connie

The camera had cost you four months of saved tips from a bartending job you quit the moment you sold your first photograph, and you still treated it like it was made of glass, wrapping the body in a strip of old towel before you zipped it into the bag every single night. Hell's Kitchen at eleven o'clock was a different city than the one people saw at noon, and the vigilantes who worked it moved through the dark like they owned it, which meant if you wanted a photograph worth anything, you had to learn to move through the dark just as well as they did. You had a devil in a black mask who worked the docks and the church steps of Hell's Kitchen. You had a man in a skull-marked jacket who left bodies instead of headlines. You had a kid in red and blue who swung through downtown some nights like he was chasing something faster than himself, and a handful of others besides, each one a story the paper paid good money for as long as the shot was clean and the face was clear.

Tonight you were perched on the lip of a parking garage across from the old cathedral on Fifty-Second, because a source inside the precinct had tipped you that the devil himself had a habit of using the bell tower to look out over his territory, and you had your six hundred millimeter lens braced against the concrete ledge, breathing slow and even the way you had taught yourself to when your heart wanted to race. Below you, the street was empty except for a stray cat picking through a tipped-over trash can, and above you, the bell tower sat dark and silent, giving away nothing. You had learned patience the hard way, through dozens of wasted nights and a handful of nights that had nearly gotten you killed, and so you simply waited, eye pressed to the viewfinder, watching the tower for any flicker of red.

It was the stillness that saved you, in the end, or at least you would come to think of it that way later. A sound reached you that did not belong to the empty street below, a soft scrape of a boot against gravel that came from somewhere behind you and slightly to your left, close enough that your whole body went cold before your mind had even finished processing the fact that you were not alone up here. You had picked this spot because the roof access door was the only way up, and you had checked that door twice before settling in, which meant whoever was behind you had not used the stairs at all.

"You've got good aim," a voice said, low and almost conversational, like he was commenting on the weather rather than announcing his presence four feet behind you. "For a civilian. Though I've got to say, the devil's a strange choice tonight. Heard he's not even in the city."

Your body reacted before your brain caught up, twisting around with the camera still gripped in one hand like it might somehow serve as a weapon, and the man crouched on the ledge behind you did not so much as flinch at the sudden movement. He was watching you with an expression you couldn't immediately place, something between curiosity and amusement, his head tilted at an angle that made him look almost boyish despite the black tactical gear and the twin blades sheathed at his thighs. You recognized the silhouette from photographs you had taken of him at a distance weeks ago, the ones the paper had run under a headline calling him Bullseye because nobody had bothered to learn his actual name, and every instinct you owned was screaming at you to run.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you said instead, because running from a man who could apparently climb four stories without making a sound seemed like a good way to end up dead in an alley. "I'm just out for a walk."

"With a lens built for tracking a man in a mask two hundred yards out." He rose from his crouch in one fluid motion, and you noted with some distant, professional part of your brain that he moved like he had never once in his life worried about being clumsy, every step deliberate and precise. "I've seen you before. Three weeks ago, camped out over the docks waiting on the Punisher. Before that, some rooftop downtown, trying to catch the kid in the suit mid-swing." He paused, tilting his head further, and something in his voice shifted into a register that made the hair on your arms stand up. "You collect us. That's what you do. You go looking for the ones who don't want to be found."

He's been watching me for three weeks. The thought landed in your stomach like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples of genuine fear through you that you fought hard not to let show on your face, because you had learned a long time ago that fear was a currency dangerous men liked to spend. "Great, well, this has been a lovely chat, but I've got a deadline, so." You started to turn back toward the ledge, toward the bag that held your escape route down the fire stairs, and his hand closed around your wrist before you had taken a full step.

His grip was not bruising, not yet, but it was absolute, the kind of hold that told you resistance would only make it tighter. "I didn't say you could leave." He said it without any heat, almost gently, like he was correcting a small and forgivable mistake. "I want to know your name."

"You first," you shot back, surprising yourself with how steady your voice came out even as your pulse hammered against the hand circling your wrist. "Since apparently you already know my whole beat. Devil, Punisher, the kid in spandex. Feels only fair you give me something back."

Something flickered across his face at that, a small crack in the composed mask, and for just a moment he looked almost thrown, like nobody had ever answered him back before.

"Dex," he said finally, and it sounded like it cost him something to give you even that much. "You can call me Dex."

"Well, Dex, my mother taught me not to give my name to strange men who ambush me on rooftops, so you're going to have to live with the mystery." You tugged your wrist, testing, and to your genuine surprise he let go, though his eyes tracked the movement like he was cataloguing it for later. "So which one are you here for? Because if you're hunting the devil too, you can find your own rooftop. I called this one first."

"I'm not hunting anyone tonight." His mouth curved into something not quite a smile. "Tonight I just wanted to see who kept turning up in all the same places I did."

You told yourself it was a one-time thing. A fluke. A dangerous man had happened to notice you on a dangerous night, and now that the moment had passed, he would forget about you the way dangerous men forgot about anything that wasn't immediately useful to them, and you would go back to your careful, solitary work without ever crossing paths with him again. You almost believed it for the four days it took before you climbed onto the roof of a shuttered laundromat overlooking a stretch of the waterfront where a source swore the Punisher had been seen twice that week, and found Dex already there, sitting on an overturned bucket like he'd been waiting for you specifically, one knife spinning idly between his fingers.

"You're late," he said, not even looking up from the blade. "Castle already came and went. Wasn't much of a show tonight. Just some poor idiot who owed the wrong people money."

"I'm sorry, did we have an appointment?" You kept your voice light, deliberately casual, even as your mind raced through every possible explanation for how he could have known you'd be here tonight, because you certainly hadn't told anyone your schedule. "Because I don't remember agreeing to let you crash my stakeouts. And you owe me a shot of the Punisher, apparently, since you scared him off before I got here."

"I didn't scare him off. He left because the job was done." He finally looked up, and the small, satisfied smile on his face made your stomach do that uncomfortable twisting thing again, half dread and half something you refused to name. "I like surprising you."

"You're not surprising me, you're stalking me." You crossed the roof to your usual spot near the ledge, setting your bag down with deliberate slowness while you tried to figure out how alarmed you were actually allowed to be, given that he hadn't hurt you the first time and didn't seem inclined to now. "Do you know how many red flags that is? All of them. It's all of the red flags."

"I've never been very good at flags." He rose from the bucket and drifted closer, not quite crowding you but close enough that you were aware of every inch of space between your body and his, and the awareness sat strange and electric under your skin. "You smell like coffee and gun oil, which is an interesting combination for someone who claims not to carry a weapon."

"I never claimed that. I said I'm not asking a hitman for help. There's a difference." You pulled a small pistol from your jacket pocket just long enough to show him before tucking it back away, and something in his expression sharpened with what looked disturbingly like approval. "A girl in my line of work would be an idiot not to carry something. Doesn't mean I'm planning on using it on you specifically. Yet."

"Yet." He repeated the word with obvious relish, and the sound of it in his mouth made heat crawl up the back of your neck despite every rational part of you insisting this entire situation was insane. "I like that you said yet. Means you're not ruling it out. So tell me. Out of all of them, the devil, Castle, the kid, who's the one you actually want most? Everybody's got a favorite."

"That's like asking a photographer which of their kids they love best." You busied yourself with the camera, mostly to give your hands something to do besides fidgeting under the weight of his attention, and you were annoyed to discover your fingers weren't entirely steady. "Fine. The devil. He's harder to catch, which makes the shot worth more. And there's something about a guy who does all that in a suit and no gun that makes for a better story than a man with an arsenal."

"Interesting." Something shifted behind his eyes at that, calculating and quiet, before it smoothed back over into the easy, unsettling calm he seemed to wear like a second skin. "I could help with that too. I know where he likes to work."

"I'm not asking a hitman to hand-deliver Daredevil to me on a platter." You said it slowly, like you were explaining something to a child, though the reality was you weren't entirely sure what you were dealing with, whether he was joking or completely serious, and that uncertainty terrified you more than any clear threat would have. "That's not how any of this works."

"Then how does it work?" He seemed genuinely curious now, arms crossing loosely over his chest as he watched you with an intensity that made you feel pinned in place even though his hands were nowhere near you anymore. "You climb up here alone, in the dark, to take pictures of people who could kill you without blinking, and sell them to a paper that won't even put your name on the byline. Why?"

You considered lying, considered giving him some sanitized answer about journalism and public interest, but something about the directness of the question, the way he seemed to actually want to know rather than just filling silence, made you tell him the truth instead. "Because somebody has to document what's actually happening in this city, and the cops sure aren't doing it. Because I'm good at it. Because it pays better than bartending and I get to be my own boss." You shrugged, tucking the camera protectively against your side. "Same reason anybody does anything, probably. It's what I'm good at, and it matters."

"It matters." He turned the words over like he was tasting them, and for a moment his expression went distant, somewhere far away from the rooftop, before it snapped back to you with an unsettling focus. "I don't think anyone's ever asked me if what I do matters."

"Does it?" You asked before you could stop yourself, some reckless curiosity overriding your better judgment, and you watched him actually think about the question rather than deflect it.

"I don't know yet." His eyes moved over your face like he was memorizing it, cataloguing every feature with the same precision he probably used when he was choosing where to put a blade, and the intensity of that gaze sent something twisting low in your stomach that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a feeling you didn't want to examine too closely. "Ask me again sometime."

By the third week, you had stopped pretending to yourself that his appearances were coincidental, and had instead settled into something you didn't have a good name for, a strange rhythm where you would climb onto whichever rooftop your research had pointed you toward, and more nights than not, you would find him already there waiting, or he would arrive within the hour like your presence had summoned him. You told yourself repeatedly that this was a problem, that a normal, sensible person would go to the police or at the very least stop going out at night entirely, but the truth sitting uncomfortably in your chest was that you had started looking forward to the low scrape of his boots against gravel, the particular quality of silence he brought with him that felt less like danger and more like company.

Tonight found you both crouched behind an air conditioning unit on top of a residential building downtown, watching a stretch of avenue where a masked figure calling himself the Swordsman had reportedly clashed with a gang running counterfeit weapons two nights running, and Dex had brought coffee this time, two paper cups balanced with surprising care as he climbed up beside you.

"You didn't poison this, right?" You accepted the cup anyway, because the night air had turned cold enough that your fingers had gone stiff around the camera, and you told yourself the gesture didn't mean anything beyond simple practicality.

"If I wanted you dead, coffee would be a strange way to go about it." He settled beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours, and neither of you moved to correct the contact. "Too slow. Too easy to survive. If I wanted you dead, you'd already know about it."

"That's supposed to be reassuring?" You took a sip anyway, watching him from the corner of your eye, and found him already watching you back with an attention that had stopped feeling entirely alarming and had started feeling, disturbingly, like something you craved. "You have a genuinely terrible bedside manner, has anyone ever told you that?"

"Only you." A faint smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared, and you had learned by now that these small cracks in his composure were rare enough to feel like victories when you managed to earn one. "I don't spend enough time at anyone's bedside to get complaints."

"Lucky them." You meant it as a joke, a light jab to keep the conversation from tipping into whatever dangerous territory it kept threatening to slide toward, but something in his expression shifted at the words, his jaw tightening in a way that told you the comment had landed somewhere you hadn't intended.

"Careful," he said, low and rough, his eyes fixed on yours with an intensity that made the cold night air feel suddenly warm. "I don't like thinking about anyone else's bed. Especially not in relation to you."

The words sat between you, thick with implication, and you felt the familiar coiling tension gather low in your stomach again, that particular twist that had become almost constant whenever he was close enough to touch. "That's a lot of possessiveness for a guy who's known me three weeks and doesn't even have my actual name."

"I don't need your name to know you're mine." He said it so simply, so certain, that it took several seconds for the full weight of the statement to land, and when it did you felt your breath catch somewhere in your throat, torn between the instinct to bolt and an entirely different instinct you were far less comfortable admitting to. "I've watched enough people to know what belongs to me when I find it."

"I'm not a thing you find, Dex. I'm a person. A person with her own apartment, her own bank account, and her own extremely strong opinions about being referred to as property." You kept your voice steady through sheer force of will, refusing to let him see just how much the low, certain way he'd said *mine* had unsettled something deep in your chest. "You can't just decide someone belongs to you because you like watching them work."

"I'm not deciding it." He shifted closer, and you let him, some traitorous part of you leaning into the warmth radiating off him despite every warning bell still ringing distantly in the back of your mind. "I already decided it, the first night. Everything since then has just been proving myself right."

"That's insane." You said it quietly, without much conviction, and he seemed to hear the lack of it in your voice because the smile that spread across his face this time was slower, more satisfied, the expression of a man who had just won an argument he'd never doubted the outcome of.

"Probably." He reached out then, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with the blades strapped to his thighs, his fingers lingering against your jaw a beat longer than the gesture required. "You keep coming back anyway. Every rooftop, every stakeout. You could've stopped taking these jobs weeks ago. Found somewhere I couldn't find you." His thumb traced the edge of your cheekbone, and you found yourself holding your breath, caught entirely still under the weight of his attention. "You didn't."

"Maybe I just like the work." The protest came out breathless, unconvincing even to your own ears, and the way his eyes darkened at the sound told you he didn't believe it for a second either.

"Maybe." His voice had dropped lower now, rougher, and the hand that had been cupping your jaw slid back to thread through your hair instead, not pulling, just holding, like he wanted to feel exactly how you'd react to the weight of it. "Or maybe you like being found. I think some part of you likes it. I think you've been waiting for someone to look at you the way I do." His gaze dropped to your mouth, deliberate and unhurried, and the air between you went taut enough that you could hear your own pulse in your ears. "Tell me I'm wrong."

You should have told him he was wrong. You opened your mouth to say exactly that, some sharp, deflecting retort already forming, and instead what came out was nothing at all, because he had closed the last inch of distance between you before the words had a chance to leave your throat. His mouth met yours slow at first, almost testing, like even now he was cataloguing your reaction, and then you felt your fingers curl into the front of his jacket and something in him seemed to break loose entirely. The hand in your hair tightened, angling your head exactly where he wanted it, and the kiss turned hungry and certain, all the coiled tension of the last three weeks finally finding somewhere to go. You kissed him back just as fiercely, some reckless, traitorous part of you no longer interested in pretending you didn't want this, and the low sound he made against your mouth sent a fresh wave of heat rolling straight down your spine.

"Dex," you managed, breaking away just far enough to breathe, though he didn't let you get far, his mouth finding the corner of your jaw instead, tracing down toward your throat with a deliberateness that made your knees go unsteady even sitting down. "This is a terrible idea."

"Probably," he agreed against your skin, and you felt the words more than heard them, his hand sliding from your hair down to settle warm and firm at your waist, pulling you in until there was no space left between you at all. "Tell me to stop, and I will."

You didn't tell him to stop. Instead your hand found the collar of his jacket and pulled him back to your mouth, and he came willingly, the kiss turning slower this time but no less consuming, deep and deliberate, like he had all the patience in the world now that he'd finally gotten what he'd been chasing for three weeks. His other hand came up to cradle your face, thumb brushing along your cheekbone with a tenderness that felt jarring against everything else you knew about him, and when he finally pulled back it was only far enough to rest his forehead against yours, both of you breathing unsteadily in the cold night air.

"I've been thinking about that since the church tower," he admitted quietly, his voice rougher than you'd ever heard it, stripped of its usual composure. "Longer than I probably should be telling you."

"You're not exactly subtle." You managed a shaky laugh, though your hands hadn't left his jacket, and neither of you seemed inclined to put any real distance back between you. "Coffee, showing up on every rooftop I pick, memorizing my patrol routes. A normal guy would've just asked me to dinner."

"I told you." His mouth curved against your temple, pressing a kiss there that felt startlingly gentle for a man who could put a knife through a target from three hundred yards. "I'm not a normal guy. Dinner felt insufficient." He pulled back enough to look at you properly, and the raw hunger still lingering in his eyes made your stomach twist all over again. "This felt like the truth."

Below you, on the avenue, the Swordsman's fight had apparently already come and gone, the street empty and quiet by the time either of you thought to check, and you found you couldn't bring yourself to care nearly as much as you should have about the missed shot. Dex noticed the direction of your gaze and huffed something that might have been a laugh, low and rough against your ear.

"Missed him too, huh." He didn't sound the least bit sorry about it. "Guess you'll just have to let me make it up to you next week."

"That's becoming a pattern." You pulled back enough to look at him properly, still catching your breath, still feeling the ghost of his mouth against yours. "You keep costing me my shots, Dex."

"I'll buy you a new lens." He said it with a straight face, like it was a perfectly reasonable trade, and something about the utter sincerity of the offer, paired with everything else you now knew about him, pulled a real laugh out of you despite yourself. "Whatever it takes to keep you climbing up here. I've decided I like it up here with you a lot more than I like being anywhere else."

"You sound exactly like that! Deep, serious voice, etcetera, etcetera." You lift the visor from your eyes and restit on your forehead, no longer seeing a mess of scarlet shades all over the room. "It's sexy."

"It's not meant to sound sexy." Scott seemed to take a certain pleasure in disagreeing with you — delighting in puffing out his chest under his crossed arms, furrowing his brows, and waiting for another comment from you so he could retort; as if everything that left your mouth was a challenge to be won.

You roll your eyes before you even think, a response ready on the tip of your tongue, "Whatever helps you sleep at night, Summers." And the visor is back over your eyes. "But you didn't answer me: how do I look?"

You watch him from behind the lens, still not used to the crimson tinting every tiny detail of the scene — much less Scott, drowned in red and burgundy. You exchange glances, eyes searching for the other pair behind the crimson filter. Silence hangs between you until, in a line no longer firm on his lips, Scott breaks it.

"I prefer it when I can see your beautiful eyes."

"… real smooth, Scott, real smooth." It slips from your teeth too quickly, too flustered to dismantle the growing smile on Scott's face.

In the three tentative months you’ve dated, you’ve flirted with him, teased him, even cursed at him, but that word has never made an appearance. 

Hospital gossip had originally painted you as the goody-two-shoes nurse recruit hired on in his absence. Perfect chart audits, day-one competency sign-offs, the one who stayed late to feed a confused geriatric patient applesauce. 

This significantly redraws the saintly portrait. 

Frank swallows whatever’s left of the briefing room’s recycled air and slides his phone face-down, as if the glass might burn through the table.

A saint, he reminds himself, shouldn’t make his cock stir in his pants like this. 

He tries, honestly fucking tries, to go back to risk-management’s droning about consent forms, but now every syllable buckles beneath the weight of that single word on the screen.

Daddy. Five letters have kicked open a door he’s held shut with both shoulders for twelve sober weeks.

His fingers tap out an answer under the table: Hallway by the ambulance bay. Five minutes. He deletes it. Types again. Still in committee. Behave. Deletes that, too.

God, get it together, Langdon. In the end all he manages is a neutral, Be there soon, before the meeting finally adjourns.

He finds you giggling at the nurses’ station printer. The sight hits him like an adrenaline push. One purposeful stride, a curl of his fingers around your wrist, and he’s steering you past the Pyxis before anyone can notice. 

The supply-closet door hasn’t even thunk shut before Frank’s got your spun, spine pressed to cool metal shelving, betadine bottles rattling. 

“You again?” you stage-whisper as his fingers walk the hem of your top north. “This hospital really ought to tighten security.”

“Tried.” Frank’s mouth finds the hinge of your jaw, words vibrating against skin as his other hand moves to tug the drawstring of your scrub bottoms loose. “Seems like your day’s been… productive.”

“Mh-hmm. Pulled a double, saved three veins, I’m kind of a big deal,” you taunt, teeth pulling your bottom lip as you flutter your lashes at him. “Just missed seeing my favorite hot doctor on the floor.”

“Overachiever.” He smirks while one hand skims beneath the waistband, knuckles skating your skin, itching to feel how wet you are; the other fumbles his own pants with impatient passes. “He sounds like a lucky guy to get such attention from a pretty girl like you.” 

Once he has you both free, he wastes no time sinking his length into your cunt in aching inches, forehead to yours, breath hitching at every squeeze of silk-slick muscle. You’re just as soaking as he knew you’d be. So perfect just for him.

“Fuck — Frankie,” you gasp, toes skidding on the tile.

“Try again. Wanna hear this newfound vocabulary of yours.” He bottoms out, hips snug to yours, and waits.

The shelf behind you rings with the tremor in your back. “Daddy.”

“That’s better.” His hand cups the back of your skull, holding you still while he drives the word deeper, each thrust into your soft wet heat a dark punctuation. “Say it like you mean it, baby.”

“Missed you, daddy — oh God — missed you all day.” 

Trading vices, his counselor had warned. Once upon a time he had been considered a star pupil. Now he knows exactly how far off the wagon he’s fallen.

MARIA NOTE agreed. agreed so heavily that i needed to write about it <3