#benjaminpointdexter

it’s silly how random life is. when you were younger you used to think it was all one big game. like, god or whoever the fuck was looking down at you and changing the colors in the sky was manning some big joystick 24/7.

it made sense then. but now?

the blood spilling from your stomach onto the scuffed, dilapidated floors of your unfurnished hell’s kitchen apartment was as red as the tomato sauce still boiling in the pot you’d been stirring four seconds prior.

glug. glug. glug.

your free time was sacred. and that tomato sauce was supposed to go over frozen gnocchi, devoured on the couch with NCIS on and a seltzer sweating in your hand. you never found it realistic; the way actors bled on screen. too much, too dramatic.

but now, here, with your own trembling hands pressed against your midsection, you realized something.

you had been so terribly wrong.

droplets became spills. and as it always did, the sight of blood made your head swim. the copper smell hit the back of your throat and your knees buckled before you could stabilize yourself on the newly red countertop. your head met the floor with a crack that you felt more than heard.

three versions of your ceiling swam above you. all of them blurry.

and a ways away, in a place you couldn’t see, the man responsible was still squinting through his scope. still trained on the peephole of what was supposed to be karen’s door.

but you were not karen.

oh no no no.

at surface level, similar enough. a pretty blonde thing, wide-eyed. and now, gorgeously complemented by the crimson blooming across that frilly white top of yours. he stayed a beat longer than necessary, watching the spiderweb of red spread against the fabric.

his work. tidy, even when it was wrong.

then his stomach growled.

fries, he thought. and a banana milkshake. definitely a banana milkshake.

he was already turning on his heel when he heard it. faint. muffled by the door between you.

“father forgive them…” a wet, rattling inhale. ”…for they know not what they do.”

ben stopped.

were you… praying? for him?

a long pause settled behind his mask. his head tilted a fraction, the way it did when something didn’t compute. he’d just put a bullet in you. and you were down there, trembling on the other side of that door, bleeding out, spending what might be your last breaths on forgiveness.

he didn’t deserve that. he knew it plainly, the same way he knew he was hungry, the same way he knew the door in front of him was unlocked when it shouldn’t have been. facts. simple ones.

his hand closed around the knob anyway.

the click of the latch was barely a sound. the draft from the hallway kissed your face before you registered the shape crouching over you. masked, still, radiating something you couldn’t name but recognized in your gut as wrong.

“door’s unlocked.” his voice was even, almost conversational. almost amused. “that’s not very smart.”

you blinked up at him. or tried to. the tears were making it difficult.

he reached down with ease and tucked a dirty blonde ringlet away from your clammy face. clinical. unhurried. like he had all the time in the world and you weren’t actively dying beneath him.

“hello.” voice soft.

a beat.

you didn’t know what was worse, the fact that you’d refused to go to the hospital for a bullet wound in your stomach, or that you’d been hunched over your corkboard for two hours and your spine felt like it had adopted a new, crooked shape.

in your defense, you had a rough history with hospitals.

you winced as a thumbtack bit into your finger, but gratefulness settled warm on your shoulders shortly after.

the puzzle was finally piecing together.

fisk. the mayor. the hit.

manila papers scattered the board. faces of people you’d never met stared back at you, and somewhere in the blur of it all was a picture; grainy, but true. countless smear campaigns against fisk, the satirical broadcasts, someone with media access trying to wake hell’s kitchen up.

that someone was your sister.

your stupid, stupid sister.

you’d never been more sure.

and from there it all clicked. this apartment was listed under PAGE per public record. fisk took a shot at silencing who he thought was karen. it was simpler than money, power. no, he had that already so it was even worse.

he was protecting himself. his name. his carefully constructed image. from what? you didn’t know. but you were certain it was more than karen’s whistleblowing.

you were just a loose thread he’d tried to pull. er— karen was.

you’d buried yourself in all of this, probably to avoid the more pressing reality which was that you’d been traumatized approximately forty eight hours ago and could very realistically go septic and die if you didn’t google how to properly tend to a bullet wound soon.

it could wait.

foggy’s face gazed back at you from beneath a green tack. the only photo you had of him. karen had dragged him along on the annual summer trip and you’d braced yourself for some insufferable lawyer who would spend the whole week mansplaining the ocean to you.

and then you’d met him. warm and ridiculous and the kind of person who could talk about a fucking marble until two in the morning and make it the most interesting conversation you’d ever had.

a once in a lifetime person. that’s who foggy nelson was.

it made sense why your sister had arrived on your doorstep in pieces only a week after his death. she’d loved him, and she’d carried his blood home with her.

and then there was matt.

you ground your teeth.

the insufferable prick who had all but emotionally abandoned your sister when her grief didn’t move at the speed of his caseload.

so it all tracked. karen running the broadcast, trying to shake hell’s kitchen awake with both hands. some elaborate chess game between her and fisk, one you were almost certain matt had walked her directly into. but why?

it was a game that could have cost her everything if you hadn’t been the one at the sauce pot.

and still, one question sat unanswered at the center of the board.

who shot me?

and more pressingly, why the hell had they stitched you up rather than left you in a ditch somewhere. you were fairly certain fisk’s reach allowed for ditches.

you pinched your brows together.

“i watch too much NCIS,” you muttered, rolling your shoulders and forcing your spine into something resembling upright.

you let your head fall back against the couch and stared at the ceiling. wondering if the curiosity was stupid. if you should just lock the door and wait for karen to handle it as per usual. but karen had matt, and matt had a habit of deciding who needed protecting and from what, and you had strong doubts that list included you.

so no. you didn’t feel like choice was something being offered.

a rattle.

soft. sudden.

your head snapped to the countertop.

what the f-

lilies. violet ones, in a slim glass vase, identical in color to the painting hung directly above your bed.

you swallowed.

you were ill, yes. possibly delirious, even. but not so far gone that you’d forgotten accepting a delivery. letting someone in. signing for anything. which meant —

“fuck.”

your phone rang and you nearly came out of your skin.

you were trembling, eyes refusing to leave the countertop, fingers moving on instinct as you pressed the phone to your ear.

“hello?”

“baby? heyyyy, it’s jess.”

a slow blink. the lilies blurred at the edges. realization struck you like a dagger to the chest.

someone had been in this apartment while you were hunched over your corkboard in a blissful, oblivious blur. standing at your counter.

watching you work.

the goosebumps came slow and deliberate up your arms.

“you’re out of rehab.” your voice came out steadier than you felt. low. careful.

“yeah, baby listen — can i crash at yours tonight? pops is on my ass again about the job stuff and— oh shit, kare? hey! babe, did you know your sister is here?”

the warmth that moved through you then was not a kind one. hot and feverish and immediate,

karen. fuck.

your eyes went wide and you dropped to your knees, dragging the corkboard beneath the couch, stuffing crumpled papers under the cushions with shaking hands.

“wh— just— tell her to leave—”

if it was him, the man in the mask, he still had a job to finish.

“we’re comin’ up now—”

“jesse. no—” he wouldn’t listen.

you slammed the phone face down on the carpet.

three minutes. maybe less, depending on ray at the buzzer. not enough time to sweep the whole studio. the bathroom, the bedroom, the balcony; too many places for an assassin to strike.

trembling hands grabbed the vase and turned it slowly, checking the underside, the roots, the water. nothing. no bomb. no death. just— flowers.

and then a flash of blue between the stems. it slipped through your fingers twice before you got it. a little card. blue sky, a rainbow arching across the front. golden letters.

GET WELL SOON!

you unfolded it.

inside, in clean, perfect script:

whoops, wrong target ☹⌖

a juvenile sad face. and beneath it — a hand drawn bullseye.

your brows knit so hard they ached.

you flipped to the back. and there, in sharp block letters that looked like they’d been pressed hard enough to indent the cardstock:

LOCK YOUR WINDOWS, Y/N.

four knocks at the door.

“one second!”

you shoved the card into the bin, curled your hand around your midsection and hissed through your teeth as you limped toward the bedroom. you were not afraid to die, no. not yet. you’d watched enough true crime to understand exactly what this was.

a moth in a jar.

you were just something being played with before being snuffed out.

the bedroom was colder than it should have been.

your breath was short as you shoved the window down with both hands, the window you were certain had been closed, and flipped both locks. a sharp look into the bathroom. a painful glance under the bed.

nothing. no one.

more knocks.

you wiped your face with the back of your hand, sniffled once, and limped to the front door. you kept the chain on and opened it three inches.

“i’m contagious.”

karen’s steel blue eyes moved over what little of you she could see, and something in them shifted immediately. jesse’s face fell behind her with the disappointment of a man whose plans had just been fucked.

“y/n.” karen’s voice was careful. “are you alright?”

the note. the lilies. the window.

the man who had crouched over you on this very floor and tucked your hair back like you were the moon and it was his first time seeing it.

you swallowed all of it down.

“peachy keen, karen.”

she didn’t believe you. she had that page look in her eye, the one dad used to wear when karen would lie about being drunk despite reeking of liquor. the one karen gave you when you were dosing all the time.

“contagious with what, exactly?”

a gulp. nervous eyes snapping toward where jesse pinched the skin between his brows. karen didn’t give you a chance to answer, she knew it was bullshit anyway.

her steel eyes cut to jesse, then back to you. and whatever morphed across her face in that moment made your stomach ache worse than the wound sitting behind the door.

“are you both using again?”

you went rigid.

you understood, on surface level, why she’d go there. this was weird. you were acting weird. but that accusation still landed like an open palm across your cheek. you clenched your jaw tight.

“no, karen. i’m not using again.”

she pursed her lips, exhaled slow through her nose. white-knuckled on the strap of her purse. your next breath was shaky and smelled of smoke and heroine.

you started naming cities in your head.

“but you’re back with jesse.”

not a question. the way she said it made you sway on your feet. the throbbing in your midsection sharpened all at once.

“i found out he was here when you did, kare.” a beat. “but thanks — for the backhanded concern. i think you’d know if i was sticking the needle in again.”

something cracked across her features then. regret, quick and unmistakable. she frowned, pressed her lips together, and without a word dug through her purse and pressed a folded wad of cash into jesse’s hand. his brows jumped to his hairline.

“holy shit, kare — than—”

“don’t.” quiet. absolute. “go find somewhere to stay that is nowhere near my sister. and so help me god, jessie; i have connections. if any of them tell me you were buying, you’ll be prosecuted by morning.”

matt. some perk.

your ex nodded once, slow. his eyes flicked to the crack in the door, tongue dragging across his chapped lips.

“later, y/n.”

that shake. that particular tremble in the way he said your name, the sniffle as he turned and walked away. that was something even karen page couldn’t piece together. something only you knew intimately.

he’d lapse within the hour.

but you wouldn’t tell her that. more pressing matters at hand.

when she turned back to you, you shook your head gently. you should have shut the door, locked her out just in case he was still close. but he would have tried by now, wouldn’t he?

“i’m sorry.”

you forgave her. you didn’t say that, because opportunity had arrived.

“accusations, right? s’my turn.” you pulled the page look on for yourself — pursed lips, steady eyes. “you said the mayor put a hit out on you. tell me why.”

your sister didn’t crack.

“i misspoke.”

“you’re lying to me.”

“you’d know if he’d sent a hit out for you. you’d be dead.”

you almost laughed out loud. if only she knew about the wound you were nursing three inches behind this door. your jaw ticked.

“fine. don’t tell me. fuck if i care — i’ll find out my own way.”

karen shook her head immediately.

“no. you need to stay away from this, do you hear me—”

“so there is something.”

“no — yes — christ, just listen to me! i’ll tell you when the time is right. that time is not now.”

silence fell between you both. the long, tension laced kind. her hand wrapped around the edge of the door where you held it open. tears stung at her eyes, red blooming across her nose and cheeks. she licked her lips and smiled — dry, tired.

“i shouldn’t have accused you. i’m sorry.”

you bowed your head.

it was nothing you weren’t already used to. you kept that part to yourself.

you thought about matt then. the way he looks at you when you’re around. careful, measured, like you’re something that requires fragility.

and it made sense, in a way. you’d ruined their lives once. karen. matt. you. foggy.

but foggy… he never looked at you like that though.

foggy used to look at you like you were just a person.

you swallowed back the tears crawling up your throat and steadied your breath.

“s’fine.” smaller than you meant it. “just — please. as soon as you feel clear weather on this, tell me.”

a single nod.

“i promise.”

you watched her face when she said it.

you didn’t believe her.

𖦏₊ ⊹

it wasn’t planned. of course it wasn’t. none of this was.

his pretty little north star. messy and the opposite of uniform, the antithesis of everything he’d ever sought out in a fixed point. he hated her.

god, he couldn’t get enough of her.

depravity had settled into his chest like a splinter. two agonizing days of it. two days of fisk buzzing in his ear about the importance of eliminating karen page, and ben nodding along like a man whose attention was fully present.

it was far from that.

he didn’t tell fisk, of course. not about her. not after julie. he knew better than that.

but he could control this. right? this wasn’t like julie. he could still perform the hit, get the job done. how different this was, he’d even been apart from her for two whole days!

day one, morning — he meditated. twenty minutes. focused. good.

day one, night — he stalked every crumb of her the internet had to offer until 3am.

y/n, huh… it tasted good on his tongue.

day two, morning — exercise. discipline. structure.

day two, night — he mapped every entrance to her apartment. every window. every weak point in the lock.

east window will be most efficient to see all of her.

day three.

a dream.

her wide, teary eyes. the addictive softness of her skin beneath his fingertips. he’d leaned down in it, watched her tremble, licked the tears from her cheeks while she squirmed beneath him. that last part was his imagination’s finest work, and he woke up with the blanket tented high and every nerve in his body pulled toward her like a compass finding north. he wrapped his hand around himself but by the second stroke he winced, he wanted to wait for her.

the urges had officially outpaced the control.

he needed more. he needed to see more.

getting in was easier than it should have been. he clenched his teeth. did she not care about the risk of some psychopath crawling through her window? he pressed his command down on the cardstock so hard, it dented and bled.

he’d spent two hours watching her from the half wall separating her bedroom from the rest of the studio. she had absolutely no idea. it made him grin.

he was relieved to find the apartment tidy — save for that chaotic explosion she was piecing together on the corkboard. he’d watched her work it, head tilted. she was so close and so very far simultaneously, and every time something clicked behind her eyes he felt a toothy grin pull at the corner of his mouth.

that’s it. almost.

his breaths were loud in his own ears. the vase of lilies in his arms, heavier.

how could he not bring them? he was a gentleman. and they matched the painting above her bed; the bed he had gotten very well acquainted with in her absence.

he’d pressed his face into the sheets and breathed. sweet, indulgent, the kind of thing he could inhale for the rest of his life and never tire of. tobacco and vanilla threaded through silk with something bright underneath— neroli, no- clementine, maybe. soft and warm and entirely, perfectly her. it took everything he had to pry himself away from them.

when he tired of watching her fail to crack the case for the sixth time, he moved. quiet, measured steps toward the island. he set the vase down.

it rattled.

he found the nearest shadow and went still. then retreated to the bedroom doorway, and waited.

the freeze that moved through her was worth every second. every single hair raising on her skin, those wide eyes, that idiotic bravery that made something in him simultaneously want to shake her and bend her over his-

she pried herself up. she found his flowers.

so good.

but then, a voice. male. crackling through the receiver but unmistakably male, and she was speaking to it, and the familiarity in her voice was not the kind she’d been using for her sister.

he went very still.

oh no no no, little star. already?

he leaned closer anyway. just to be sure. the name came through clear enough.

jesse.

one name. that’s all he needed.

with one last look at her, finding his note, reading those four words with that particular shade of fear he was quickly developing a preference for; he crawled through the open window and dropped down the pole to the cobblestones below.

he watched from the street as she closed it.

locked it this time.

good little star.

he wasn’t done with her. not even close.

but first, he had a situation to rectify.

jesse.

if your pain had a color, you’d label it black. so vast and endless you felt consumed by it.

you couldn’t take a full breath. your heart stuttered when your eyes found your ceiling.

your ugly, rotting ceiling.

you had never been more grateful to see it.

tears stung and your hands trembled as you tucked your chin to your chest. your white top had been pulled to your ribs. the source of the blossoming ache was bandaged.

“what the fu—ah.”

okay. no talking.

“hmm.” you let your head fall back against the olive threads of your couch, eyes squeezing shut. something tickled at your temples. trembling fingertips found gauze wrapped around your throbbing head.

get up, y/n.

one leg first, then the other. you screamed as your stomach bent, teeth sinking into your shoulder, tears soaking through the fabric. you fell to your knees, palms catching the edge of the coffee table.

you and karen had a rule. some juvenile thing she only agreed to because you wouldn’t shut up about it.

whatever you’re avoiding, you have to do it by three.

both you and god knew this would be the worst countdown of your entire life.

“o-ne.”

still at one.

a shaky breath.

“two.”

fuck fuck fuck just—

“thre—ah—” the meat stitched behind the bandage folded and stretched against its hold and you bit down on everything that wanted to come out of your mouth. you hummed the law and order theme instead, digging your nails into your hips, teeth into the chapped pillow of your lower lip.

and then, slowly, you began to limp.

to where, you didn’t know.

once you reached the middle of your small studio you turned in a slow circle.

empty. no one. no sign of anything.

okay. you were going crazy. that was the only explanation. maybe the knife slipped when you were dicing tomatoes for your sa—

your sauce.

your head snapped to the stove.

four limps and you arrived.

more jarring than the pain in your midsection, the burner was off. and the pot? clean as a whistle. no sauce dribbling down the sides the way you’d last seen it, furious and bubbling and indifferent to what was happening to you on the floor.

you don’t know how long you stood there clutching the white countertop and staring down at the cold, undisturbed surface of it.

long enough that it was the vibration of your phone against the counter that pulled you out. the instrumental of a stevie nicks track hummed against the tile. karen’s face smiled up at you from the screen; cancun, four summers ago, her steel blue eyes doing that thing they did where they made everything feel temporarily safe.

against every better instinct, you picked up.

“h-hello?”

“y/n.” the relief in karen’s voice was immediate and slightly terrifying. “oh thank christ. please tell me you’re alright.”

a blink.

a glance down at your stomach.

a glance back at the pot.

“i’m… fine?” you sounded unsure because you were.

“good. good.” a pause, the particular kind that meant she was choosing her words carefully. “there was — it’s complicated. fisk sent someone to your address. a hit. but i guess they never showed up, so—”

“the mayor sent someone to—”

silence on the line. a flurry of hushed voices disagreeing just beyond the receiver. you swayed on your feet, lips parted, waiting.

“the most important thing is that you’re alright,” karen said finally, and the firmness in her voice meant the conversation was over before it started. “i’ll come by later. i love you.”

“yeah, i—”

you stilled.

because your eyes had drifted back to the island, and there, sitting upright, perfectly centered, clean as the pot and the stitching and every other impossible thing in this apartment… was a bullet.

the bullet.

weathered bronze. cold between your fingertips when you lifted it.

not a drop of blood on it. not a trace of copper, not a single thing to suggest where it had just been.

buried in your stomach…

and it all came back at once. the sauce. the floor. the ceiling doing that horrible swimming thing. the blood soaking through white cotton and the man crouched over you; masked, still, something behind his eyes that wasn’t quite human and wasn’t quite not.

you’re not karen page.

your would-be assassin.

who was either dead in a ditch somewhere or the very same man who had stitched your wound, cleaned the pot, turned off the burner, and placed this bullet here. upright, deliberate, like punctuation at the end of a sentence.

with trembling fingers you peeled back the edge of the bandage. expert stitching. clean edges. no blood smeared on the surrounding skin.

he left it here on purpose. you were certain of that the way you were certain of the moon.

chills moved slow and deliberate up your spine.

“hello?” karen’s voice cut through the static of your thoughts like a lone lantern in the night sky. you flinched.

you stood there for a long moment, thumb pressed against the cool face of the bullet, swallowing back everything rising in your throat.

“i love you too, karen…”

𖦏₊ ⊹

he should have left. practicality or whatever. his banana milkshake was sweating into banana slush at some shitty diner down the road, karen page was still breathing, and fisk would want his head on a silver platter for the miss.

that last part was the lesser of the pressing issues, as it turned out.

untied knots made him itch. hornets buzzing behind his eyes, loud and insistent.

it had to be perfect, there were three leads to follow, karen page was still breathing— and yet here he stood. perfect view from the balcony. shadow swallowed by a fern and the sheer frilly curtains his new little star had hung.

oh, look at her.

the sound she made when she cried out created an ache he hadn’t felt in a long time. not since julie. hot, insistent, spreading through his bloodstream before throbbing at his crotch. he tightened his grip on the rails. her pain was all his doing. the way she moved, like a legless fawn, so very oblivious of her audience.

he’d done that to her.

something about that sat in his chest and purred.

he needed to see more of it.

she’d been asleep two hours by the time he moved. he took the time to tidy the pigsty she called a home. there wasn’t much to see in such a small place, but her bedroom became his favorite very quickly. scattered perfume bottles and paint, and that haunting painting of lilies above her bed. signed page. she was a painter.

he’d learned many superficial things in his short time there.

he’d hovered longer than was necessary. he’d done his good deed, balanced the scale for her prayer. but something…

he catalogued the way her lips parted in sleep, the faint flutter of her lashes, the slow rise and fall of her chest beneath that ruined white top.

such a nice top…

she was young, early 20s at most. far younger than he was. he studied the bandaging he’d done himself, neat and precise, sitting just below the swell of her very pretty—

no.

the little gray bottle on her nightstand was labeled suboxone. recovering addict. rosary under the pillow, afraid or hypocrite. he filed it away with everything else. surface things weren’t enough. he wanted her thoughts. her reactions. wanted to peel back every careful layer and see what was underneath.

what would she do when she finally put it together?

oh, that maniac kept me alive. what is he gonna do next?

the corner of his mouth twitched.

awful things.

it took an agonizing while. his knuckles had gone white around the balcony rail by the time she finally saw it; the bullet. and something in him pulled taut like a wire about to snap. watching her turn it over in her fingers, slow, edging him. watching her eyes swell with fear.

he hummed low, squinting in the scope of his gun as she murmured something tearfully to the phone.

the hornets buzzed so loud his fingers twitched toward the sliding door.

what would she do?

thank him for his goodness? get on her knees and —

“no.”

forced through gritted teeth. one leg over the railing, then the other, quick and controlled.

no. no no no. not this time.

she was good. he had a sense of it after her little prayer. and he was doing good under the fisk administration. that’s what he breathed into his chest like scripture on the way down. concrete. order. something to obey.

because if he spent another moment on that balcony, so close to her.

there would be no good left in him.

Check out this TikTok I posted! ▶️Watch the full video now! https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTk7aY8pT/