.”

“They disappeared.”

“How do forks disappear?”

He leaned against the counter. “I think I accidentally threw them away with takeout containers.”

“All of them?”

“Apparently.”

You pointed toward the drawer. “Yet the soy sauce survived.”

“It’s resilient.”

You laughed again, and Peter smiled as he looked down at the fork and there was something unexpectedly nice about seeing him like this. Usually, Peter seemed halfway out the door even when he was standing still. You’d pass him in the hallway and get a quick smile before he hurried downstairs, or you’d find him coming home long after midnight with his hood pulled up and his shoulders tight with exhaustion. Even when you talked, there always seemed to be another place he needed to be. Tonight he was barefoot in his apartment, arguing with you about missing silverware while a crooked birthday cake sat on his table.

You pulled two plastic forks from your pocket. Peter stared at them. “I came prepared.”

“You brought forks?”

“I had a feeling.”

“That’s actually kind of insulting.”

“You own one fork.”

“I didn't know you knew that before five seconds ago.”

“I know you, Peter.”

The words came out casually, but something about them made him quiet.

You hadn't meant anything serious by it; you knew Peter in the ordinary way neighbors knew each other, through little conversations and familiar routines, but his expression softened anyway. You cleared your throat and turned toward the cake. “Sit down.”

Peter obeyed, although he still looked a little overwhelmed when you put the cake in front of him. “You’re not singing, are you?”

“I wasn't planning to.”

“Good.”

“I could.”

“Please don't.”

“You seem scared.”

“I've heard you singing through the wall.”

Your mouth fell open. “Excuse me?” Peter grinned. “You can hear me?”

“The walls are thin.”

“Oh my God.”

“You really like that one Olivia Rodrigo song.”

You covered your face. “I hate you.”

“No, it’s good.”

You uncovered your face and pointed toward the cake. “Okay, then. Make a wish.”

“There aren't candles.”

“Well… pretend.”

“That feels like cheating.”

“Peter, you celebrated your birthday with cereal, so I think the birthday authorities will make an exception.”

He looked at you for a moment before turning his attention toward the cake.

You expected him to joke again, but he didn't, Peter closed his eyes, then he leaned forward and blew gently across the top of the cake, sending several blue sprinkles sliding over the frosting.

“There.”

“Good?”

“Yeah.”

“What'd you wish for?”

Peter gave you an incredulous look. “I can't tell you.”

“Why?”

“Then it won't come true.”

“So you believe in birthday wishes but didn't celebrate your birthday?”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You contain nonsense.”

“You made me a cake.”

“Don't change the subject.” Peter picked up the plastic knife you’d brought and hesitated over the frosting. “You can cut it.”

“I know.”

“You look nervous.”

“It has my name on it.”

“That's generally how birthday cakes work.”

He finally cut into it, although his slice was so narrow that you immediately reached over and made it wider.

Peter glanced at you. “I was going to eat that.”

“You were going to eat half an inch of cake.”

“I can get more later.”

“No, you're having a birthday-sized piece.”

“That isn't a measurement.”

“It is tonight.”

You transferred the slice onto his plate and handed him one of the forks.

Peter took a bite, then another while you waited. He noticed. “What?”

“Well?”

His eyebrows lifted. “It’s really good.”

“You don't have to lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You're very polite.”

Peter took another bite, much larger this time. “Would I be doing this if it was bad?”

“Yes. You're exactly the kind of person who would eat terrible cake because you were afraid of hurting someone’s feelings.”

“That is a very specific accusation.”

“And an accurate one.”

Peter pointed his fork at you. “It’s good.”

You smiled and cut yourself a piece.

For a while, the two of you sat at his little table and ate cake while talking about nothing particularly important. You complained about the landlord, Peter told you the washing machine downstairs had started making a noise that sounded expensive, and you informed him that apartment 3F had apparently gotten a cat despite the building’s pet policy.

Peter looked genuinely interested in that. “The orange one?”

“You've seen it?”

“It sits in the window.”

“His name is Dennis.”

“Dennis?”

“I didn't name him.”

“No, Dennis is good. I like Dennis.”

“You've never met Dennis.”

“I've seen enough.”

Eventually, your eyes drifted back toward the bruise on Peter’s jaw and he noticed immediately, but you didn't ask where it came from. Peter seemed prepared for the question anyway, his shoulders shifting slightly, but when you only took another bite of cake, he relaxed. “You work tomorrow?” you asked.

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“Early.”

“Then I’m leaving you the cake.”

Peter looked at what remained. “You don't want any?”

“I've had some.”

“There’s almost a whole cake.”

“You’ll manage.”

“I live alone.”

“That was sort of the point.” His expression changed again, although this time you understood it a little better. You set your fork down. “I didn't mean that in a sad way.”

“No, I know.”

“I just figured birthdays probably suck when you're by yourself.”

Peter looked at the cake between you. “They're fine.”

You tilted your head. “Peter.”

He sighed. “Okay. They suck a little.”

“A little?”

“A medium amount.”

“Better.”

He smiled faintly and ran his thumb along the edge of the plastic fork.

You didn't know anything about Peter’s family. You'd heard him mention an aunt once, months ago, but never again, and you had never seen parents, siblings, cousins, or friends coming through the building. There were no photographs sitting around his apartment either, at least none you could see. You didn't ask about that. Instead, you reached across the table and tapped the cake plate. “Well, next year you're not having cereal.”

Peter looked up. “Next year?”

“Yes.”

“You're planning my birthday a year in advance?”

“Someone has to.”

His smile grew. “What if I move?”

“I'll find you.”

“That sounded threatening.”

“It was meant to.”

Peter laughed under his breath, then looked down at the cake again. “You didn't have to do this.”

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know, Peter.”

“No, I just…” He paused, and for once there wasn't an immediate joke waiting behind the hesitation. “Nobody's done something like this for me in a while.”

Your chest tightened, but you refused to make the moment heavier than he wanted it to be, so you nudged his plate toward him. “Then eat another piece.”

Peter looked at you. “You're very bossy.”

“You have one fork and no birthday candles so clearly you need supervision.”

“That feels unrelated.”

“It isn't.”

He smiled, picked up the knife, and cut himself another slice.

You stayed longer than you planned. By the time you finally stood, there were only a few pieces of cake left, Peter had somehow convinced you to help him investigate the mysterious missing-fork situation, and you had learned that his kitchen cabinets contained an alarming amount of instant coffee.

Peter walked you to the door even though your apartment was directly across the hall. You stepped outside, then turned around. “Happy birthday, Peter.”

His hand remained on the edge of the door. “Late birthday.”

“I'm extending it.”

“Can you do that?”

“I just did.”

Peter smiled, and this time it didn't look like the quick, automatic one he usually gave you in the hallway. “Thanks.”

“You're welcome.” You started toward your door before remembering something. “Oh, and Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“If I hear you eating cereal for dinner tonight, I’m coming back.”

He leaned against the doorway. “How are you going to hear that?”

“The walls are thin.”

Peter laughed.

You went inside before he could answer, closing your door behind you. Across the hall, Peter stayed where he was for another moment before returning to the table. The apartment looked the same as it had earlier. His backpack was still beside the couch, his suit was hidden where nobody would find it, and the police scanner on his desk would probably start pulling him back toward the city before the night was over.

But there was a mostly-eaten-cake sitting in the middle of his table with his name—previously—written across the top, a pair of plastic forks beside it, and blue sprinkles scattered over the cheap wood.

Peter cut one more piece.

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