Mia leaned over the headline. “Another another one?”

“Yes, another another one.”

She glanced past you at the fridge.

You didn’t need to look. You knew what was there.

Pinned under a strawberry magnet and a concerning number of takeout menus was the magnetic whiteboard you had made two weeks ago.

At the top, in red marker:

KILLS BULLSEYE STOLE FROM ME: 4

Underneath, in blue:

KILLS I STOLE FROM BULLSEYE: 4

Beneath that, taking up most of the fridge, were the newspaper clippings. Task force murders that were yours but had been attributed to him. Task force murders that were his but had somehow been attributed to you, because apparently every cop in the city had been dropped on the head as a baby.

Mia slowly chewed her cereal. “You’re losing.”

Your head snapped toward her. “We were tied.”

“Were.”

You scowled, tore the article out of the paper with unnecessary violence, grabbed a marker from the junk drawer, and stormed over to the board. You begrudgingly added one angry little tally mark that went under Bullseye’s side.

5.

Mia made a soft, faux-sympathetic noise. “Oof.”

“This is not oof,” you rolled your eyes. “This is fucking police incompetence! What was all that budget increase for, huh?”

“It is kind of oof.” She took another bite of cereal. “But you can catch up. He’s only up by one.”

You stared at the board. Your eye twitched.

Mia lifted her bowl toward you like a toast. “Very exciting season.”

“These stupid cops can’t tell the difference between a stab and a long-distance throw.” You turned back around, waving the paper like evidence in a trial you were fully prepared to win. “Look at the wound. Look at it. That’s clearly close quarters.”

Mia squinted at the grainy crime scene photo, her spoon hovering halfway to her mouth. The image was bad, blurred edges and cheap newspaper ink, but even from across the kitchen she could tell what it was: yours.

“Maybe they thought Bullseye walked up to him,” Mia said.

You stared at her.

“Bullseye doesn’t walk up to people. He has a ricochet fetish.”

Mia choked on a laugh, nearly spilling cereal milk onto the table. “Oh, so now you know him.”

You corrected her. “I know his work.”

“You know his work,” she repeated, deadpan. “You mean you’ve been staring at the leaked photos you saved again?”

You ignored her, because Mia had this very annoying habit of being right in ways that didn’t make you feel good about yourself.

The worst part was that you were angry.

That had been your kill. It was clearly your style. You were a melee specialist, for fuck’s sake!!! You liked the intimacy, the nearness. You like watching the life drain out of your victims’ eyes, being close enough to watch their face change when they finally understood why you were there.

Bullseye was different.

Bullseye liked a little distance. Bullseye was impossible accuracy. He could turn a room into a murder weapon without crossing it, and no, you definitely didn’t admire that.

You just understood skill when you saw it.

That was all.

But under the anger, in the small, horrible place where your dignity went to die, there was a humiliating feeling that curled in your stomach every time you thought about him opening the paper.

Because Bullseye was going to see this.

He was going to read the same headline, look at the same shitty photo, and know it was wrong.

He would know.

Maybe he would be offended. Maybe he would laugh. Maybe he would tilt his head at the paper and think, No. That wasn’t me.

Maybe he would wonder about you, and at this point, you were certain he knew of you. Because some of his knife-related rampages had been attributed to you too. Not often, but enough that sometimes your name got dragged into his mess, enough that you had stared at a clipping once for ten full minutes, heart crawling up your throat, because the paper had called one of his kills yours and you had hated how badly you wanted to know whether he had noticed.

Mia was staring at you again.

You folded the paper too carefully. “What?”

“You’re doing the thing again”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you pretend to be mad,” she said, pointing her spoon at you, “but really you’re hoping your murder crush noticed you.”

You frowned “He’s not my murder crush.”

Mia smiled into her cereal and ignored the denial altogether. “Want me to get you more knives for today?”

You looked down at the headline.

“Yes,” you finally said. “The nice ones.”

Mia’s grin got wider. “You dressing up, too? Just in case you run into him?”

“I’m hunting,” you corrected.

“Sure.”

“I am.”

“Wear something slutty and stab-proof!”

You threw the newspaper at her.

—

Later that night, you went out in the jacket Mia called your “bad decision jacket” (it had extra knife sheaths) which was rich coming from a woman who kept grenades in a biscuit tin.

You were definitely not hoping to run into Bullseye. You were working.

There was a difference, even if Mia would have said hahhaha, sure. 

The AVTF agents were exactly where your source said they would be, inside a half-empty municipal building wearing the kind of confidence that came from believing the badge still meant something. They had files they should not have had, names they should not have known, and enough blood on their hands to make your little visit feel almost civic-minded.

You made it quick.

Messy, but quick.

You handled most of it the way you liked best: Close, direct, personal enough that nobody could pretend it was an accident. But halfway through, because you were still one point behind on the stupid fridge-board and your pride had apparently become an emergency, you tried to make it look like Bullseye.

Just a little. Just enough to even the score.

You threw a knife. It hit a filing cabinet and dropped to the floor with the saddest little clatter you had ever heard.

One of the AVTF men stared at it like what the fuck was that?

“Shut up,” you said, before he could say anything.

Then you threw a smaller knife, in the hopes that it was easier to control.

It bounced off a desk lamp, went nowhere useful, and spun under a chair.

Fine.

Whatever.

Throwing stuff was harder than it looked, which was annoying because he made it look like flirting with physics. You were not built for distance. So you gave up and did it properly.

By the time you left, the crime scene was mostly yours, with two deeply humiliating attempts at his signature scattered around like evidence of a mental breakdown. You lingered on the fire escape for a few seconds longer than necessary, checking the neighbouring rooftops.

Nothing.

No figure in black. No little glint of movement across the street.

Which was fine.

Obviously.

You were not disappointed.

—

When you got home, Mia was out. Work, she had said, which meant she was probably meeting Turk in the back of some terrible bar and calling an arms deal “networking”.

The apartment was dark when you unlocked the door.

Not unusual.

You stepped in, a takeout bag hanging from one hand, the other already sliding toward the knife under your jacket. The kitchen was empty. Mia’s cereal bowl was still in the sink. Mia’s boots were next to your sneakers.

Everything seemed normal until you saw the fridge.

Huh. 

Your magnetic board had been straightened.

Not cleaned or erased. It was fixed.

The crooked newspaper clippings had been lined up into neat rows. The takeout menus had been stacked by alphabetic order, it seemed. The strawberry magnet sat dead centre at the top, no longer holding up three different things at once. Even the tallies had been corrected into clearer, cleaner marks.

And below your personal Bullseye vs Me board, in new black marker, someone had written:

I’ve been looking for you too.

Your gaze snapped to the wide-open window, and realised, oh my god.

He had been here.

—

Dex came back to his studio apartment with a smile on his face.

He locked the door behind him, slid the chain into place, and reached into his jacket for the shirt he had taken from your apartment.

Your shirt. It was a plain white shirt he’d seen you wear before, and you looked pretty in it. I mean, Dex thought you looked pretty all the time, but still. 

The fabric was soft in his hands. In his head, it still felt warm, even though it had just been hanging over the back of a chair when he found it. You had been careless and made it easy for him, really. You basically left it out like you had no idea someone could come in through your window and take a piece of you home with him.

Dex knew better now.

He knew how your apartment sounded in the dark. He knew which floorboard creaked near the kitchen. He knew your roommate left dishes in the sink. He knew your takeout menus were a mess, your knives were hidden well but not well enough, and your window lock was insultingly easy to pick.

He knew how you smelled now.

Dex sat on the edge of his bed and brought the shirt to his face, breathing in like he was trying to memorise your scent: Detergent, metal, and city smoke. 

He closed his eyes.

He had stalked people before. Julie. Matt. Vanessa. Targets. Problems. People he wanted. People he needed to understand. But this was different.

This was not surveillance, or a job, or a petty attempt to become a good person, whatever that meant anymore. 

This was you.

Dex had been infatuated with you since the first time he saw one of your kills credited to him.

From there, he found a photo of you in the database: grainy, badly angled, and almost useless for the cops. You had silver reflective paint smeared around your eyes to ruin facial recognition, strange under the flash, but Dex knew enough to know what he was looking at.

Before long, he figured out who you were.

And now, he had been watching your window for almost a month. 

Tonight was just the first time you and Mia were both gone long enough for him to finally climb inside.

And then, he found that you had made a board.

The thought should have made him happy, and it  had, at first. For one perfect second in your dark kitchen, Dex had stood in front of that fridge and realised, you had noticed him, too. 

You had clipped the articles. You had tracked the kills. You had written his name in red marker and stood there thinking about him long enough to make tallies.

Then he read the rest.

KILLS BULLSEYE STOLE FROM ME.

His smile had died so fast it almost broke his heart.

Stole.

You thought this was a competition.

Dex stared down at your shirt in his lap, fingers tightening in the fabric.

That was wrong.

That was so wrong it made his skin feel too tight for his body. He had not stolen anything from you. He had never thought of it that way. Every time the papers confused you for him or him for you, every time your names bled into each other in some stupid journalist’s mouth, Dex had felt it like a sign that you belonged together. 

The mistaken murders were just evidence that you were close to him without even trying. Your work was intertwined, cosmically, with his. Your violence answered his. His name kept finding yours in the paper, in police files, like the whole city already understood a fact you were denying.

You and Dex were linked.

Obviously.

So why had you made sides?

Why had you put a line down the middle and placed him across from you like he was just another person to beat?

Dex swallowed, still holding your shirt to his mouth and frowned.

He thought you liked him.

He thought you understood. He thought, maybe, when you saw his kills printed under your name, you felt the same obsessive pull he did. The same recognition. 

Instead, you were mad. You were keeping score. You had written him down like a rival.

His jaw tightened.

That was okay.

It really was.

You were confused, that’s all. You had misunderstood. People did that all the time. 

You would understand eventually.

He had fixed the board for you, so maybe you’d realise there was no ill intent. He had straightened the clippings. Alphabetised the menus. Corrected the tallies. Left the message underneath because you needed help getting to the obvious conclusion that you belonged together:

I’ve been looking for you too.

In his head, it didn’t look threatening. It was merely a correction. Perhaps a little nudge in the right direction.

Dex lay back on the bed, dragging your shirt with him until it was pressed beneath his cheek. He breathed you in again, slower this time, and the hurt in his chest eased.

You thought it was a game.

Fine.

He could play.

He could let you have your angry little board and your angry little tally marks. He could let you pretend you were chasing him, fighting him, competing with him.

But eventually, Dex would fix that, too.

Eventually, you’d want him as much as he wanted you. 

—

You wiped the note off before Mia got home, even though you didn’t really want to.

You stood there for an embarrassingly long time first, staring at the neat black marker beneath your board while your stomach did a stupid flip.

Then you remembered Mia was weird about outside people being in the apartment.

Fair. You were also weird about outside people being in the apartment, usually. Usually, if someone broke in, you handled it with a knife and made Mia bleach the floor while you tied a brick to the body and sunk it in the Hudson.

But this was Bullseye.

So you erased it, like an idiot getting rid of DNA evidence. 

You wiped the board twice, fixed the strawberry magnet, and tried to look normal when Mia came home carrying a bag that clinked against her hip.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway and squinted. “Did you redo the murder board?”

You didn’t look up from your hot chocolate. “No.”

Mia stared at the fridge.

The whole thing looked less like a breakdown and more like a very well-done administrative system. “Why is it nicer?”

You took a sip. “I got bored.”

Mia looked at you. You looked at her.

Then she shrugged. “Whatever. It was ugly before.”

Totally clueless, Thank fuck.

By the next morning, you had bought reinforced locks, and not because you were scared of him getting into your apartment again. If anything, the memory of the open window had been sitting in your mind all night. You kept thinking about him standing in your kitchen. Touching your board. Straightening your things. Writing to you like he already knew you would read it and think about it all night. 

So no, the new locks were not there out of fear. They were a message.

You installed them yourself, one after another, until all the windows looked almost impossible to open from the outside.

Then you stood back, smiled despite yourself, and imagined him finding it.

He’d know the message then:

If you want to get in again, earn it.

—

Three nights later, the paper was waiting on the kitchen table.

Mia had left it there under her empty coffee cup, either as a warning or because she had run out of coasters. You found it while the kettle boiled, still barefoot, still half-asleep, and then very suddenly awake.

AVTF INFORMANT FOUND DEAD. 

You stared at the headline.

Then the photograph.

Then the headline again, and then the subtitle, crediting the kill to you, 

But that kill wasn’t yours.

You knew it before you read the article. You knew it from the angle of the body, the precision of the knife in a fatal artery. He had not been stabbed. He had been aimed at by distance, by calculation.

Bullseye.

And the papers had given it to you.

For a second, all you could do was stand there while the kettle clicked off behind you.

Then you smiled a small, helpless twitch of your mouth before you walked across the kitchen, uncapped the blue marker, and added one clean tally to your side of the board.

5-5.

Yay! Level again!

You leaned back on your heels and looked at it.

Perfect.

Almost.

You picked up the paper again, meaning to cut out the article, when something in the crime scene photo caught your eye. It was half-hidden behind the dead man’s shoulder, smeared on the wall, small enough that most readers would miss it.

Not a threat or a boast, but a question, written in blood.

why the locks?

Your hand tightened around the paper.

Oh.

He’d left you a message.

You could almost feel him in your kitchen again, standing in the dark in front of your board, touching the magnets, straightening the clippings, noticing what had changed. Of course he had noticed the locks.

You stood there for too long, long enough that the tea went bitter in the mug you forgot to drink.

When Mia came in later, tying her hair back and looking for her keys, you had already finished cutting the article out with careful hands.

She glanced at the board.

“Even again?”

“Mhm.”

“Congrats.”

She took her keys off the hook and left without noticing the way your fingers hovered over the little blood-written question in the photograph.

Good.

You did not need an audience for whatever this was becoming.

—

You answered him three nights later, when you eventually found Benjamin Poindexter’s apartment building.

It took patience, two evenings of watching, a borrowed set of binoculars. One very stupid moment where you almost slipped on a drainpipe and decided not to think about how humiliating it would be to die before the flirting even got interesting.

But eventually, you found his window. Child’s play, really. As if going under a stupid fake name like “Tony” would ever hide him from you. 

That night, you waited until the light in his apartment went off.

Then you left a brand new lock on his fire escape.

The same brand as the ones you had put on your windows. Heavy, reinforced, and annoyingly expensive. It was still sealed in its packaging, with the little paper instructions tucked under the shackle.

You added a note:

Jealous?

Then you left.

—

Dex found it before sunrise.

He hadn’t slept much. He had your shirt twisted between his fingers, the fabric pressed into his palm until his knuckles ached. He had been sitting across the window for hours the night before, looking across at your apartment, at the little row of reinforced locks catching the streetlight like tiny silver insults.

You were keeping him out.

On purpose.

He kept telling himself not to be hurt by it, which was useless, because he was hurt. He was so fucking hurt it made his chest feel crushed, like an anvil had been dropped on his ribs and left there. You had changed the windows because of him. You had looked at the place where he got in, thought about him standing in your kitchen, touching your things, breathing your air, and your first instinct had been to shut him out.

Dex hated that.

Dex hated that so much he almost hated you for half a second.

Then, that morning, he opened his window and saw the lock waiting on his fire escape.

He went still.

It sat there perfectly placed, right where his hand would find it. Same brand as yours, same little shine in the dark. 

For a moment, he didn’t touch it.

Then he picked up the note.

Dex read it once.

And then, he smiled.

Because now he knew you hadn’t locked him out because you wanted him gone.

You had wanted him to notice.

You had wanted him to see the effort. You had wanted him to look at your windows and understand that you had been thinking about him too. You had not made a wall. You had made a challenge. You had left him the same lock like a matching star, like a little joke only the two of you were deranged enough to understand.

Dex sat on the fire escape with the lock in his hand until the sky began to lighten.

The note went into his wallet.

The lock went on his window.

—

The next mistake came no less than a week later. 

You had gone out the night before. You had driven the knives into the agents and controlled the room, kept the distance intimate enough that any half-competent investigator should have known better.

Unfortunately, half-competent was not what New York had.

By morning, the headline said it was Bullseye.

You stared at the paper in silence. Ugh. You were losing again.

That was irritating, up until you realised he would see it.

He would know the city had handed him something that belonged to you again, and you hated how badly you wanted to know whether that would make him smile.

It did.

Dex smiled so hard it almost hurt.

He read the article at the counter of a diner, coffee untouched, thumb pressed lightly over the blurred photograph like he could feel the shape of your work through the cheap ink.

Obviously yours.

They had called it his, but it was yours. Anyone who understood you would know that.

I understand you.

The thought sat inside him like a lit match.

He folded the article with almost painful care and took it home.

That night, when you came back to your apartment, nothing was out of place.

The windows were shut. The door was bolted. Every lock you had installed still sat exactly where it was supposed to, heavy and unpicked.

For one stupid second, you were disappointed.

Then you saw the kitchen window. Outside the glass, taped neatly to the pane where you could not miss it, was the newest clipping.

Oh. So he had climbed all the way up to your window, pressed flat against the glass like an offering.

At the bottom of the clipping, in small black marker, Dex had written:

they got it wrong again.

Your heart climbed into your throat.

You stepped closer until your reflection overlapped the words. It looked strange like that, his handwriting across your chest in the dark glass.

It was as if it was the two of you against everyone else’s incompetence.

You didn’t leave it there. Mia would see it in the morning. Mia would ask why Bullseye was leaving notes on your window like some homicidal pen pal, and you had no answer that didn’t sound insane. That, and Mia just ordered in a bunch of assault rifles. The last thing you needed was your roommate pointing it at Dex when he visited.

So you opened the window just enough to reach out, peeled the clipping carefully off the glass, and tore away the strip with Dex’s writing.

You didn’t throw it out. Instead, you folded that little scrap of paper twice and tucked it into your jacket pocket, right over your heart like an idiot.

Then you pinned the clipping to the fridge yourself, neat and straight beneath the strawberry magnet, just the way Dex would like it. 

You updated the score, still a bit annoyed.

6-5

And somewhere outside, across the dark gap between buildings, you hoped he had seen you keep it.

—

The next one made it even again.

You knew it the second you saw the headline, before you even got to the photograph. There was a kind of cleanliness to Dex’s violence that the papers never understood. They called it brutality because they didn’t have better words, but you did.

TASK FORCE OFFICER FOUND DEAD IN ALLEY. 

Attributed to you.

You stood in front of the bodega newspaper rack for so long the man behind the counter asked if you were buying it or grieving it.

By the time you got home, the board was waiting for you.

You added the blue tally slowly, smiling despite yourself.

6-6.

They had given you his kill, and you should have been pleased because that was the game. That was the whole stupid point. But instead, your eyes kept drifting back to the photograph, to the blurred dark shape on the floor beside the victim’s hand.

It was a knife.

His, you thought.

Maybe the police had missed it in the chaos of the shot, or maybe the photographer had caught it before evidence got bagged. Either way, once you noticed it, you couldn’t stop looking.

He had left something behind, but he wasn’t careless

Which meant he had either wanted it found, or he had been interrupted.

So you went to the scene of the crime.

You waited until the scene thinned out, until the uniforms got bored and the detectives started making the kind of mistakes tired people made. You kept to the edges: fire escapes, alleys, rooflines, with the courtesy of a little patience.

To your surprise, the knife was still there, half-hidden beneath a radiator, dark with day-old blood, beautiful even like that.

You took it.

At home, you cleaned it carefully, until it gleamed again under the kitchen light. You sharpened the edge until it caught against your thumb, cutting a little bit of your skin to check.

A little blood trickled off. Yep. Sharp enough.

Then,  you wrapped it in a strip of clean white cloth and waited until night.

You climbed the rooftop up until you got to Dex’s apartment building. His window was closed when you reached his fire escape.

The lock you had given him sat there now, installed properly, bright on the frame. For one second, the sight of it made your heart warm.

He had actually used it.

You crouched outside the glass and placed the knife carefully on the sill where he would find it.

Then you tucked the note beneath it.

they keep getting us wrong :(

You stared at the little sad face for a second. Then you almost snatched the note back because, Jesus Christ, that was humiliating.

But the light in his apartment flicked on.Through the thin curtain, you saw his shadow move.

So you left it and climbed away before he reached the window, heart kicking hard against your ribs like you had done something worse than trespassing on a known assassin’s fire escape.

Behind you, Dex opened the window.

His hand appeared, picking up the knife first.

Then he found the note.

Dex read it and chuckled.

He sat down on the edge of the fire escape with your note in one hand and his knife in the other. You had cleaned it. Sharpened it. Brought it home to him like it mattered.

Like his things were worth taking care of.

Like he was.

As this all happened in the background, the score climbed. 

7-6. 

Your kill, his credit. 

Then finally, after one long, ugly night that left half an AVTF unit dead and every paper in the city contradicting itself, the board settled again. 

Then 7-7. 

His kill, your credit. 

Perfectly even.

After that, the messages got cuter, which somehow made them worse.

The first note Dex left was taped to the outside of your kitchen window with a polished bullet casing tied beneath it in red thread.

there’s an us now?

You stared at it for so long your tea went cold.

Your answer came two nights later, left on his windowsill beside an AVTF badge you put there like an offering

don’t get sentimental. but yes.

After that, it became ridiculous. A loose knife sheath returned with a note that said you left this behind. be careful. A newspaper clipping from you with wrong again :( scribbled in the margin. A black marker from him, because he could tell from your last note that yours was running out. A little evidence tag folded into a paper heart, which you immediately flattened, put under your pillow, and thought about all day like an idiot.

That night, somewhere across the street, a shadow moved on the opposite rooftop.

You didn’t wave or smile, but you left the window unlocked when you went to bed.

—

The next morning, there was black fabric at the foot of your bed.

For one confused, half-asleep second, you stared at it like your brain hadn’t finished loading. Then you sat up, hair a mess, blanket sliding down your shoulder, and realised it was a black shirt.

It was folded very neatly, sleeves tucked in, collar smoothed flat, like whoever had left it there had taken his time.

Underneath it was a note:

I took one of yours. It’s only fair.

Your mouth parted. Then, you smiled.

“Oh,” you whispered.

That was where your white shirt had gone.

Of fucking course he had taken it, likely on the first night he broke in. And last night, he had climbed through your unlocked window like a nightmare with good manners, walked into your room while you were sleeping, stood close enough to see the rise and fall of your chest, and decided the polite thing to do was leave you one of his in return.

You picked up the shirt and brought it to your face before dignity could stop you. So this was he smelled like: gun oil, soap, cold air, and a metallic tang underneath that made your eyelids flutter for one horrible second.

Fuck.

You were actually smelling his shirt. Worse, you were smiling about it.

You pressed the fabric harder against your mouth, grinning into it like an idiot, because the thought of Dex standing at the foot of your bed while you slept should have made you afraid. It should have made you check the locks, grab a knife, call Mia, do literally anything normal.

Instead, all you could think was: he was here.

He saw you asleep and he didn’t hurt you. He saw you vulnerable and all he did was give something back.

Then, from the hallway, Mia’s voice floated through the apartment. “What the fuck?”

You froze, lowering the shirt from your face. “What?” you called out. 

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

You scrambled out of bed, still clutching Dex’s shirt in one hand, and padded into the hall.

Mia stood at the entrance to the living room in yesterday’s shorts and a tank top, hair sticking up in six different directions, one hand wrapped around a pistol and the other holding a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST CRIMINAL.

You followed her stare. Then you saw what Dex had done.

There was a man tied to one of your dining chairs in the middle of the living room.

Alive. Barely conscious, but alive.

His ankles were zip-tied to the chair legs. His wrists were bound behind him. His mouth was taped shut. A neat little bow made of red ribbon had been tied around his chest like Dex had either found gift-wrapping funny or had no idea how gifts worked.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. Then Mia turned her head very slowly and looked at you with the exhausted expression of a woman who had been through a lot with you and was still somehow finding new reasons to be disappointed.

“I didn’t do that,” you said immediately, which was technically true and therefore the best kind of lie. You lowered the shirt slightly behind your thigh and hoped she was too busy processing the tied-up man to notice you were holding another assassin’s laundry.

Mia blinked at you. “There is a task force rat in our living room with a bow on him.”

“I can see that,” you said, stepping closer like you were being practical about it and not fighting the urge to smile. The man, when he finally opened his eyes, made a muffled sound through the tape, eyes wide and wet with panic, and you ignored him because the coffee table was more interesting.

Dex had laid out everything the man had been carrying in neat rows: A burner phone, a badge, a small recorder, a folded surveillance schedule, and four photographs of your building sat arranged with almost romantic precision.

One was of you, from your bedroom window, wrapped in your towel after a shower. Two photographs were of your living room  window: one of you enjoying the sunset from the fire escape, and the other was of you and Mia drinking beers and sitting on the counters by the kitchen last week. One was of your window last night, zoomed in close enough to show the lock you had left undone.

Your stomach dropped and warmed at the same time, which was deeply inconvenient. You reached for the note pinned to the red thread across the man’s chest before Mia could get there first.

Underneath, in smaller writing:

I didn’t like that. You should be more careful.

You stared at the note for too long, long enough for Mia to notice exactly how not-horrified you were. That was the problem with Mia; she was nosy, armed, and unfortunately not stupid.

“What is that?” she asked, taking half a step toward you. You folded the note before she could read it properly and tucked it into your waistband like it was nothing.

“Evidence,” you said, because again, technically true. 

Mia’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you holding a shirt?”

You looked down as if you had only just noticed the black fabric in your hand. “Laundry.”

“That’s not your shirt,” Mia said, huffing. “That is very obviously not your shirt.”

You forced yourself to shrug and moved past her into the living room, putting your body between her and the note on the hostage’s chest like that would somehow fix everything. “Maybe he brought it,” you said, nodding at the informant, which was such a stupid lie that even the tied-up man looked offended.

Mia stared at you. Then she stared at the man. Then she stared at the shirt again, and you could practically see her connecting dots you were trying to kick under the sofa.

“You’re being weird,” she said. 

“I woke up to a federal informant in our living room, Mia. I think weird is allowed,” you said, and crouched in front of the man before she could keep interrogating you. His eyes fixed on you with desperate relief, like you were the reasonable person in the room, which was honestly insulting.

He had not killed the man. He had found him, hurt him, wrapped him up, and left him breathing in your living room because he knew you would want the choice.

That wasn’t sane. That wasn’t normal. That was not something you could explain to Mia without her opening the biscuit tin full of grenades and declaring a turf war in your apartment.

So you just tilted your head, and Mia watched the movement with open suspicion, her pistol still raised but her attention now split between the hostage and whatever the hell was happening to your face.

Instead of giving her a second of your time, you crouched in front of the informant and smiled like this was business as usual. Behind you, Mia muttered something about needing stronger coffee, and you tried not to think about Dex standing in your bedroom while you slept, leaving you something comforting before placing something violent in the next room.

“Morning,” you said.

The informant whimpered again. You softened your voice, and smiled just enough to make him regret being awake.

“Where shall we start?”

The man made a desperate noise behind the tape, eyes blown wide his whole body jerking against the zip ties like panic had gotten under his skin. You watched him for a second longer than necessary, Dex’s black shirt still clutched in one hand and hidden half-uselessly against your thigh.

You reached forward and pinched the edge of the duct tape.

The man started shaking his head before you even pulled it free, frantic little sounds building in his throat, but you only smiled at him and said, “Relax. I’m helping.”

Then you tore it off.

The second his mouth was free, he gasped so hard it sounded painful. “Bullseye sent me!”

You froze.

Mia’s confusion manifested in a little huh? behind you, but you barely registered it. The man was already blabbing, words falling out of him too fast to be clean. “Please, please, I swear, I swear to God, that’s all this is. He told me to deliver a message. That’s it. I’m just the messenger. I didn’t ask to come here. He grabbed me, he tied me up, he said if I didn’t tell you exactly what he said, he’d come back and cut my hands off, and I believe him, I really, really believe him.”

You crouched a little closer. Your heartbeat had gone quick under your skin. “What message?”

The informant swallowed. His eyes flicked to Mia’s gun, then back to you, and whatever he saw on your face made him more terrified. “He said it’s a date. He said that specifically. A date. He told me to say date, not meeting, not job, not negotiation. Date. He said if the city keeps putting your names together, maybe you should stop letting everyone else have all the fun. He said you should meet him tonight at eleven-thirty at The Black Rabbit on 46th. The back booth. He said you’d know which one because. He said you’d know it because you cut through the alley behind it last Thursday after the task force thing, and he said you ordered fries there once and didn’t finish them because the oil tasted old, and— and I don’t know what that means, I swear I don’t know what that means.”

Oh.

Oh, that absolute freak.

Your mouth parted before you could stop it. You knew The Black Rabbit. It was small, low-lit, always half-empty after ten. You had used the alley behind it twice. Of course he had picked somewhere cute in the most deranged possible way. 

The man saw your expression and started crying harder. “Please. That’s all. That’s all he told me. back booth, I told you. I delivered it. Please let me go. I won’t say anything. I won’t tell the task force. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll leave the city. I swear, I swear, I swear—”

You were not listening anymore.

A date.

Dex had called it a date.

The thought landed low in your stomach, warm enough to be embarrassing. You looked down at his shirt in your hand, at the black fabric bunched between your fingers, and your thumb dragged over the seam before you could stop yourself. 

You would’ve gotten lost in your own head if Mia did not shoot the informant in the head, and the man slumped on the floor so suddenly the ribbon went crooked across his chest.

You flinched, blinking yourself back into the room. “Mia.”

“What?” she said, lowering the gun with the exhausted irritation of someone who had just turned off a very loud alarm. “He’s a messenger. He delivered the message.”

You looked at the body, then back at her.

Mia stared at you for a long second. Her eyes dropped to the shirt in your hand, then to the dead man, then to your face, which was doing a terrible job of pretending it had not just been lit from the inside. Her mouth flattened when she connected the dots.

“Oh,” she said. “So you’ve been in contact with Bullseye and didn’t tell me.”

You opened your mouth.

Mia lifted a hand before you could say anything. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool. It’s not like I’m your best friend or anything.”

“It’s not like that,” you said, which was stupid, because there was a corpse in your living room wearing a bow and you were holding another man’s shirt like a keepsake.

Mia looked at the body again. Then at you. Then at the note still pinned under the ribbon. “Right. Not like that. Obviously. Men are always sending women hostage invitations to bars for completely normal reasons.”

You tucked Dex’s shirt closer to your side, as if that helped. “It’s complicated.”

“I bet.”

“Mia—”

“No, you know what?” she said, rubbing at her forehead with the heel of her free hand. “Fine. Go on your date.”

You had no answer for that, which was irritating, because you usually had an answer for everything.

Mia sighed so deeply, because this concern had come from years of friendship, unpaid rent, and every bad decision she had ever watched you make. She stepped around the dead informant, pistol still loose in her hand, then paused in the hallway and looked back at you with total, bone-deep exhaustion.

“Couldn’t he just send a singing telegram like a normal psychopath?” she muttered. Then, before you could smile too hard, she pointed the gun vaguely at your face. “Whatever. I’ll get you a gun. Just in case.”

You looked after her, trying and failing not to grin.

“And you’re telling me everything afterwards,” Mia called back.

—

You walked into The Black Rabbit at eleven twenty-seven wearing a skirt, a jacket, and Dex’s oversized black shirt tucked messily into your waistband.

It was a mistake.

You knew it the second he saw you.

Dex was in the back booth under the cracked mirror, one hand around a beer he hadn’t touched. He looked up when the door opened, and whatever expression he had prepared for you died instantly.

His eyes dropped to the shirt. Then to your skirt. Then back to your face.

For a second, Bullseye looked like he had forgotten how breathing worked.

You stopped at the edge of the booth. “Hi.”

Dex stood up too fast, almost hitting his knee on the table. “Hi.”

It was so stupidly endearing, you almost forgot your combined body count.

You looked him over, trying to be smug and failing because he was staring at you like you had walked in wearing his heart instead of his laundry.

“You picked a bar,” you said.

“I wanted it to be normal.”

“You sent a dying man to ask me out.”

Dex swallowed. “I wanted you to know I was serious.”

Your stomach flipped.

God. He was insane. Why did you think he was being cute about it?

His gaze dropped again, helplessly, to the shirt hanging loose off your shoulders. “You… wore what I gave to you.”

“You broke into my bedroom.”

“I gave it to you,” he repeated, like that was the important part. Like he had not stood at the foot of your bed in the dark and watched you sleep. Like that wasn’t the most frighteningly intimate thing anyone had ever done to you.

You should have been angry. Instead, you smiled.

Dex saw it and looked like he was about to explode.

Oh.

Your heartbeat kicked hard.

The bar noise blurred for a second: the jukebox skipping in the corner, the bartender moving glasses around, someone laughing too loudly near the door. Dex didn’t seem to hear any of it. He was looking at you with frightening, naked concentration, his hands flexing once at his sides like he wanted to touch you and was using every violent part of himself not to.

You slid into the booth across from him.

Dex sat after you did, still watching, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.

“If you want to talk,” you leaned back, trying to play it cool, “then talk.”

“I… I know you hate being miscredited,” he said. “I know you check rooftops when you leave a scene. I know you keep your knives cleaner than your kitchen. I know you pretend you’re angry when you’re interested. I know you left the window unlocked for me.”

Your mouth went dry.

Dex’s voice dropped. “And I know you wore my shirt because you wanted me to see it.”

You stared at him.

For one long second, neither of you moved.

Then you reached across the table, picked up his untouched beer, and took a sip.

It was awful. Bitter and poured badly and exactly the kind of thing he would order because he had no idea what people were supposed to enjoy.

You set it down and smiled. “You’re very confident for a man who had to kidnap someone to ask me out.”

Dex’s mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed ruined. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”

“You look surprised that I did,” you tilted your head with a genuine smile.

“I’m not surprised.” His gaze dragged over you again, softer this time, worse. “I’m trying not to do something stupid.”

Your heart climbed into your throat. “Like what?”

Dex looked at your mouth.

There it was.

The whole ridiculous game of notes and locks and knives suddenly collapsed into one fact sitting between you in the booth.

Dex wanted you.

Not abstractly or poetically. Not as some distant counterpart in a newspaper headline.

He wanted you right here, in his shirt, across the table, smiling like you knew exactly what you were doing to him.

You should have made a joke. You should have leaned away. You should have reminded him that this was public, that he was dangerous, that you were dangerous, that Mia had told you to report back and would absolutely ask invasive questions.

Instead, you leaned in.

“Careful,” you murmured. “It’s only the first date.”

His eyes darkened. Very slowly, he smiled. “Then I’ll be good.”

Fuck.

You were in trouble.

—

Talking was easy after that.

Annoyingly easy, actually. Once the first  charged silence broke, once Dex stopped looking at you like the sight of you, awake and talking, had rewired everything essential in him, the conversation settled into normal. Well, almost. If normal could mean two killers sharing beer in the back booth of a shitty Hell’s Kitchen bar, talking about murder like it was music theory.

It started with the board, obviously. You accused him of taking your credit. He genuinely seemed upset, not because of the murders themselves, but because you put each other on opposite sides. 

You should have laughed at him.

Instead, you understood it.

See, under all the insanity, he made a horrible kind of sense. His violence was clean where yours was intimate. Yours got close. His made distance feel personal. You said as much, lightly at first, and watched the words hit him harder than any knife could have.

Dex went quiet after that, as if he was moved by your observation. You’re starting to get it, he said. 

He talked like nobody had ever looked at the ugliest part of him and called it skill without feeling afraid. Like nobody had ever understood the difference between chaos and control before you. He sat across from you with his beer untouched for too long, staring like he wanted to crawl inside into your lap and live there.

The two of you kept talking for hours. Murder one-to-one. Technique, preferences, mistakes other people made when they tried to imitate either of you. Bad police work. Worse journalism. The insult of being misunderstood by people too stupid to deserve the blatant fucking evidence left in front of them. It should have been ridiculous, and it was. But Dex listened like every petty complaint mattered, like your irritation was holy because it matched in the one in him.

He had never felt so understood before.

You could see it on his face, which was embarrassing for both of you. Every time you leaned forward, every time the collar of his shirt shifted against your shoulder, his focus narrowed so intensely it made the air feel thin.

You could’ve continued talking there for hours if your phone didn't buzz.

You glanced down, expecting Mia to be demanding details or threatening you if you died before telling her everything. Instead, your informant had sent you an address. Then another, along with a list of names. AVTF agents moving together, not far from the bar, practically gift-wrapped by circumstance.

You looked at the message for a second.

Then you smiled.

You slid the phone across the table, and Dex read the text.

You leaned forward, his shirt slipping loose at your shoulder, and smiled sweetly. “Wanna go hunting?”

—

By the time you reached the rooftop across from the location, you were only starting to realize how intimate this was, even though it should feel like mostly work.

From your crouch near the ledge, you could see the building your informant had sent. It had everything a vigilante could ever dream of: rooftop access, bad perimeter awareness, two lit windows on the upper floor, a side entrance that might as well have had an invitation nailed to it. 

Dex, meanwhile, looked exactly as he had in the bar, which was to say unfairly good. He had that same wound-too-tight stillness, only now it had somewhere to go. Neither of you really needed to change because this was who you were. The bar hadn’t been the disguise. If anything, the bar had just been two vigilantes forced briefly into civilian setting, and now the city had handed you both an excuse to slip back into yourselves.

His hand disappeared into his jacket pocket, and when it came back out, there was the mask. He looked down at it for only a second before starting to pull it on like it was muscle memory, like it belonged to the shape of his body as naturally as breath.

Your fingers closed around his wrist, before you thought too hard about it.

Dex stopped, startled, his mask half-unfolded in his hand.

Then you took it from him.

For one long second, he just stared. Not suspicious or annoyed. He just looked completely thrown off, all his composure knocked sideways by the fact that you had interrupted him so casually, like this was your right.

You should have said something then. Instead, you just pulled the mask over your own face.

Oh.

The fabric settled over your features, and you felt Dex go catastrophically still.

His shirt was still hanging off your frame beneath your jacket, the hem tucked into your skirt carelessly in a way that had already ruined him once tonight. The skirt itself was too short to qualify as practical, which had been part of the fun. And now, on top of all that, you were wearing his mask?

It was not subtle, what it did to him.

Dex looked at you like something inside his brain had simply stopped functioning, overloaded so completely there was nothing left for him to do but stand there and take it.

You could practically see the short circuit happen.

His mouth parted uselessly. His eyes dragged over you, and you could've sworn you had never seen anyone look so gone while still technically upright.

You smiled under the mask.

“Hold still,” you murmured, reaching into your little bag, the one you never left home without, fingers finding the small tin by touch alone. It was silver reflective paint. 

You flipped open the tin and stepped closer.

The silver caught the rooftop light as you dipped your fingers into it. You reached up and touched him beneath the eye first, dragging one clean line of paint over the sharp plane of his cheekbone, right above his scar. Then another, across the bridge of his nose, your hand steady, his breathing not.

Dex didn’t move. He was holding himself together just to let you do this. The city noise carried below you, distant traffic and sirens and the hum of night, but up there on the rooftop it felt strangely intimate in a way that had nothing to do with proximity.

You painted the silver around his eyes the way you did your own, ruining cameras, distorting the face, making him look stranger and somehow even more himself. When you were done, you leaned back just enough to look at him properly.

“Pretty,” you said.

Dex’s throat worked. His gaze pierced your eyes. If he had looked overwhelmed before, now he looked outright haunted. Like being handed pieces of you had already been bad enough, but having your paint on his skin, his disguise on your face, the two of you standing there in each other’s signatures… it was something else entirely.

And for one absurd, breathless second, on a rooftop above a building full of men you were both about to kill, it felt less like getting ready for a job and more like the strangest, sweetest kind of undressing.

For a second, neither of you moved. Below you, through dirty windows and bad blinds, Task Force agents moved around inside the building like they had no idea the night had already chosen death for them.

Then someone inside laughed too loudly, and the moment snapped.

Right, work.

Or something like a work-date.

You laughed sweetly and dropped first, down the fire escape and through the service entrance, Dex behind you without needing a word. There was no need to gesture twice or whisper instructions. He moved like he already understood where you would go, which side you preferred,  you wanted distance cleared and when you wanted a body left close enough for your knife.

It should have unnerved you. Instead, it made you giddy.

You had known he was good. You had studied the clippings, the photos, the evidence left behind. But watching Dex work beside you was something else entirely. 

Every throw made space for you. Every little movement answered one of yours. He never crowded you, never interrupted, never treated the room like it belonged to him alone.

He made room for your violence like he had been waiting to see it up close.

And you gave him a show.

You moved through the agents with your style, close and quick and pulsing with adrenaline. Dex stayed in the shadows until he didn’t, a small knife flashing from his hand, then an agent behind you dropped before you even turned.

You couldn’t help but laugh.

It bubbled out of you, delighted though completely inappropriate, and Dex heard it through everything. His eyes found you across the room, stunned.

Like he had never heard anything lovelier.

Fuck, it was wonderful how well you worked together.

You ducked when he needed you to duck. He shifted when you needed space. You slid under his arm once, close enough that your shoulder brushed his chest. It was like dancing, if dancing was a criminal offence and everyone else in the room had arrived mortally underprepared.

Where the hell have you been all my life?

You thought it so clearly it almost became speech.

You only chuckled again, and Dex looked at you like he might never recover.

By the end of the bloodbath, twenty dead agents later, the building had gone quiet.

The euphoric, ringing kind of quiet. Broken glass glittered under the lights. A chair had been knocked onto its side and papers had been scattered across the floor. The agents were ruined, and the two of you stood in the middle of it like the last two people left after the world ended.

You were breathing hard, and so was he.

Dex had silver paint smudged beneath one eye now, a little messier than when you had put it there. His jacket was open. His hands were flexing at his sides, not because he needed a weapon, but because he didn’t know what to do with all the wanting still left in him.

You knew the feeling.

So you walked across the room before either of you could make a joke and ruin it.

Dex did not move away.

He watched you come closer with that open hunger on his face.

You grabbed the front of his jacket and pulled him down.

The kiss landed through the mask, a frustrating thin piece of fabric between your mouth and his. 

Dex froze for half a second, and then the restraint in him cracked just enough for you to feel it. His hands lifted, stopped, hovered near your waist like touching you might be another line he needed permission to cross. You smiled against the mask, and that was somehow worse, because he made a low, wrecked sound into the almost-kiss like you had done an unforgivable sin.

You pulled back, and he followed.

Only an inch, maybe less. But enough.

Enough to tell you exactly how badly he wanted the real thing.

His eyes were dark now, fixed on the place where your lips hid beneath his mask. He looked almost hurt, almost betrayed by the fabric, almost desperate enough to forget every wall he had built for your benefit.

“Take it off,” he said, rough, almost a plea. “Do that again.”

Your heart picked up a beat.

You stepped back just far enough to make him feel the loss.

You smiled beneath his mask.

“Earn it.”

And as Dex stared at your mouth through his mask, silver still wet beneath his eyes and twenty bodies cooling around you, you wondered, almost fondly, who the cops would blame for this one.

—end. 

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He had simply followed you around in silence as you barely made it through the shower. Barely made it through brushing your teeth. Barely made it into bed before collapsing face-first into the pillow. “If anyone wakes me up, I’m gonna bite.”

Dex, who had killed people for less threatening statements, took it very seriously.

Then your hand came out from under the blanket and patted the mattress impatiently, as if to say why aren’t you here yet? 

Dex got in so fast it was almost embarrassing.

You had made a sleepy sound as soon as the mattress dipped, but then you reached back, found his wrist, and dragged his arm over your waist. Not tenderly or romantically. You just put him where you wanted him, tucked his hand under yours, and immediately went limp again.

And everything was fine.

It was fine until 4 a.m., when you clearly started dreaming.

It wasn’t a nightmare. Dex knew what those looked like, and this was not that.

This was just you, half-dead and dreaming nonsense, making the most annoyed, crankiest little sound as you began to migrate away from him like a crab.

At first, Dex let you.

He was reasonable, at least as reasonable as he could be. You shifted an inch, maybe two, and he simply adjusted his hand on your waist. It was no big deal as his palm smoothed over your stomach, his chest following your back, his body staying pressed close behind yours because that was where he belonged.

Then you moved again, a little more this time.

Your shoulder slipped away from his chest. You dragged your hip out from under his hand. Your body started retreating across the mattress like you had somewhere better to be at four in the morning.

Dex frowned, now half awake and irritated by your subconscious, apparently trying to escape his loving grip. 

His arm tightened, restraining you a little in his big arms. It was a pathetic, clingy, half-conscious little no as he tried to pull you back against him.

You made a tiny displeased noise and inched away in deep sleep.

Then, because he was stupid and in love and apparently incapable of learning from warning signs, he tried again. He slid closer, tucked his face near the back of your neck, and gathered you into him with all the commitment of a man trying to keep his favourite person from drifting off the edge of the world.

Unfortunately, you were a supersoldier.

And you had apparently decided that whoever was touching you in your dreams didn't deserve to. 

You let out the cutest little groan.

Dex had half a second to think, Oh, that’s sweet.

Then your elbow drove back into his ribs.

He grunted, more surprised than hurt, his arm loosening just enough for you to wriggle farther away. 

“No,” he mumbled, and reached for you again.

Bad choice.

Your knee came up next, shoving into his thigh with enough force to move him several inches across the mattress. Dex blinked into the dark, confused and heartbroken, but still clinging to the very stupid belief that he could fix this by cuddling harder.

So he tightened his arm around your waist one last time.

You huffed, then you kicked. It was an exhausted, dream-fight little shove of your leg and shoulder and elbow all at once, pushing Dex off the bed completely. 

He landed on the floor with a thud.

You rolled halfway into the warm space he had left behind, made one satisfied little sleepy noise, and went right back to dreaming.

Dex stared at the ceiling.

The floor was cold against his spine, but that barely registered. He had been thrown through worse things than a bedroom. He had landed harder on concrete. He had been kicked, stabbed, shot at, operated on, broken open, put back together.

This was not the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

Unfortunately, his heart didn’t know that.

His heart, because it was stupid and badly trained and had become humiliatingly dependent on you, reacted like you had opened one eye, looked directly at him, and said, You specifically. Leave.

Dex swallowed.

You were asleep. He knew you were asleep. Logically, he knew your unconscious body had simply decided it needed more room. You had been exhausted. You hadn’t meant anything by it. You probably had no idea he was on the floor.

But when had his love ever followed logic? 

Maybe this was better. You had the bed. You had space. He was close enough to hear if your breathing changed. He was close enough to know if someone came through the door. Far enough not to crowd you. Far enough not to be too much.

Maybe being close enough to you on the floor was all he ever deserved. 

Twenty minutes passed.

Dex reviewed the last twelve hours with clinical precision. Had he done something wrong? Had he been too quiet at when you got home? Too intense when he watched you shower? Had you noticed him checking the locks twice when you were changing into your pyjamas? Three times? Had he kissed you too much? Not enough? Had you finally gotten tired of being loved by him?

Then you shifted again.

Dex turned his head before he could stop himself.

Your hand slid across the mattress, searching blindly.

Pat.

Pat, pat.

You paused as your fingers curled around empty sheet. You frowned in your sleep.

“Dex,” you mumbled.

He tried to answer, but nothing came out.

You slapped the mattress harder this time. “Dex.”

“I’m here,” he managed, but it was too quiet. 

You looked down at him on the floor with absolutely no comprehension. You did a sleepy, annoyed squint. “Huh?”

Dex stared up at you. You blinked.

Your voice was thick with exhaustion. “Why the fuck’re you down there?”

He tried to answer, but couldn’t. Because what was he supposed to say?

Because you pushed me away and I thought maybe that was what you wanted. Because I didn’t think I deserved to climb back in unless you asked.

You stared at him for another second, barely conscious.

Then you made an offended sound and flopped your arm over the side of the bed toward him. “Come back.”

Dex didn’t move, still trying to wrap his mind around the last hour. 

You wiggled your fingers, impatient and clumsy. “Dex.”

“I thought you didn’t love me any—”

“Dex….” You hadn’t even heard the full absurd thought. You had simply rejected it on instinct.

“I thought you wanted space,” he said quietly.

You blinked at him again, slowly, like he had just tried to explain taxes to a houseplant.

“What?”

“You pushed me.”

You processed that with the solemn difficulty of someone receiving bad news underwater.

Then you frowned. “I’was rude.”

You reached farther down until your fingers brushed his shoulder. The touch was weak, uncoordinated, barely a touch at all, but when Dex still didn’t move, you grabbed a fistful of his shirt and tugged, enough to make your point.

“Bed,” you mumbled.

Dex got back up slowly, as if he was afraid the mattress might reject him, too.

You watched him climb back into bed with the exhausted disgust of someone witnessing a grown man almost emotionally perish over a sleeping accident.

The second he was close enough, you grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him down.

His arm slid around you again, like he had been granted temporary access to holy ground. You immediately grabbed his wrist and dragged it tighter around your waist, tucking his hand against the bottom of your shin like you were putting him back where he belonged.

“Too early,” you muttered.

Dex pressed his face into the back of your neck. “You mad at me?” he asked quietly.

You groaned, still mostly asleep. “I’m mad at being awake.”

“That’s all?”

You rolled over in his arms with dramatic effort and squinted at him through one barely open eye. You looked murderous. Beautiful. Half-dead. Still the love of his life, though.

You half-stared at him for another second, then relaxed when you realised he had spiralled over something stupid and couldn’t help himself.

“Baby,” you mumbled. You shoved your face into his chest, cranky and affectionate, and hooked your leg over his hip. “C’mere.”

His arms tightened around you, relieved to the point of humiliation. You made a content little sound against him, already drifting off, one hand curled loosely at the back of his neck.

“There,” you whispered. “See? Still love you. Freak.”

Dex closed his eyes, breathing a content sigh with a slight smile.

His heart was still doing pathetic and painful flips under his ribs, but your body was tucked back into his, your breath against his skin, your hand holding him there even in sleep.

Dex pressed his mouth to your hair, held you a little tighter, and eventually drifted off, too.

“No hospitals,” he said.

And because you were a good person, you swallowed hard and said, “Okay.”

You knew first aid, you volunteered in enough community centers not to. 

“Do you have a name?” you asked.

His teeth chattered a little. “Dex.”

You swear you’re a good person when you let him inside your apartment.

You swear you’re a good person when you clean the blood from his body and nurture him back to health.

You swear you’re a good person when you let him sleep on your couch, even after you realize the suit is familiar.

Even after you realize he’s familiar.

Even after you realise he’s Bullseye. Even if he’s the kind of man good girls are supposed to run from.

But you look at him, Dex sits on your couch under  your blanket, bruised and battered, and says, “I’m one of the good guys now” with absolute conviction and a lopsided grin, as if he was imitating you. 

You swear you’re a good person when you believe him.

Or maybe you just want to believe him. Maybe you decide wanting to believe in him counts as mercy.

You swear you’re a good person when he’s eventually well enough to leave.

You swear you’re a good person when you spend two weeks pretending you’re glad he’s gone.

In truth, your apartment feels empty. You keep looking at the place where he bled on your tiles longingly.

Then, like a lost cat, he comes back through the window.

His hair was streaked with blood, he has blood on his knuckles. His eyes are tired and fixed on you.

“Task Force is crawling my streets,” he says. “Can I stay here?”

You swear you’re a good person when you say yes.

You swear you’re a good person when he kisses you that night.

It happens in the kitchen, under the flickering yellow light, with rain tapping against the glass. 

His mouth hits yours hard. You gasp, and he swallows it. His hand cups the back of your neck, thumb pressing under the soft flesh of your jaw, holding you still while he kisses you deeper. His body pins yours to the counter, and you know you should be scared.

You swear you’re a good person when you kiss him back.

You swear you’re a good person when you pull him closer by his belt loops.

You swear you’re a good person when he tells you he’s been watching you since he left.

He said he was sure you got home safe. He was making sure nobody followed you. He was sure the man from 4B stopped looking at you like a creep. He was sure you were safe, because he was a good man, right?

You should tell him to leave. Instead, you cup his cheeks and press his forehead to yours.

“Don’t lie to me about it again,” you whisper gently, which is not the same thing as telling him to stop.

You know that. Dex knows that, too.

You swear you’re a good person when you basically forgive him for stalking you. 

You swear you’re a good person when he starts staying over.

Suddenly, he has a toothbrush next to yours. His shirts end up in your closet. 

You swear you’re a good person when his hands go under your shirt, groping and gripping and touching  like he can’t believe you’re letting him. He kisses your neck until you’re whining. He bites your shoulder hard enough to make you arch. He grinds against you, still clothed, like he’s trying to crawl out of his own skin and into yours.

“Tell me to stop,” he pants.

You don’t. Instead, you drag him down.

You swear you’re a good person when he fucks you. When he gets you naked with desperate, clumsy hands and pushes your thighs apart like he’s afraid you’ll change your mind if he goes any slower. Your thighs are shaking so hard you have to grab his hair and mewl into his shoulders.

He fucks you deep and messy and stupid, hips pounding into yours, one hand gripping your thigh, the other braced beside your head. The bed hits the wall and nails tear down his scarred back. His mouth drags over your nose, your cheek, your lips, all open-mouthed and frantic.

“You’re mine,” he says, voice wrecked.

You just let out a helpless “hmpph!”

He laughs once against your mouth.

You swear you’re a good person when you let him fuck you silly in your own bed, even though you know what he is.

You swear you’re a good person when Task Force comes knocking three days later, when Dex is out.

The agent at your door is handsome, but not your type. 

“Ma’am,” he says. “We’re asking about a Bullseye sighting nearby.”

You blink up at him. “No, sir. I haven’t seen anything.”

You swear you’re a good person when you lie.

He doesn’t leave and steps closer instead, one boot over your threshold.

His gaze drops to your bare legs, and then to the oversized shirt you’re wearing. It was actually Dex’s shirt.

“You live alone?” he asks.

Your stomach turns upside down. “I think you should go.”

He shrugs, “I’m just asking questions.”

His hand catches the door before you can shut it. Then he is inside, too close, fingers brushing your wrist.

You freeze.

He looks at your mouth.

“You sure you don’t know anything?” he murmurs.

You swear you’re a good person when you lie again, this time through gritted teeth. “I said no.”

His hand slides to your waist and you shove him.

He laughs, but he tries to put his hands on you again. 

Eventually, you shut the door and get him out.

You wait for Dex.

You swear you’re a good person when you tell him everything, knowing exactly what Dex would do. 

“Name,” he says.

You tell him what you saw in the badges.

You swear you’re a good person when you don’t ask where he is going.

You swear you’re a good person when he comes back before dawn dragging the agent by the back of his collar. The man is crying.

His badge is gone, face is bruised, pushed to his knees  on your wooden floor.

Dex stands behind him with a gun in his hand.

“Apologise,” Dex says.

The agent sobs through it. He says sorry, says he didn’t mean it. Says he was just messing around.

Dex presses the gun to the side of his head and looks at you. “Can I?”

You swear you’re a good person.

You swear.

You swear.

You swear you think about mercy. You swear you think about laws. You swear you think about the literal human life Dex has put in your hands.

Still, you say, “Yes.”

Dex shoots him in the head. The agent drops, and blood spreads across your wooden floor.

He looks at you as if asking, are you proud of me yet?

You swear you’re a good person when you help him clean up the mess. You swear you’re a good person when you hold the bin bag open. You swear you’re a good person when you help him scrub blood from the floorboards. You swear you’re a good person when you help him bury the body.

What else were you supposed to do? Let him do it alone? After he defended you? After he did what you asked him to do?

You swear you’re a good person when you crawl into bed beside him that night.

You tuck yourself under his chin and whisper, “I love you.”

His arms close around you as he says, “I love you, too.”

You swear you’re still a good person.

Or maybe you’re just in love. Maybe you don’t know the difference anymore.

—

bobby would fight for bb. bobby HAS fought for bb. some kid in fourth grade called bb a freak. because bb was staring again, doing that too-still watching thing that unsettled adults let alone nine-year-olds. and bobby broke the kid's nose. didn't hesitate. zero calculation. just heard "freak" and his brother's name in the same sentence and his fist was already moving.

and that protection never stopped. all through school bobby ran interference for bb. not consciously, or as some fucked up project. just as a reflex.

when bb stood too still at parties bobby would throw an arm around his shoulders and say something loud and funny that redirected attention. when people asked why bb was so quiet bobby would shrug and say "he's thinking, he's the smart one" and move the conversation along. when teachers expressed concern bobby would charm them into dropping it.

he built a social buffer around his brother and maintained it for years and never once framed it as a favour because to bobby it genuinely wasn't one. it was just what you do. bb is his brother. bb is a little weird. the world is not kind to weird. bobby makes the world kinder by standing in front of it.

but.

and here's where it starts to hurt.

bobby also doesn't fully understand bb. he loves him without understanding him and those are not the same thing.

bobby can read bb's silences but he can't always read what's behind them. he knows when bb is uncomfortable but not always why. he knows when bb is upset but not what to do about it beyond the arm-around-the-shoulder, the loud joke, the deflection.

bobby's emotional toolkit is: make it lighter. make it easier. move on. and that works for bobby because bobby's emotions are things he'd rather not look at directly. but bb's emotions aren't like bobby's. bb's emotions are deep, slow and vast. they don't want to be made lighter. they want to be seen. and bobby doesn't know how to see them because bobby doesn't know how to see his own.

so there's a gap. it's not a cruel gap, not intentional. it's the gap between someone who processes the world externally and someone who processes it internally, and they happen to share a face.

bobby fills rooms. bb observes them. bobby is the sun and bb is the moon and the metaphor is apt right down to the part where everyone looks at the sun and nobody notices the moon is always there too.

does bb resent bobby for being the brighter twin?

yes.

no.

both, in a way that bb himself couldn't articulate because the resentment is so tangled up with love and gratitude and loyalty that pulling one thread would unravel all of them.

bb doesn't resent bobby's charm the way you'd resent a rival. it's not competitive. it's more like...

imagine standing next to a bonfire your whole life. you're glad the bonfire exists. you love the bonfire. the bonfire has kept you warm and safe and protected you from things that would have eaten you alive. but you've also spent your entire life in its shadow and nobody has ever looked past the fire to see what's standing next to it. you don't resent the fire for burning. you resent the world for not looking anywhere else.

bb has never once wished bobby was less. he's wished the world was more.

more observant. more patient. more willing to sit with quiet instead of filling it. but wishing the world were different and resenting your brother for thriving in it are two different things and bb keeps them carefully separate in whatever meticulous internal filing system he maintains.

now. their mom.

she doesn't prefer bobby. she would say that and mean it. she loves her boys equally and she has said this sentence more times than she can count. to teachers, to family, to herself at 2 AM when the guilt creeps in. she loves them equally.

she understands bobby.

that's the distinction and it's crucial.

bobby is legible to her. bobby is loud and expressive. his needs are on the surface and when he's upset she knows what to do because he shows her.

bb is not legible. bb is quiet and internal. when he's upset he goes still (stiller than usual, which is already very still) and she doesn't know what to do with that. she's tried. she's a good mother. she's not cruel or dismissive. but there's a fundamental mismatch between her emotional language and bb's and after years of trying to bridge it she's settled into a pattern that looks, from the outside, a lot like preference.

bobby gets the stories at dinner. bobby gets the laughter. bobby gets the easy warmth of a relationship where both people speak the same dialect.

bb gets the concern. bb gets the careful questions. bb gets the "is he okay?" asked to bobby instead of to bb himself because somehow, at some point, everyone agreed that bobby was bb's interpreter and nobody checked whether bb wanted one.

bb notices. he doesn't blame her. he doesn't blame bobby. he blames the frequency he was born on. too low for most people to hear, too quiet to compete with his brother's volume. and he makes do. he has always made do.

and then you transfer in junior year and everything changes.

not all at once. slowly. the way bb does everything. you're bobby's girlfriend and therefore part of the group. therefore someone bb has to share space with, and at first he treats you with the same polite distance he treats everyone who exists in bobby's orbit. you're bobby's. bobby's world. bobby's frequency.

except you keep talking to him.

not talking AT him the way most people do. that performative inclusion, the "oh and what do you think, bb?" that expects a one-word answer and moves on.

you talk to him like you're actually curious what he'll say. you ask questions and then sit in the silence while he formulates his answer instead of filling it for him or growing bored. you remember things. you bring them up later. "you said something last week about—" and bb looks at you like you've just said something utterly baffling. because nobody holds onto the things he says. they fall out of conversations like coins through a grate.

except yours don't. you catch them. you keep them.

and bb falls in love with you.

and bobby has no idea.

and here's the thing about the twin dynamic once you're in the picture: bb is genuinely happy for bobby. that's real. that's not performance. when bobby's actually being good (when he's present, attentive, making you laugh and being the version of himself that bb knows he's capable of) bb watches and feels something warm and bittersweet.

his brother is happy. you're happy. the two people he loves most in the world love each other and he's the third point of a triangle that functions. he has a seat at the table and you save it for him every time.

he doesn't envy bobby's relationship with you. he envies bobby's ability to HAVE the relationship. the ease of it. the way bobby can just reach for you without weighing every implication, without running the ethical calculus of "she's my brother's girlfriend and my feelings are a betrayal simply by existing."

bobby touches you because he wants to and the wanting is simple. bb's wanting is the most complicated thing inside him and he has to keep it locked in a box at all times while sitting three feet away from the thing he wants most and watching his brother have it.

but he manages. he makes do. because you're happy and bobby's happy and the triangle holds.

and then bobby starts to drift.

and the triangle doesn't hold anymore. because one point is pulling away and the other two are left closer together than they've ever been and bb can see it happening. can see the gap where bobby used to be filling with something dangerous. something that looks a lot like opportunity, and he hates himself for seeing it that way.

this is his brother. this is his BROTHER. and he's watching his brother's relationship deteriorate and some part of him, some part he will never forgive, is doing math.

so he overcorrects. he tries to fix it. he starts nudging bobby. small things at first. "she liked that restaurant, you should take her back." "her birthday is next month, what are you planning?" trying to prop up his brother's relationship from the outside because if bobby and you are okay then bb doesn't have to look at what's in the box. if bobby and you are okay then the math doesn't matter.

but bobby sometimes listen, and more frequently doesn't. bobby's drifting. and you're dimming. and bb is watching both things happen simultaneously. the box is rattling and his brother can't hear it because his brother never learned to listen to quiet things.

and the night bobby and bb fight (really fight, the "she deserves someone who pays attention" fight) there's a moment after the realisation lands. after bobby says "you're in love with her." after the silence confirms it.

there's a moment where they're just standing in the kitchen, two boys with the same face and completely different damage, and everything between them is exposed.

every year of bobby running interference. every year of bb making do. every dinner where their mom laughed at bobby's jokes and asked bobby if bb was okay. every party where bobby's arm around bb's shoulder was both protection and cage. every single instance of bobby loving bb without seeing bb and bb seeing bobby without being able to say what he saw.

it's all right there. in the kitchen. in the silence.

and bobby says (because bobby's instinct is always to deflect, always to make it lighter) "so what, you've just been sitting there this whole time? at every pizza night? every movie? just. sitting there?"

and bb says "yes."

one word. no armour. zero deflection. the quietest most devastating word in the english language.

yes. i've been sitting there. for years. watching you have the thing i want. loving you both. saying nothing. making do. being the weird twin in the corner who's just happy to be included except i wasn't just happy to be include. i was burning alive at your dinner table and you never smelled the smoke.

bobby doesn't know what to do with that. bobby has never known what to do with bb's depth. so he does what bobby does. he leaves the kitchen. he goes for a drive. he puts distance between himself and a feeling he can't make lighter.

and bb stands in the kitchen alone.

and that's the twin dynamic. that's the whole thing. two boys who love each other enormously and understand each other incompletely. a loud one who protects without seeing. a quiet one who sees without speaking. and a girl between them who is, without knowing it, the first person who ever learned to hear on bb's frequency.

and the tragedy of the twin AU isn't the love triangle. it's that bobby and bb could have been so much closer. could have really known each other, really seen each other, if either of them had ever learned to bridge the gap between loud and quiet. but bobby filled silences instead of listening to them. and bb kept silences instead of breaking them.

they'll recover. they're twins. the bond is bone deep, it doesn't collapse even when it cracks. but it won't be the same. and the thing that changes it won't be the fight or the girl or the love.

it'll be the "yes."

the smallest word bb has ever said.

he tries to claw it away with his own digits wrapping over your wrist, blunt nails digging into your skin as a warning before he uses his actual strength. but you shake your head against the pillow you’re resting on, swallowing down a whine when he ruts into you just right and nearly folds you in half under him from the force of it. you regroup and ignore the way your cunt flutters around him beyond your control. you use your grip to yank him down until his lips hover over yours, watching his hazy eyes go wide with shock at your daring display.

“apologize to me,” you huff out, a soft sound falling from your lips after. you squeeze his throat and he gasps like he’s losing himself already, his hips surge forward with need and you watch his eyes roll back for a split second through your own half lidded gaze. you purr your words out, pride swelling in your chest, “apologize for being so rotten to me this morning, aerion.”

“baby,” he whimpers pathetically, breathlessly— shivering under your touch. his own hands glide over your soft skin. he’s holding your waist with reverence, then your hips, before his fingers finally sink into your thighs and guide you into that position he knows liquifies your brain in your skull, “you know i didn’t mean it. i never do, pretty girl.”

“then apologize, or i’ll make sure the only thing that’s getting you off for the next month is your own hand.”

aerion’s breath gets caught up in his throat at that, pulse fluttering against your fingers and his adam’s apple bobbing under your palm. he no longer cares that you have him right where you want him. not even a little bit. his pace picks back up, knocking sounds out of your chest and his own with every movement. every time he sinks into you and finds that heavenly little spot hidden in your cunt, he has your thighs twitching against either side of his waist.

he’s not good at talking, he’s not good at being nice …

but he is good at this. he’s good at fucking you senseless and making you melt under him, and he wants to keep doing it. he needs you wrapped around him one way or another and clinging to him every single day, or he won’t feel complete.

It’s only fifteen days into the summer holiday and Aerion knows that you are going to be a problem.

Which… shouldn’t bother him. Doesn’t bother him. He is Aerion Targaryen, his whole thing—the marketable thing, the specific, bone–deep identifier—is that he’s a chaos, and a defaulter, that one rotten apple that’ll eventually eat everything else in the barrel. A problem—such as you were—prim and proper and pretty in a disturbingly poised way should be the least of all his other troubles. Adding to the fact that he has at least a hundred other problems beating into his brain.

Adding into the fact that you have been a problem for the last ten summers of his life.

It doesn’t bother him.

At all.

—-----------------------

You were laughing with Valarr.

It was seven in the morning and Aerion had successfully sneaked inside the Manor—Summerhall’s walls are terribly susceptible to his maneuvers—when he heard it. You were wearing your nightdress, which was the first thing that he noticed. The soft, silken, silver thing was sneaking out of the red shawl you had wrapped around you as you walked with his cousin along the freshly planted rose bush in the garden of his summer-home. The shawl hung carelessly, just an inch over the swell of your backside—and Aerion would later say that it was the weed he’d smoked the night before—the cheap, badly rolled stuff, that made his head dizzy and feet stop—and the sight of it made him angry out of all things. Livid. 

It was his summer-home and his sanctuary from the rest of the fucked-up world and he should be well-within his right to not find an intruder loitering around its ground during the only time of the year he’s allowed to be a trouble-kid and not a generational warning. It’s specific. It’s the yearly tragedy. Time around his mother’s death anniversary when his father’s leash gets thinner and his attention gets more tender and Aerion has only a thin window of opportunity to get drunk and trash on everyone around him without any real consequences. Two months of summer is considered, by his father Maeker, as an acceptable period of mourning. Aerion doesn’t really care to understand why, but he prefers this time, this particular thickness in Summerhall’s air in these months, likes the way his father’s violet eye lingers, like the way Egg finds excuses to brush up with him, likes the effortless cruelty that everyone gives a hall pass to.

So yeah.

His time. His house.

Where you were basically trespassing. And he hated it, hated the way the morning light refracted off your body and the way your open hair seemed to absorb the sunlight rather than reflect it. It was darker in the shade as you walked with Valarr, hands behind his back, and Aerion was telling himself that he’d leave as soon as you saw him and he’d have the opportunity to say something crude. 

But then you laughed.

He froze, his anger froze—mid-rising, mid-thought. The fire washed over with an icy shield as if it wasn't there to begin with.

The sound—bright and strong, as clear and sharp as the sunlight—rang through him. It was uninhibited. Loud. Louder than he knows you allow yourself to laugh. Not a streak of poise in it. He could hear the breath stuck in your chest and the vibration when it finally rang out of your throat and the tiny, helpless giggle you made when you couldn’t stop. Valarr said something else and you breathed through your nose and made a sound, a half cry, made his knees buckle. He waited, like an orphaned child, for you to look back, to see him, to scoff or smirk at him. He wanted to say something cruel again, something about your unrelenting crush on his cousin, something about the gap in your teeth. Something that would make that composure in you break and the world would make sense again. He could imagine your face, as clear as a picture, even with your back to him.

But you didn’t turn, and he didn’t get to settle the itch in his skin. Your laughter vibrated off the hedge bush and the grass and the wall he just climbed through and everything and everything and it was everything. For one unbridled moment it was everything. 

Then Aerion felt his throat tighten. He wheeled back and walked away, his back to you and Valarr, his hands tightened around the beer can he’d snatched from Daeron’s hand an hour ago. The walk to his room took forever, he didn’t breathe until he snapped his door shut, refusing to let another thought, the only thought plague his brain. Because if he thought about it, for even a second, the truth was clearer and uglier than it had ever, ever been.

It’s dangerously simple. You laughed and it made his head stop ringing.

ahahahhh another story!! on top of all those unfinished ones!! but this one’s almost all-the-way written. there’s more of FMC in the next part, also. Smut.

lemme know if you like it!

more of my akotsk stories

The infants still wailed with the raw vigor of their first desperate breaths, though Dyanna herself remained lightheaded from the ordeal. The heavy scent of sweat and blood lingering in the chamber stirred a throbbing ache in her temples — one she chose not to ascribe to the twins’ ceaseless cries.

Maekar appeared at the doorway the moment the maester granted him entry, confirming that the birth had gone flawlessly. Still, he did not release the breath he had been holding until his gaze fell upon the three figures nestled together on the rumpled bed.

“You must rest, my love,” he murmured, his voice nearly lost beneath the infants’ cries. He approached the bed, one arm extended. His eyes settled upon the babes, and a rare gleam of wonder softened his characteristically solemn features. He kneeled beside her. “Give one to me.”

Dyanna shifted carefully against the pillows, preparing to pass him the child closest to his side — the boy.

The slight movement drew the twins momentarily apart as she turned to lift the infant toward her husband. Their cries sharpened at once, growing even more piercing.

Dyanna froze, brow furrowed in concern as she studied her son.

“What troubles him?” Maekar asked, his tone firm yet laced with unease. He glanced about the room as though answers might linger in the air. The maesters had withdrawn to afford them a moment of privacy now that the peril had passed. His gaze returned to Dyanna, then to his son. “Is he in pain?”

The mother had no answer. Slowly, she drew the boy back to her body, pressing him closer to his sister. Their tiny hands fluttered across her skin, and the boy’s delicate fingers curled instinctively around his twin’s wrist, like the softest of anchors.

The wailing ceased at once — for both of them.

Dyanna and Maekar exchanged a fleeting glance. While her eyes brimmed with tender affection and quiet awe, a shadow of uncertainty flickered in his.

Only the Gods knew what destiny they had woven for these children, for they only sought comfort in one another.

࣪ ִֶָ☾. 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖊𝖓𝖙.

The morning sun’s rays streamed through the tall windows lining one side of Ashford Castle’s corridor, bathing the interior in a pleasant, golden warmth. Outside, the clatter of horses’ hooves, the metallic clang of armor, and the murmur of the crowd could be heard — most likely placing wagers on who would triumph in today’s jousts.

Aerion strode down the hallway already clad in his armor. Crimson dragon crests in enamel stood out boldly against the dark steel of his helm, rendering it as imposing as a dragon itself. He carried the helmet tucked beneath his arm, pressed against his coal-black surcoat, where the swirling flame-like patterns gleamed in the sunlight. No one turned to stare; the extravagant design made it obvious who approached: Aerion Brightflame. No one sought trouble with the monstrous prince.

Though he paid no mind to the worms he passed, his gaze remained fixed on the great mahogany door beyond which lay his sister’s temporary chambers. His steps were purposeful, determined to see her before mounting his horse and unhorsing every fool who dared face him. He wished to make her proud — as he always did.

An unconscious smile curved his lips as his hand reached for the door handle, but it burst open before he could grasp it. He staggered slightly as a servant girl fled the room at a frantic pace. He did not bother chasing her or punishing her insolence, as he normally would. Instead, his smile turned mocking. He stepped inside, slamming the door shut behind him, and his heart gave a heavy thud at the sight of you.

Oblivious to the commotion, you stood before the vanity, adjusting a piece that the clumsy girl had failed to place properly in your braided silver hair. Unlike a common tiara, your dark headdress rose several inches upward — black as jet, its central base adorned with intricate filigree flowers and glittering with inset rubies. As extravagant as your twin brother, and as dazzling as someone of your bloodline was meant to appear.

“Sister,” Aerion called, watching your reflection in the mirror as he approached with that effortless familiarity he reserved only for you.

A calm smile touched your lips, as though you had not just terrified a harmless servant.

“Oh, brother.” You placed your hands on the front of your skirts and exhaled heavily. “The servants in this castle are all utterly inept.”

Aerion’s gaze lingered on your celestial headdress, then drifted over your blood-red gown with its black ribbons, the shoulders rising like dragon claws, and the chain bearing the three-headed dragon emblem crossing your chest horizontally.

“How did they fail you?” he asked, genuinely curious. Everything seemed perfectly in place — every accessory, every jewel, crafted as though made for you alone.

“Their hands trembled like a newborn’s while fastening the pins,” you replied with a contemptuous curl of your lip. “She kept pricking me like some fumbling novice.” You finally turned to face him. “She fled in terror. I merely told her that if she hurt me again, I would rip out her windpipe with my bare hands and feed it to the pigs. It was nothing more than a warning.”

“We keep them better trained at home,” Aerion scoffed. “They don’t shatter from a mere threat.”

You made a soft sound of disappointed agreement in your throat and moved away from him to pick up a delicate, translucent dark silk cloth. Turning, you held it between two fingers. He approached at once, as if he already knew what you wanted. He removed his gloves, setting them on the bed, and took your hand with surprising gentleness.

“Use this to bless me with your favor in the jousts,” he asked commanded as he began tying the silk around your wrist so it could be easily untied and given to him on the field.

You could feel the warmth of his touch against your skin, a sensation you had grown accustomed to since you first knew your own name. Accustomed to his heat. To his overwhelming presence. To the silent understanding that you were his and he was yours by right.

“If I were to grant it to you, I would tie it on your wrist myself without delay,” you said, your eyes watching as his fingers stilled the moment your words sank in.

His violet eyes, identical to your own, lifted to meet your gaze.

“Hm?” His entire expression had grown deadly serious, as though some foul jest had left your lips.

“You heard me. Father has been pressuring me about marriage again,” you replied lightly. Aerion stared at you as if the words could not possibly be yours.

How dare you even entertain such a thought? It was written in the blood that two dragons such as you were destined to be joined in marriage. The duty of keeping the blood pure fell upon you both. And it was not duty alone that drove him. The desire to possess you ran like molten fire through his veins.

With an angry snarl, his free hand seized your other arm, nails digging into your skin as he forced you to face him squarely.

“We dragons stand far above arranged marriages. We do not bow to the laws and decrees of Westeros as lesser men do. We are gods.” His voice dropped low and rough, as though merely speaking the reminder cut like knives across his throat.

And you knew it to be true. You clung to that truth as fiercely as he clung to you. Yet your gaze held his without faltering. A small spark of satisfaction gleamed in your eyes.

Yes, you were destined. Yes, there was no purer blood than yours — the blood of twins born from the same womb, fated to be together from cradle to grave. Your temper complemented his, and together you were terror incarnate to any fool who dared provoke the dragon’s wrath.

But you had grown tired.

With you, he was relaxed, so certain of your belonging that it rivaled his certainty in himself.

Yet you craved more.

You wanted his fire. You wanted his rage. You wanted to see him erupt. You wanted to watch him burn the kingdoms for you.

So you smiled.

“Let the knight who unhorses you be worthy of my favor in the coming jousts,” you said sweetly, like honeyed poison. “And of my hand in marriage, should he prove bold enough to claim it. Which he will.”

Fury danced in Aerion’s violet irises. His fingers remained pressed into your skin, leaving marks. His knuckles had turned white, and his jaw was clenched so tightly you saw the muscle twitch.

“You speak as though you have already foreseen my defeat,” he hissed. His tongue swept across his lips, fighting the urge to tear yours away with his teeth for such provocation. With remarkable restraint, he released you and snatched up his gloves, stepping back. “You are wrong, sister. I do not come here to play, like this herd of swine who dare compete. I come to win. And you know the dragon ought never lose.”

“You should hurry. The knights must already be assembling on the field.”

Rage bubbled hot inside his veins, a feeling he wasn't accustomed to when the receiving end were you. A heated, ugly feeling was shaping in his core. Aerion bared his teeth in contempt.

“You will regret those words.”

The sun bathed the high royal stands where you sat beside Maekar, granting a privileged view over the field where the jousts would soon commence.

All around, the hurried bustle of squires attending their knights, the nervous whinnying of horses being armored for the impending clashes, and the lively chatter and laughter of the common folk formed a chaotic symphony that did little to calm your racing heart.

You tilted your head, glancing at the empty seat where Aerion usually sat beside you. He was now mounted upon his great coal-black stallion. Your eyes returned to the field, sharpening like a falcon’s upon your twin. He drew every gaze with his extravagant splendor. His mount was draped in a barding of fabric cut in the furious hues of fire — orange, crimson, and gold. With every powerful stride, the cloth billowed and snapped like living flames. A dragon-scale chanfron adorned the horse’s head. It was impossible not to stare. The rider attracted attention like a magnet, and his regal, arrogantly graceful seat made the more impressionable ladies smile behind their fans like helpless fledglings awaiting devouring.

Your upper lip curled in open disdain. Maekar shot you a stern glance. Everyone was watching — not only Aerion, but you as well. The announcement that your hand was available for marriage had several knights eyeing you with shameless interest. You showed them no contempt, however.

Your earlier words to Aerion still echoed in your mind. If anyone unhorsed him, you would accept their offer of marriage.

Fortunately, you knew no one was capable of throwing him from his saddle. Especially not now, with the future of his beloved sister at stake.

The blast of trumpets pulled you from your thoughts. When you refocused, your eyes were still locked on your twin as he paraded his horse at a slow, deliberate pace. Not once did he lift his gaze to the royal box. He must still be furious.

A herald began the announcements. It seemed Aerion was to face a capable knight of House Tyrrell, easily recognizable by the rose emblazoned upon his shield.

Your fingers toyed absently with the fine dark silk tied around your wrist — the very token Aerion had fastened there with such certainty that it belonged to him. You straightened your spine in anticipation as the knight in question halted his white destrier before the royal stands. A sudden hush fell over the crowd. Aerion, completing his own lap of honor, reined in his stallion and turned in your direction, lifting his visor with narrowed eyes.

“My dragon princess,” announced Ser Tyrrell with solemn courtesy. He raised his lance so that its tip reached you near the wooden railing.

You rose gracefully and folded your hands neatly over your abdomen as you stepped forward. The knight appeared far more nervous in your presence than at the prospect of facing your brother. That would change soon enough, you were certain.

“I humbly beg your favor for this joust. Would you do me such an honor?”

Maekar kept his gaze fixed on the scene, tapping his finger uneasily against the arm of his chair. Aerion clenched his teeth, staring daggers at the knight while gripping his own lance with the clear desire to charge forward and drive it through the man’s nape until it burst from his mouth. That was his sister. His lady.

“You dare present yourself before me,” you asked with icy composure, “begging my favor to defeat my own brother?”

The knight seemed to reconsider every choice that had led him to this moment. A terrible threat coiled in your throat, yet the words that left your lips were soft as silk. “Foolish. Or perhaps brave. Here it is.”

Ser Tyrrell exhaled in visible relief as you tied the dark silk around his lance. The crowd erupted into fresh cheers.

A dragon granting her favor to a rose, so that it might face another dragon. What madness was this?

The trumpet sounded once more. The knight offered a slight, respectful nod before riding to his position. Aerion did the same with barely contained rage, slamming his visor shut and urging his stallion forward with a sharp, angry thrust of his hips.

Aerion was seeing red.

Moonlight bathed the sandy arena where the jousts had unfolded hours earlier. The ground remained churned and scarred, yet an eerie stillness hung over the field, as though time itself had halted. There was no one else present — only you and the solitary song of crickets accompanying your steps. Shards of splintered wood and lingering traces of blood still marked the earth, imperfectly cleared by the squires.

You walked slowly toward the largest pool of blood staining the sand. The dried blood of Lord Tyrrell, now a dark, crusted stain upon the arena floor, summoned vivid memories of the events that had transpired mere hours before.

The thunderous clash of lances. The piercing screams of horses. The sudden whirlwind of sand thrown up by pounding hooves, followed by a sepulchral silence as the entire crowd held its breath. When the dust finally settled, Tyrrell’s convulsing body lay exposed, the tip of your twin’s lance driven through his throat. Too precise to be an accident. Aerion never missed.

The wet, gurgling death throes of the dying man drowning in his own blood were eclipsed by the horrified gasps of the spectators, who turned away and covered their mouths in dismay. Yet you felt a dark, twisted satisfaction watching Aerion’s unnerving calm as he committed murder — for you.

A faint smile curved your lips.

The sound of footsteps made you turn. Aerion stood before you. He stepped unhesitatingly into the pool of dried blood, his eyes finding yours.

He had shed his armor and now wore his customary red-and-black attire. Less imposing, yet no less dangerous — though those wide, almost boyish eyes refused to leave yours.

“Do you see what happens?” he asked, lips tightening with irritation. He gave the crimson sand a dismissive kick. He regarded you as one might scold a wayward child, his voice soft as silk sheathing steel. “When you doubt your brother. When you wager against him. I struck the blow… but you killed him.”

“I did not aim the lance at his throat,” you replied dryly, fighting the urge to smile with open satisfaction.

Aerion pressed his lips together, suppressing a grin of his own, and shrugged with feigned innocence. “I felt obligated.”

That look on his face — as though the most natural response to the threat of losing you was violence. As though he would gladly slaughter any man and walk away unscathed, solely to keep you by his side. As though he would defy every law of Westeros for his beloved sister.

“You have pleased me,” you declared, lifting your chin with regal poise.

“I did not do it for your pleasure, my dear sister.” His mouth widened into a dangerous, wolfish smile as he stepped closer. The heat radiating from his body became almost tangible. “I did it for mine.”

His gaze dropped to your lips, and he slowly licked his own. Before you could draw another breath, his hand closed firmly around your arm. He pulled you after him, dragging you toward a small, deserted pavilion not far from the bloodied sand.

To claim the reward he so richly deserved.

Aerion had kissed you before. Innocent little pecks, fleeting brushes of lips — before your father had swiftly put an end to such behavior, at least in his presence.

But the way he kissed you now was savage.

His mouth claimed yours with raw hunger, his body pressing you back until you stumbled against a table. Even then, he did not break the kiss. If anything, it grew more dominant. His teeth sank into your lower lip, drawing a stifled gasp that he seized upon, plunging his tongue into your mouth to taste you as he had always longed to.

Your tongue met his with equal fervor, sliding and coiling around it with a sensuality that stole the breath from his lungs. His dominance faltered for a moment as you sucked on the slick muscle, pulling a deep groan from him. He braced himself with one hand on the table beside your hip.

With his free hand, he impatiently untied the laces of your gown, one by one, until the fabric slipped from your shoulders and pooled at your feet.

The cool night air kissed your bare skin, but your brother’s merciless mouth soon warmed every inch it touched.

Breathing hard against your cheek, lips parted, he tilted his head to trail kisses along your jaw, down your neck, and across your collarbone, leaving a wet path in his wake. While one of your hands braced against the wooden table behind you, the other buried itself in his hair, not guiding but holding, as his heated mouth descended to one of your breasts.

“Someone could walk in,” you gasped, even as you made no move to stop him. “We don’t even know whose tent this is.”

A crooked smile curved his lips before they closed around one hardened nipple, drawing a sharp arch from your back.

“Let them enter,” he murmured against your skin. “They’ll learn it belongs to us now.”

You meant to reply, but he silenced you with a sharp bite to the side of your breast. His mouth moved to the other, lavishing it with the same hungry attention. He licked and sucked until the peak glistened with his saliva, then continued downward. Lower. And lower still.

“Brother,” you whispered breathlessly, eyes widening as you watched him sink to his knees before you.

He rested his chin against your stomach, looking up at you with an arrogant, predatory smile. His lips were slightly swollen from the kiss and glistening with the mingled wetness of your mouths.

“What?” he asked mockingly. “Is this too fast for you?” He lowered his head again, pressing kisses and soft bites across your navel and lower abdomen. His hands gripped your waist firmly. “This is what happens when you keep poking the dragon all day. You haven’t stopped teasing me once — and I won’t stop now, even if I have to drag your apologies from you screaming.”

Without another word, he hooked one of your thighs over his shoulder, spreading you open for him. He buried his face between your legs, eyes fluttering shut as his nose brushed along your swollen folds, making your hips twitch. His grip turned ironclad, holding you still as his tongue dragged a long, slow lick through your slick heat. Then he closed his mouth around your clit and sucked hard.

Your fingers tightened in his hair, nails digging into his scalp. The sharp sting only made him groan with pleasure and devour you with even greater fervor.

His tongue plunged inside you, drawing a loud moan from your throat. Aerion growled against your cunt, tilting his head to reach deeper, his nose brushing your sensitive bud with every thrust.

He loosened his grip just enough to let you grind against his mouth while he fucked you with his tongue. His eyes remained locked on your face, drinking in your expression of ecstasy, which only made him more ravenous.

You were close — your walls fluttering and clenching around his tongue, your movements growing erratic.

“Come in my mouth,” he rasped against your soaked flesh, baring his teeth in raw desperation. “Please… you taste too fucking good.”

You surrendered completely, pressing his face harder between your thighs. The coil of pleasure snapped, unraveling in a wave of moans and curses from you both. Aerion never pulled away, drinking every drop as it flooded his tongue and dripped down his chin. He swallowed greedily, as if he had never tasted anything purer — or more sinful.

When he finally drew back, a shadowed, satisfied smile played on his glistening lips. His chest heaved in time with yours.

“Was this what you needed from me?” he asked, pressing one last lingering kiss to the inside of your thigh before rising to his feet. His eyes burned into yours. “For me to kill for you... to kneel for you?” He leaned in closer. “Next time, speak plainly... or I’ll take you in front of all those fools who think they have any chance with my sister.”

You, Foggy, and Karen had just left Josie’s Bar to check on Cafaro when the loud crack of a gunshot filled the air and pain hits you from behind. It rips through your right shoulder, taking your breath away before you fully understand what’s happened, as the force of it sends you stumbling forward.

But what made you stiffen was the blood splatter on Karen’s face as you realised that the bullet had exited your shoulder and hit Foggy, who had collapsed onto the ground as people around you screamed in horror, and for a few seconds you froze in pain and panic before adrenaline kicked in and you were moving before your mind caught up.

Yelling for someone to call an ambulance, you press your hands firmly against Foggy’s wound, willing your powers to stop healing you and to heal Foggy.

To keep him breathing, and to keep him stable. To keep him with you.

You were so lost in your panic that you didn’t even notice when Karen put her hands against your shoulder until she pressed down hard enough to make you gasp in pain as she tried to keep as much of your blood where it should be.

“Stay with me.” Her voice broke as each word filled with more panic. “Both of you, please.”

But you don’t answer. You can’t.

Not when you're forcing everything you have into Foggy. Not when you can hear your brother fighting on the roof of Josie’s Bar, knowing that he’s listening to Foggy’s heartbeat, to your blood dripping onto the street.

With your body begging to heal the hole in your shoulder, your vision blurs as you push through the pain, putting everything you have into Foggy. You hadn’t even realised that you'd been repeating the same things over and over.

“Keep breathing. Just keep breathing. Stay with me.”

But the strain keeps building, becoming sharper with each passing moment, when a heavy impact lands behind you three. Your breath catches as your powers flicker for just a moment as you silently pray that you won’t lose them both tonight. Not Foggy and Matt.

Not your brothers.

Breathing deeply, you steady your hands, channel your powers, and check that Foggy is still breathing as the paramedics that have just arrived rush to help before you turn your head and let out a sigh of relief.

Not Matt.

You slouch into Karen's waiting arms, your pain finally catching up with you as you fully turn to look at Benjamin Poindexter on the ground, barely conscious, and as you make eye contact, it happens.

The pleasant burning feeling on your left collarbone. The sign you've been waiting nearly your whole life for.

The sign that you have met your soulmate.

And yours has just shot you.

Breathing deeply, you push the memory out of your mind, reminding yourself that you’re in your apartment tucked away in your warm bed and not bleeding in the arms of your friend.

But the ache is still there, still pinching, and you realise that no amount of gentle rubbing is going to relieve it tonight. Sighing you toss your covers back, slide your feet into your soft slippers to make your way to your kitchen, where you last put the pain relief balm.

Slowly you push yourself to stand, your aching shoulder throbbing in protest as you put on your fluffy robe, fingers brushing against the scar, and take a deep breath.

Checking your clock that reads 1:44 AM, you tighten the robe and step into the hallway.

The apartment is pitch black except as you make your way towards the kitchen, you don’t bother turning on any lights, using the moonlight to help lead you to the balm left on the center island.

Opening it, you gently massage the soothing gel onto your scar, letting out a sigh of relief as you feel it take effect. Placing the lid back on the tin and tucking it into your robe's pocket, you turn back towards the bedroom when the sound of fabrics moving against each other comes from the darkness of the living room.

Slowly you grab a knife from the wooden block and move carefully towards the sound, slippers gently slapping against the wooden floors. Keeping your breathing as quiet as possible, you slowly crept around the corner and quickly flicked the lamp on, flinching at the brightness and nearly dropping the knife when you saw who was sitting on the sofa.

Benjamin Poindexter was supposed to be imprisoned and serving multiple life sentences. Not casually sitting on your new sofa.

Blood darkening the side of his shirt as one of his hands pressed tightly against it, though a slow trickle of blood slips through his fingers. His head lifts the second the light turns on, and for a moment he doesn’t move; he just stares at you with a look in his eyes that you can’t quite place.

For a few seconds, neither of you speak. You just look at him, cataloguing everything that has changed since you last saw him. He’s bigger and bulkier than before, as if he had nothing to do in prison except gain more muscles. You ignore how it makes your heart stutter.

Dex’s eyes flicker briefly towards the knife clutched in your hand, and a smirk appears on his face as he looks you in the eyes. “Are you going to use that?” he asks quietly.

“Why are you here?” Your voice comes out stronger than you expected. “What do you want?”

Soulmate or not, this is still the man who shot you.

Dex’s eyes lower briefly to the blood staining his side. His hand still tightly clutching the wound. “I needed help.”

Then his eyes lift back to yours. “And I wanted to see you.”

Something tightens in your chest because part of you understands exactly what he means.

For a moment you stay where you are, knife still low at your side, eyes flickering once again towards the blood dripping from his hand and staining your sofa.

“You’re staining my sofa,” you say, placing the knife on the shelf, hands more steady than you feel.

Dex tilts his head, eyebrows twitching in confusion. “What?”

“My sofa is brand new, and you’re ruining it.”

“Oh,” he says, finally noticing his blood soaking the cushions. “So I am.”

You exhale slowly, feeling the last bit of adrenaline leave your body. When your brother told you this morning he was going to see Dex in prison, this wasn’t how you expected your night to go.

“Let me see it,” you say.

Dex stills at your words, his hand moving to his ribs, his eyes slightly hopeful.

“Your injury,” you sharply say, face flushing red. “Not that.”

His eyes stay on you for a second before he slowly moves his hands away from his body. Blood immediately gushes through the tear in his shirt, a stab wound from what you could see and probably a few hours old.

You swear softly under your breath. “You should be at a hospital, especially with those face wounds as well.”

“No.” His answer was quick but certain. “Just you, only you.”

You don’t bother arguing as you step closer, removing your robe and setting it below you on the coffee table. He looks worse up close, pale even in the light of your warm lightbulb, and the left side of his face was bruised.

But his eyes never left you, slowly roaming up and down, taking in your light blue PJs, and smirking at your fluffy cow slippers.

“What?” you ask, reaching for the box of medical supplies you kept in the ottoman. Usually you would have used your powers, but tonight you were too tired and drained from helping out at the back-alley clinic your boss ran.

“Fluffy cow slippers?” His amusement was clear in his voice.

“Shut up,” you say, putting all your supplies on the table beside you. “They were a gift from Karen, and they’re very comfortable.”

Dex snorted. “Sure.”

“Are you armed?” you ask, pulling on gloves and sliding to your knees.

“Yes.” He said, spreading his legs to give you more room.

“… Are you planning on using it?” You ask, facing your supplies.

“No.” His answer was quick and certain again. “Not on you, never on you.”

Again. You couldn’t help but think.

“You’re nervous,” Dex says quietly, still watching you, and you begin to wonder if he’s even blinked.

You snort at that. “You broke into my apartment in the middle of the night and are now bleeding all over my sofa.”

“You’re still helping me.” He says like this means something.

You refuse to answer that as you reach for his shirt because deep down it does.

“Lean forwards.” You say quietly.

Dex obeys immediately and you lift his shirt. The movement exposing his defined muscles, and a few inches above the wound in black letters was your name. Unblemished, like he had done everything to protect it.

You freeze slightly at the sight of it, feeling the rush of emotions that happened every time you thought about him. Shaking the feelings away, you grabbed the disinfectant and soaked a gauze.

Silence settled between you as you dabbed at the wound, soaking up as much blood as you could before grabbing a fresh gauze.

“You didn’t come to see me,” he whispered breaking the silence, his eyes leaving you and going towards his blood-soaked hand.

“Don’t,” you say quietly, pressing the alcohol-soaked gauze harder against the wound than intended.

Dex barely reacts as his eyes move back to you. “Don’t what?”

“Talk like this changes anything.” You whisper, grabbing a new gauze to wipe away the remaining blood.

And for the first time since you walked into the living room, something shifts in his expression. Not anger, not hatred, but something you didn’t expect to see on him.

Hurt.

“I was in prison,” Dex continues quietly. “You knew, but you never came.”

You still at his words because what was there to say? For months you’ve refused to talk about what happened that night, focusing on your family and pushing every thought or feeling about him away.

For months you’ve kept your bond with him to yourself despite how much you wanted to cry and rant to someone about it without being judged or scorned.

You force yourself to keep working, fingers steady despite the sudden tightness in your chest. “Yes,” you say evenly. “I knew.”

The quiet is heavy as it fills the room before you clear your throat, reaching for the needle and thread in the kit. “You need stitches.”

“Sit up properly if you can,” you instruct, pulling all the necessary items closer to you.

Dex watches you for a second longer before pushing himself upright from the cushions, his jaw as he straightens himself up.

“Take the shirt off.” You say, preparing everything that you needed to stitch him up.

Dex drops the blood-soaked fabric onto the table behind you, exposing the full extent of the wound. The weapon grazed more than it pierced, but it still tore enough flesh to make a mess of his side.

Wiping the surrounding area with a fresh gauze, you gently rubbed some numbing cream around the wound and threaded the needle while waiting for it to dry.

“This is going to hurt.” You say, leaning closer towards him.

Dex goes still at your words, his attention once again focused fully on you.

You try to ignore his eyes on you, focusing completely on stitching the wound perfectly and not on how close he was now that you’re kneeling between his legs and leaning against him to get better access to the wound.

“You should’ve had this cleaned hours ago,” you mutter nearly halfway done.

“I was busy.” He answers as his hand gently brushes against your shoulder.

“With?” You ask, eyes still not leaving the wound but not shrugging his hand away.

His eyes scan your face. “Finding you.”

Your hand slips slightly. Not enough to hurt him, but enough for him to notice.

“You already knew where I lived.”

“I wanted to see you.”

There’s that sentence again. So honest, like there was nothing else more important.

Silence settles between you again, broken only by the quiet rattle of paper as you open fresh gauzes and the sound of rain against the windows. Focusing once again on your task, you quickly lose yourself in what is familiar.

Then Dex quietly says, “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

You tie off the last stitch before grabbing more gauze and soaking it in antiseptic alcohol. “Most prisoners send a letter.”

“I didn't think you’d like letters from me.”

You couldn’t stop your quiet snort.

“Did you think about me?” he says quietly after a while. Hand tightening on your shoulder like the answer to this question could hurt him more than his wound.

You press the gauze against the stitches, cleaning them and the surrounding area. “You were all over the news, quite hard to miss.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He says cupping your face and forcing you to look at him.

His face is blank, but his eyes are looking at you like he’s already decided you belong in his life.

And maybe you did. But it causes that familiar complicated feeling to twist in your chest.

“You shot me,” you say softly before you can stop yourself. “I waited years for you, and you shot me.”

Your confession settles heavily between you, and for the second time that night, Dex looks away.

“I know.” He says his face filled with something you couldn’t place—guilt, maybe.

The apartment smells faintly of antiseptic, rain, and blood. Outside the storm gets stronger.

Inside the living room, neither of you move.

“You’ll live,” you say, taking off your gloves.

Dex looks down at the neat line of stitches crossing his side before his gaze drifts back to you. “I know.”

Standing up, you move all the soiled items aside so that you can toss them in the kitchen bin. “You should go before the numbing wears off.”

Moving back to the table, you pack up the remaining medical items, making a mental note to restock and place them back in the ottoman.

Leaning down to grab your robe, your breath catches as Dex reaches out his hand, gently grabbing your wrist, his thumb gently pressing against your pulse.

“You’re shaking,” he says quietly.

“I’m tired.” You say, making no move to pull away.

“You’re drained.” He states.

You almost deny it. But what would be the point? He noticed everything else about you tonight.

“I’ve had a long night,” you remind him.

“And you still helped me.” He states like this means something.

Before you could reply, Dex’s gaze drops to your shoulder. To the scar barely hidden by your shirt. His expression shifts into the same look as earlier.

“I didn’t mean to hit you,” he says honestly. “You moved in front of him so quickly I didn’t have time to stop.”

You look away at his admission, part of you wanting to believe him while the other part wants to shoot him to make it even.

Rain hits the windows harder as you begin to feel it again, that persistent and wanting pull between you becoming tighter the longer he stays.

“You need to leave,” you say quietly.

Dex looks at you for a long second. “Why didn’t you come to see me?”

The question hit you like a punch to the gut. Months of knowing exactly who he was to you, and you’d done nothing.

No visits. No letters. Nothing except pretend the name on your skin didn’t exist.

“I was in prison,” Dex continues quietly. “You knew where I was.”

You couldn’t force yourself to hold his gaze. Not when you knew what he was really asking. Why didn’t you come? Why didn’t you choose me?

But you can’t answer that. Not honestly. Not when the truth was that every day you wanted to see him, to betray your friends and your family just to get a day with him.

“You need to leave.” You say, instead of spilling the truth, pulling your wrist out of his grip.

For a second, you think he might argue. His stare fixed so intensely on you that you almost cave and spill the truth.

Then he stands, pulling his shirt back over his head, and makes his way towards the window. Pushing it open wider, as storm blows cold air and rain into the living room as he tosses one leg out before he pauses and turns to look back at you again.

“I’m going to see you again.” He states.

Then he disappears into the night, and you’re left standing alone in your living room.

Your fingers slowly brush his name on your skin, and you can’t stop the feeling of wanting to see him again.

A/N: This is my first one-shot written so feedback is welcome!

@benspoindexter @noisyinfluencerstrawberry @genya1617

To Dex, the physical topography of another human being had always been a calculus of vulnerability. His mind was a machine, capable of mapping the dimensions of an enclosed space within milliseconds and identifying the precise trajectory required to sever an artery. He understood the mechanics of the anatomy; he knew exactly how much pressure it took to snap a collarbone or drop a grown man to his knees. But touch and affection? Affection was a foreign, deeply distressing dialect. It was a sensory input that rendered his internal programming entirely mute. He knew every ligament in the body, where to assault to cause torment but God forbid he uses his hands for softness.

There was a profound, quiet irony in a man of his age and lethal competence being so utterly paralyzed by the simple proximity of soft skin. Hell, he almost pitied himself for it. For decades, the concept of a romantic relationship hadn’t been relegated in his mind. It had been buried beneath layers of institutional survival, psychological trauma, and the crushing weight of an existence spent entirely on the defensive. Dex was not a lover and he had never been, affection and care was unnatural to him.

He could still recall the sharp, sterile scent of the office belonging to his first therapist, the singular human anchor he had at the fragile age of sixteen. He had cared for her, though his developing mind lacked the emotional framework to define what care actually meant. To Dex, care was synonymous with structure. It was the methodical way she re-aligned his straying thoughts, the unnatural patience she extended far beyond the boundaries of her hourly compensation. That was the closest Dex ever got to care. And when death claimed her, his internal architecture had shattered into something feral and defensive. Standing beside her hospital bed, looking down at her failing form, he had chosen to weaponize his grief, hissing that he hated her. He didn’t hate her for who she was, but for the betrayal of leaving him entirely alone in a world without parameters. After that care became just another word without meaning to him.

Then came Julie.

Julie had been an exercise in aesthetic symmetry. She was safe, correct, and perfectly aligned with the script he desperately tried to perform. Dex had cared for her in the same detached, appreciative manner you might have for a beautiful painting in a museum. Admired from a calculated, safe distance, entirely devoid of genuine visceral heat or want. He never wanted Julie, despite how it might have looked, Dex wanted to be her. How easily life came to her was just so fascinating to a man like him. He remembered the exact moment she had offered him a farewell hug at the Suicide Hotline Center, just before he transitioned into the stark world of the Bureau.

The physical contact had been an absolute shock to his nervous system. And he remembers it even now years later. First came the ice, a sudden, freezing sensation that trickled down his spine the precise millisecond her palms pressed against his biceps, his body mistaking the gesture for an ambush. His muscles had coiled instantly like overwound springs, his vertebrae stiffening in a violent protest against the proximity. But then, right before he could pull away, the ice had thawed into an invasive, confusing warmth. Before his mind could categorize or fixate on the sensation, she had already retreated, leaving him standing in the corridor, thoroughly deregulated by a three-second interaction.

That brief, fleeting embrace had been the absolute zenith of his experience with physical intimacy. Dex didn't do hugs, or anything else for that matter… His subsequent, half-hearted attempts at dating in his early twenties had been a disastrous blur, locked away like radioactive material in the darker corridors of his subconscious. The entire experience had felt extremely uncomfortable, unfulfilling, and complicated in ways that insulted his intelligence.

The sheer volume of unwritten variables was maddening. He had to speak enough to demonstrate engagement, but not so much to appear self-absorbed. Connection required vulnerability, but a fraction too much was classified as forward or desperate. He couldn't request another date too quickly or too frequently without crossing into the territory of predatory. Touch was a minefield; it was deemed acceptable only if initiated by the woman, yet society dictated that a man should assert dominance and assume leadership. Hold her hand, the script said, but don't apply too much pressure to suggest control. Open the door for her, but don't infantilize her or imply incompetence.

By his third official date, Dex had quietly withdrawn from the field entirely. The sheer unpredictability of the social ritual was entirely too volatile for his psychology to parse. He vividly recalled sitting across a woman in a dimly lit restaurant, completely incapable of processing a single syllable falling from her lips because his entire focus had been hijacked by a fork. Her elbow had accidentally nudged the cutlery, leaving it misaligned by less than half an inch from the knife. The asymmetry had screamed in his mind like a siren, drowning out her voice, preventing him from formulating the carefully curated, charming responses necessary to foster romantic banter. He had stared at the silver, suffocated by the lack of order, and realized he was entirely unfit for the performance.

So, he surrendered the idea. He locked his focus onto the FBI, dedicating his life to a rigid, bureaucratic institution that allowed him to believe he was doing good for society while keeping his demons safely behind bars. Years had dissolved into the background of that singular pursuit, and the concept of dating became an obsolete idea of a past life.

Even more now that his world had been violently upended; he had broken out of the prisons meant to contain him, shed the skin of a government puppet, and stripped away the illusions of the system. He was older now, his features hardened by violence, but he was entirely free from the invisible snares that had once dictated his value. Standing in his late thirties, Dex felt a strange sense of selfhood that had completely eluded him in his twenties.

His daily routine remained his mandatory sanctuary, waking up exactly the same hour, executing a flawless military tuck on his bedsheets, consuming a balanced breakfast before physical regimen, and then work. But the internal shift was tectonic. He no longer walked through the streets of New York like a fraudulent actor trying to mimic human behavior and integrate himself into civilization. He knew the truth now: there was no grand order to life. There was only the winding, bloody path he had been carved out to walk. He no longer craved the external validation of a badge or a supervisor’s praise to consider himself a whole entity. He was fucking Bullseye.

And the concept of a "North Star", the desperate need for a perfect, external moral anchor to keep him sane, had been forcibly buried deep within a vault next to his most violent, unpacked trauma. Though sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night, a phantom tension would ripple through his chest, an instinctual tug toward the comfort of connection, but he would quickly dismiss it as mere human biology. He didn't need a North Star. His life was already perfectly illuminated by his own design. Or so he continuously told himself.

Until he walked into your boutique.

The shop was situated a short distance down the asphalt stretch of Hell’s Kitchen, a stark, hyper-feminine building in an otherwise gritty neighborhood. The interior was an absolute assault of pastel pinks, a visual sensory overload that normally would have triggered his defense mechanisms, but the hand-painted sign outside promised custom tailoring services. And Dex needed his belongings fixed the moment he noticed imperfections.

He carried two specific items across the threshold that afternoon. His utilitarian jacket that had suffered a tear against a rusty fire escape during the previous night's "hero work," and a pair of heavy tactical gloves that needed the seams to be adjusted for a better grip.

You'd been seated behind the polished wooden counter, a needle held between your hand, your hair slightly disheveled as you worked. When you looked up and saw the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in your doorway, your face had broken into a smile so massive, so genuinely warm, that Dex had felt an involuntary, almost evolutionary impulse to mimic the expression. He stood perfectly rigid as your small, incredibly nimble hands took the damaged fabric from his grip, your fingers tracing the torn nylon of the jacket with a professional, practiced ease.

When you looked up and informed him that the repairs would only take sixty minutes, his sharp brows had risen in mild intrigue at your efficiency.

"I work fast," you had offered, your voice bright and entirely unbothered by his silent, imposing intensity.

Dex returned to the shop precisely the sixty-minute mark, not a second early, not a second late. You were already waiting for him at the counter, the jacket neatly pressed and the jagged tear now entirely imperceptible, executed with a level of craftsmanship that deeply satisfied his need for perfection. Then he slid his large hands into the resized tactical gloves, flexing his fingers to test the tension of the thread.

Whether you had recognized the subtle Bullseye emblem stamped into the leather, you made no verbal indication. Instead, you merely bit your lower lip, your gaze tracking the movement of his hands before you boldly, without an ounce of hesitation, reached out and gripped his gloved hand. Your fingers guide his, pointing down to the specific cross-stitch where you had loosened the seams to accommodate his knuckles.

The ice returned instantly. It danced down the length of his spine, a freezing jolt that made his chest tighten. But as your warm skin remained pressed against the heavy material of his glove, the sensation mutated into something remarkably pleasant. Dex let out an involuntary exhale from your touch as your index finger trailed a slow, deliberate line down the length of his hand. Was this flirting? No, this was her job….

"If you need it bigger I can make that possible," you offered softly, your eyes lifting to lock onto his with a quiet, grounded confidence. And Dex paused, taking in the intimacy of your closeness. Okay…. Yeah, this was flirting. He deduced at its baseline before he found himself engaging.

Dex couldn't understand the sequence of events that followed, birthed from that moment alone. His memory, usually so linear and mathematical, became a blur of transitions. And normally the haze would eat away at him till he lost his mind, if it weren't for the fact that the stages that followed were extremely enjoyable. All he knew was that the rigid wall of his isolation had suddenly breached, and he was taking you on a first date. Then a second. A third. A fourth. The unwritten variables that had paralyzed him in his youth seemed to dissolve in your presence; you didn't demand a script, and your effortless need to keep talking filled the awkward silences he usually created. Dex was thankful for it. He was thankful for all of you.

By the time the fifth date happened, you were both standing inside the threshold of your private home. And Dex was fucking ecstatic. The realizations hit him in waves during his nightly routines: life was simply greater, sharper, and infinitely better with your existence woven into it. Within the calculated grid of his mind, he had rapidly come to view you as an essential, non-negotiable component of his daily structure. A connection he needed desperately to maintain that he was fully prepared to execute any measure necessary to ensure you stayed. You were kind, sweet, and giving in a way that defied his understanding of human nature. How were you so willing to offer the world everything you had without demanding anything in return?

Because he couldn't comprehend it, he studied you. He watched you with a hyper-attentive, microscopic focus that would have terrified a normal civilian, tracking the micro-expressions of your face, the cadence of your breaths, and the specific pitch of your laughter. And you let him. To you, that intense, unblinking gaze didn't feel like surveillance; it made you feel entirely seen and warm.

Dex had learned you. He played every single card in his hand with absolute precision to ensure he kept your favor, but you made the act remarkably easy. He found himself wanting to give the world to you, a new directive that lingered constantly. While on missions, he's doing this to make the city better for you. He had to come home safe because you'd be so devastated if anything happened to him. You needed him in your life so he had to make sure no wounds took over his body. These thoughts progressed over time, though they were already brewing the minute he stepped out of your boutique. Dex brought you a perfectly curated bouquet of flowers on your very first date, quickly logging the fact that you flourished when things were done for you. From that moment on, his chivalry became non-negotiable. He opened doors before your hand could even approach the handle; he pulled out chairs to the exact angle required for your comfort; he even leaned across the console of his vehicle to buckle your seatbelt for you, his large frame momentarily shielding you from the world. A thought that appears constantly in his mind at night.

And now, those correctly executed actions had granted him entry into your sanctuary.

Walking through the door of your brownstone, his analytical eyes immediately deduced that you and your work were a singular entity. The space was less a traditional home and more an active studio. A heavy, vintage treadle sewing machine sat prominently in the center of the room, positioned directly in front of the television, while two antique, velvet-upholstered couches framed it on either side. Dex made a silent, permanent mental note of that specific layout: the tool of your labor received absolute priority over comfort.

As he looked around Dex noticed your affinity for older things immediately, your eyes lingering on aged, well-maintained pieces of history. A part of him wondered if that was why you liked him so much and despite himself, the thought amused him. His gaze drifted to the expansive dining room, noting how every single high-backed chair had been pushed flush against the perimeter of the walls, completely away from the central table to maximize workspace. A deep, quiet part of his psychology deeply admired the dedication. He understood the obsession with craft, the way you spoke about fabrics and patterns with radiant love. He was identical to you in that regard, though he remained hyper-vigilant about never revealing the bloodier details of his own craft to you.

Dex paced silently behind you, his broad shoulders squared as his eyes continuously darted around the rooms, absorbing the atmosphere of your home while you led him toward the kitchen by the hand. His frame was tense, his muscles vibrating with a low-grade current of electricity. He still wasn't accustomed to the physical touching. He liked it, he liked it with a terrifying intensity that scared him, but his brain lacked the programming required to properly receive it.

And bless your heart, you were so unbelievably touchy.

You were a creature of constant physical contact. There was always a soft arm looping around his rigid bicep, a gentle palm resting against his. A constant, natural inclination to latch onto his massive frame and cling to him as if he were the only solid object in a moving world. He reciprocated in the only ways he knew how, squeezing your hand back with a carefully measured amount of pressure, standing perfectly still to accept your weight. But Dex still hadn't learned how to articulate or manifest his own physical desires. He didn't know how to be the one to close the distance. He didn't know how to reach out his large, scarred hands, wrap them around your waist, and pull you against his chest without an explicit invitation. The script hadn't given him those lines yet.

So instead, he simply allowed himself to be a passive monument of muscle and bone, letting you pull him toward the kitchen island for wine and cheese after your date. The night got more enjoyable, but then again, every moment was enjoyable with you. But this is even more so. You trusted him enough to let him into your space, liked him so much that you paid attention whenever his glass was empty.

"I have a secret," you admitted suddenly, your face flushing a deep, radiant pink after you drained the remainder of your second glass.

Dex raised a single, sharp brow, holding his own glass perfectly steady as he waited for the disclosure. He ignored the sudden, rhythmic thumping of his own blood pumping violently in his ears. He couldn't quite determine if the sudden spike in his heart rate was the result of the alcohol or a sudden surge of anxiety. Given his high tolerance, it was likely the latter.

"I hate wine," you hiccuped, a small, breathless sound. You didn't feel that inebriated but Dex had a skill for making you feel drunk.

Dex’s cold blue eyes widened slightly in genuine surprise. Without a word, his large hand reached out and gently but firmly took the crystal glass directly from your fingers, a low, rumbling chuckle vibrating in his chest as the absurdity of the situation caused a bright laugh to break from your lips.

"Why didn't you say anything," he asked, his gravelly voice dropping an octave as he placed the glass down on the exact center of a stone coaster.

"Because it was a nice gift and also because I wanted to be with you longer," you reasoned smoothly.

You stepped away from the counter, your short frame moving into his immediate personal space. Slipping effortlessly between his extended legs as he sat perched on the high barstool, your body completely filling the void between his knees. Before he could process the proximity, your arms looped entirely around his broad shoulders, your hands resting against the nape of his neck.

Dex sat up just a fraction straighter, his entire spine locking into a protective line. A hesitant, unpracticed hand rose from his side, his large palm resting against the fabric of your dress to support your lower back, his fingers trembling slightly against your skin.

"I like having you around..." you admitted softly, your voice heavily laced with an intoxicated, sleepy haze as you looked up at him.

"I like being around," Dex nodded, his gaze boring into yours with an unblinking, absolute intensity.

It was the most fundamental truth his mouth had ever uttered. He liked being around you so much that the mere concept of physical separation had become an agonizing friction in his daily life. There were moments during his long, solitary hours on a rooftop or following a lethal assignment where the craving to see you grew so violent, so overwhelming, that he had seriously contemplated abandoning his operation just to stand outside your window. But the rational, highly defensive side of his mind, the piece of him that vividly remembered the trembling panic in Julie's eyes, always managed to reassert control. He wouldn't risk breaking what you two had.

"Will you be around forever?" you asked, your voice dropping into a soft, vulnerable register that sounded almost like a plea.

Dex felt a sudden, blinding flash behind his eyes, a sensation so sharp and radiant it felt as though stars had detonated within his skull. A terrifying wave of duty and existential purpose crashed through his mind, rewriting his internal directives in an instant. This was his calling. This was his permanent assignment.

"I'll be here forever," he nodded, his voice carrying the heavy, unyielding finality of a death warrant.

He barely had a single microsecond to process the violent rush of devotion flooding his veins before you leaned in, and your soft lips met his.

Dex froze.

He froze in a way he had never experienced in the heat of lethal gunfire. He hesitated with a sudden, paralyzing vulnerability that his mind was completely unequipped to handle. Bullseye did not hesitate; Bullseye was a creature of pure, instantaneous reaction. But Dex, Dex was entirely lost here in the quiet of your kitchen, his lips pressed flat against yours, his breath catching in the back of his throat as the delicate warmth of your mouth completely shattered his being.

His mind scrambled for data, for a past memory or a set of instructions to tell him what to do with his hands, how to move with you, how to breathe. The sheer sensation of your mouth against his was too vast, too unaligned with any grid he had ever mapped. He wanted to deepen the pressure, wanted to sink his fingers into your hips and drag you so close that the space between you ceased to exist, but the terrifying lack of instructions kept his body entirely locked in stone. He was a starving man paralyzed by the sudden appearance of a feast, terrified that a single incorrect movement would cause the illusion to vanish.

It was only a brief, agonizing second of contact. It was over far too quickly for his liking before you were gently pulling back, your eyelashes fluttering against your cheeks.

"You never got much love huh?" you hummed out, your voice dipping into a sad, incredibly tender melody.

Your small hands didn't retreat; instead, they began to preen over his tense shoulders, your fingers sliding upward until your nails began to slowly, methodically comb through the short hairs at the base of his scalp.

An involuntary, deeply guttural groan tore itself from the very bottom of Dex’s throat, the sound surprising even himself. His eyes rolled back, his lids fluttering shut as a wave of intense pleasure rippled through his nervous system. He liked that. He liked that with a feral, addictive desperation. Whatever you were doing with your hands, it was dismantling the static in his brain.

"No," he admitted, his voice a broken, raspy whisper in the quiet room, his head naturally sinking into the guiding pressure of your palms as you continued to adore him.

Your lips moved forward again, finding the hard, unyielding line of his cheekbone. You pressed a soft, lingering kiss directly over the jagged scar near his cheek, the exact spot you always claimed when you were saying goodbye, and Dex felt his entire body shudder under the impact. Then, your kisses migrated downward, tracing the sharp angle of his jaw before your mouth found the sensitive, hot skin of his neck.

Dex’s hands lost their hesitation, his fingers curling tightly into the fabric of your dress as he decided, with absolute certainty, that he liked this even more.

"Don't worry. I'll fix it," you murmured against his skin, your breath hot and reassuring even in your heavily tipsy state.

“Pretty girl like you gonna fix a man like me,” Dex mused out, exhaling in amusement as he welcomed your kisses by granting you more of his neck. You hummed in delight and he noted that was the correct response.

“I'd do everything for you, Dex,” you admitted into his neck and that seemed to do it. Every rigid order he told himself to act like a gentleman broke as he pulled you into his chest, turning his face as if begging for you to grant him another kiss.

And you do.

This time he reciprocated the contact eagerly, fuck it, thoughts can be damned, Dex let his body lead now. His kisses were harsh and demanding, desperate in its undercurrent but you enjoyed it. You tasted faintly like wine and something minty and he finds himself deepening the kiss. His large calloused hand found the thin straps of your bias-cut dress, hastily pushing it down the slope of your shoulder before he froze. He was being too forward, too much, too–

Before he could spiral, you whined into his mouth at the lack of movement. A harmonious plea that he's never had the privilege of hearing before. And Dex's eyes fluttered, that sound went straight to his straining cock evoking a groan against your skin. Emboldened hands pushing the dress down only to pull back momentarily, breaking the kiss despite not wanting to. He'd rather shoot himself than stop kissing you, but he needed to know that what he was doing was okay. And by the blissful state of your eyes, you were more than okay with this, with him. And so he allowed his gaze to wander, darting down to the exposed skin of your soft breast.

His gaze locked onto your hardened nipple before his hand slowly moved, not giving himself time to overthink. His thumb grazed the sensitive peak in experimentation, Blue eyes watching as your chest stuttered, his gaze darting up to meet yours in calculation on how to proceed. You were waiting for him, letting him take the lead and explore, and God did he want to map out every shape of you. He wanted to know what made you arch and squirm, what made you sing his name in praise. But Dex was a man rendered stupid in the unfamiliar vastness of your body, so hands stayed motionless as they had done nothing but take and punish all his life. He'd do it slow, he decided, after all, his hands were not meant for this. For worship and caress.

But his mouth would be.

Not breaking eye contact with you, his lips found home on your skin, latching onto your nipple. Humming as you arched your back, your pliant body gravitating into him. You liked that, he learned, so he did it harder. Teeth grazing the sensitive peak before sucking it into his mouth hard.

His free hand wanders to your other breast, thumb circling the clothed nipple there while he devotes himself to the first with his tongue. It’s messy, uncoordinated, Dex isn’t a gentle lover, he learned as the need progresses. His brave hand slips under your dress, pushing fabric up further to expose more of your body as his kisses migrated down your sternum.

“D-Dex.”

The breathy sound made him freeze and he recoiled immediately as if burned. He waits for the storm only for you to eagerly pat him on his shoulder, signaling you wanted him up.

“Room, please…. I-i don't want it here…” you say almost shy and he obeys immediately, standing up and holding you dear.

“Yeah? Sweet girl,” the term endearment escaping his lips catches him by surprise just as much as him kissing your forehead does. But he doesn't dwell on it long as he grabs hold of your hand and leads you upstairs where he already knows where your room is.

The silence of the space was only intensified once you both entered your bedroom. Dex pauses, taking a moment to appreciate the image of you standing there, waiting with earnest eyes and swollen lips. You looked so vulnerable, your dress wrinkled and breathing heavy as you let him assess. He welcomes your softness and realizes that he owes it to you to be vulnerable as well.

With a firm, certain, grip, he turns your body around, your stomach flutters in expectation as lust filled eyes land on the made bed. Only the inevitable force never came, you weren't shoved face down into the mattress in pure heat, instead Dex is moving your hair aside to fall on one shoulder. And that impacted your core more than any barge ever could. So you remained standing there, ignoring the heat in your stomach as the brooding man you'd come to know gently unzipped the back of your dress. Pushing the fabric down your hips, a hum escapes the claimant as he turns you back around with even kinder hands and you melted.

Sure in your intentions, you begin to unbutton his shirt and he watches you in the moment. Sometimes you often wonder what goes on in Dex's mind, but here you're certain that whatever thoughts that hammered in his head were anything but pure. When the fabric of his shirt meets your dress on the floor, a barely suppressed smile threatens to take over your face and his features silently requested for context, amused in your glow.

“You're so big,” appreciation dripped from your words, reinforced by your hands steady on his chest. Pride and something smug consumes Dex’s internal framework as he reaches for your bare waist, pulling you into him. Fuck. He liked how that felt, loved the feeling of you two skin to skin.

“That why you're always so touchy,” he huffed. It was a poor attempt to regulate himself from these overwhelming emotions. Still riding the dopamine high from your appraisal.

“Yes,” you nodded shamelessly.

At that a raw exhale breaks free from his mouth, falling in ardor before he's guiding you down to the bed. Dex’s gaze is locked on yours, at your body barely covered in cotton underwear as he prowls towards you on the duvet. Your presence was the single grounding planet in the uncharted stars of his nebula, an innate need to keep his focus on you and solely you to avoid getting lost in the orbit of his thoughts. Waiting patiently as exploratory hands trailed over your body, thumbs brushed over your nipples just once, before migrating down to your torso, eventually finding home on your hips.

Lips parted but nothing fell from them as words failed him. Instead blue eyes darted up to meet yours as his fingers deliberately tugged your underwear, not fully, not even an inch down, just enough to get your attention and silently ask for permission.

Your body moved on its own, hastily squirming under his broad stature and pushing the thin fabric down your legs. The man over you had been the only thing plaguing the recesses of your brain for the past few weeks, consuming you with such unbidden thoughts. Anything would be done for him at this point. You barely got to kick the drenched cotton off before Dex's palm landed flat on one thigh, pushing it down hard against the bed and spreading you open for him. With a fluttering stomach so intense, your body fell back as you took in his state. Half dressed and tightly coiled, muscles pulling in restrain as he remained pinning your thigh down. His attention was locked onto you, or more so, your dripping cunt and an involuntary need to shut your legs was met with even more resistance from him.

He didn't appreciate you trying to hide from him, evident in his warning gaze. Without a word, his palm trailed up, the desire and craving to touch you won out in him. And suddenly hands that had only known violence was caressing you so softly and attentively, figuring out the definition of what it meant to be a lover.

God you were so wet and warm and soft and all the good things in the world…

Dex noticed your breathing growing more labored beneath him and instinctively he leaned back to watch you more, away from the disadvantage of being tucked into your neck. Your pupils were blown out, starry eyed as your brows creased and a pout settled on your lips. His fingers moved on their own as he watched, a new desire to pull more of those darling expressions from you forming. And as he sunk two cruel digits into your slopping wet heat, satisfaction invaded his senses as he took in your reaction. Your mouth parts in ecstasy, a sound Dex immediately knew he loved fell from your lips as your body arched up into him. And then that begging pout graced your features again, looking down at where his fingers fucked you.

So perhaps intimacy was everything people made it out to be, and so much more when it's with you. Dex was beginning to understand it now, the insatiable need to constantly be touching your person. Fuck, he doesn’t think he could ever go back to the way he was before. So fucking hesitant, unsure with anxiety that dibilitated him. He refused to be so rigid again, not when the sounds of your desire and need were music to his ears. He loved this, loved it in a way that was beginning to align with his new idea of normal. He could get used to this, to touching you, to fucking you.

Whining in protest as his fingers pulled away, your hands gripped at his chest in agony. Complains at the tip of your tongue before halting completely as you hear him begin to take his jeans off. Humming in delight as he strips. And fucking hell…. You were well aware of Dex’s large frame, it was one of the first things you noticed about him, second to the attractive scar on his cheek. But seeing him like this was something different entirely and you couldn't help yourself as you preened over his naked form again. Palms gliding the expansive plains of his back, brushing down his abs and strong chest as you sucked on his neck. Though judging by the expression on Dex's face, he didn't mind you playing. He let you have your fun until eventually pulling your lips off of him with a gentle hand at the back of your neck. A protest happened beneath him as you tried to chase after his body before stopping, noticing his hand on his member. And that shut you up real good.

Dex gently guides his hardened cock onto your dripping core. Rubbing his swollen head up and down your drenched skin before slowly sinking into you. A gasp falls from your lips followed by a desperate cry of want. His breath comes in rough bursts through his nose, focused entirely on you beneath him. How you take it, how you sound, how tight you feel with every drag out and push back in. The plains of his anatomy strained with tension as he exhaled in contentment. Dex thought he had come to know comfort, in the way you'd lean onto him during walks, how you raked your nails through his hair earlier. But this exceeded that in every capacity, comfort was a juvenile word to express how this felt like home. He's barely halfway through and already has to stop and compose himself. He let out a hiss, halting all movements as you clenched around him.

The sudden, full stretch makes you mewl out a sharp, startled sound And Dex freezes instantly, his entire body locking up. Has he hurt you? Was something wrong? He’s buried to the hilt now. It’s a lot. Too much all at once. A wave of something almost like guilt hits him, he hadn’t meant to scare you, but the sensation is… God.

"Shhh," he soothes automatically, instinctively brushing your cheek with his thumb despite how wrecked he feels right now.

You leaned into his touch, seeking for more and he's relieved. Needy palms finding a place on his biceps as you squirmed, looking down at where you both meet. Dex follows your gaze, watching his hardened cock buried deep in you. Yeah… that’s a lot.

"Tell me what you need," he murmurs, thumb brushing away another stray tear. "We can stop. Or go stupid slow.”

You let out a laugh that bled dangerously too close to a moan and Dex makes the decision of the latter for you. The first thrust is deliberate, deep and controlled, testing your reaction. The second follows, then a third, each one creating a filthy rhythm that fills the quiet room. He slowly fucks into you in a sedate, gentle manner. But gentleness is short-lived. His movements quickly grow faster till he was fucking you in a steady eager pace. Skin slaps against skin, joining the song of moans that you sing. The bed creaks under the weight, every movement is amplified in the hushed space. Rapture floods through you as any other thoughts that weren't Dex quickly subsides, giving way for your focal. Everything felt right in the world as he molded your body to his.

It was almost too much, his body caging yours in as his hips moved relentlessly. You knew you wouldn't last much longer if he kept going like this. But Dex was a man of intention, he took you like it was the only thing worth doing in his life.

The press of your hand against his pelvis, pushing, cunt trying to get him closer yet you were pulling away at the same time, sends conflicting signals straight to his dick. Your thighs around him squirmed, a telltale sign you're overwhelmed. Dex groans but doesn’t let up; if anything, he presses down harder on you with his hips, pinning yours in place.

"Take it," he rasps no room for argument. His skilled thumb lands on your clit, relentless despite the overstimulation threatening both of your bodies. The sound that left you was obscene and filthy as your head lulls back and Dex is quick to grab hold of your thigh and pull you closer towards him.

The new angle hits perfectly, your entire body jerks, a broken moan escaping as you tense around Dex’s hips. He learned you almost immediately from the very first second his fingers were inside you, he found where to target instantly. And now he abused that information.

He feels it, the way you clenched around him, and his own control wavers. But he holds on, focused solely on your pleasure, chasing every twitch and whimper with relentless precision. His lips find yours again in a messy, open-mouthed kiss as he pounded into you with controlled hits. A sound so similar to bullets in the air echoed at the impact, the wet sound, obscene, unfiltered, hitting him like a lightning bolt. Every thrust is accompanied by that slick, squelching noise: your arousal mixing with his movements. Dex learns that he loved that sound, it satisfied a part of his brain in a notion he couldn't understand but he knew that it fueled him even more. Dex's hips stutter for half a second at the realization of just how drenched you are for him.

A groan rumbles from his chest as he picks up speed, fucking you till you saw stars. A melody of moans and gasps filled the room with a symphony of skin heard with it. The walls welcome the sound with open arms as the atmosphere feels too hot and too heavy. You try to grab at the bed sheets despite Dex's tight grip on one of your wrists, you need something to ground you as you neared. Too much. It was all too much. Seamlessly, he laced his fingers with yours, still holding you down onto the bed but his grip softened.

You reciprocate the touch, tightly squeezing his hand as you feel the pressure capsize and your thighs shake in hot waves. You cry his name out, your back arching off the bed from the pleasure. His cock still sliding in and out of your dripping cunt, desperate to join you in your release, ignoring the coil of his muscles. He loves the way you say his name, so breathy and blinded by ecstasy. Dex breathes into your neck, the sensations becoming too much before a loud groan breaks his focus and he spills ropes of his cum into you. Immediately you primp under him, satiated and spoiled but your accord for touch remains ever present as you gently brush your nails up and down his back. And that sends him collapsing down onto you. Not that you seemed to mind as he heard a loud gleeful laugh beneath his large frame.

Dex exhales, long and slow, moving to stare at you. He’s not used to aftercare. Not with anyone. But here he is gently moving off you and tucking a throw blanket around your shoulders like you're something fragile. A calloused finger brushes a stray hair from your forehead, an absurdly tender gesture for someone who just fucked you into oblivion but you welcomed it.

He learned an entirely new vocabulary that night, and the education continued to expand exponentially in the weeks that followed.

He discovered, through application and obsessive cataloging, that he liked touch. He liked it an immeasurable, terrifying amount. He grew to absolutely love the specific jolt that occurred when you wake him up in the morning by lazily raking your nails across the broad, scarred expanse of his bare back. He loved the domestic weight of you playing with his hair while he sat on the living room floor, or the frantic, heavy way you would cling onto him when the city noise rattled the brownstone windows.

Methodically, his analytical mind began to solve the puzzle of how to return the same favor. He'd mapped your body with the same precision he applied to his targets, but with an entirely different objective.

He learned how to execute a kiss without needing an explicit verbal invitation, his large hands learning the exact amount of pressure required to tilt your chin upward to meet his mouth. He figured out how to use the immense, terrifying strength in his palms to gently massage the deep knots out of your shoulders after you spent a twelve-hour day hunched over the antique sewing machine. He studied the micro-movements of your muscles, tracking the specific shivers that rippled through your frame when his thumbs traced your collarbones, logging every sigh and hitch in your breath as data.

He figured out, with a profound, quiet sense of internal victory, that you loved every single form of physical touch imaginable, so long as it came entirely from him.

And he decided then, he loved intimacy.

"No kisses for me?" He ask, looking down at you with expectant smile and hopeful eyes. And you only smirk up at him, cheeky smile quirking up your face. "No."

"Fine. And you're buying me ice cream."

His body deflated, a disappointed sigh came out his mouth, and you grin, "even a little bit?" You love to rile him up. And you felt the way his fingers stretching your asscheek, making your asshole probe against nothing.

"Deal."

And when he got his lips on yours, he's not wasting for a bit. All teeth and tongue, lapping up at the saliva of your mouth as he eat your face out, and you mostly moan when he top up with circling his finger around your asshole.

"Stick your tongue out f'me." And you did, tongue laid out flat as he suck on them, twirling it around with his, then proceed to surge forward to lock his lips back into yours, groaning at the mess you two make, swapping spit and everything.

All while the mic of his computer still on. Catching every smack of lips agains lips, huff of heavy breaths and your whimpers mixed with his deep grunts.

"He's fucking? Mic on???"

"Oh my fucking god."

"Im bricked up."

"There's no way he's this stupid."

Though he cant hear their voices because he's muted by the connected headphone, the mic was the problem. Been like that since you barge into his gaming session and hop onto his lap, demanding attention, making him have put his headphone down and brought us to the scene right now.

The lobby of his game still displayed on his pc screen, where his friends literally either freaking out or trying to act like they didnt just hear anything, but seriously? They heard everything.

And you two were lost in the feeling of eating each other faces to snap back into reality.

That's the thing that make you two stop, looking at each other because mom's back. "Tck. Mood killer." You mumble, and big bro could only chuckle at your mood drop. Leaning forward to kiss at your glossy lips, "that's your cue to leave."

Not when a loud, high-pitched voice came calling out from the kitchen. "Why is the dishes not clean yet??!"

He shook his head as he watch the figure of your back leave, decide to sit up straight on his gaming chair and put the headphone back around his head. "Sorry guys, i got distracted."

He take his hands back out from your shorts, not before grabbing a rough handful of your ass through them, "dont forget my ice cream." You peck at his lips, then hop off his lap to face whatever mom's got going on.

Chaos erupted.

"That wasn't the wind at all bro."

"Yo, what the fuck?"

"Im bricked up by voices. That's a shame, even for me."

"You really dont know your mic were on the whole time?"

Big bro instantly stiffen, a dread of anxiety rushing through his veins. "My mic was on?" He sound in disbelief by himself.

And more chaos came, his friends chirping up more comments about how clumsy he is, if he's really fucking while still on lobby, who the mystery gal and 'im really bricked.'

But a voice stops everyone, another member that had gone quiet since the first time, decided to open up.

He knows that tone. He knows for hell, who it is. That was his best friend. The one who'd been his bro since middle school, crashing into the house, dead by snacks and late night gaming session.

"That's your sister, right?"

So it's no wonder if he's familiar with your voice. Because the guy been there for half his time.

That's gonna make the whole things more messed up, but it'll be enough to cover up his other friends that doesn't know everything.

Big bro had to think fast, and all he could come up was a "No. That's my new girlfriend."

And big bro knows, his best friend pretty sure catch the lie falling out his mouth. He just hope he doesn't fuck up that bad.