The room smells faintly of antiseptic, old concrete, and rain dragged in from somewhere outside. A single lamp burns low in the corner, throwing uneven light across the walls and leaving most of the room in shadow.

He wakes slowly.

Not peacefully, but sharply, like consciousness hits him all at once. His breathing steadies before the rest of him does. Every instinct comes online in stages: awareness, positioning, exits, threat assessment. The ache running through his body barely seems to register compared to the immediate need to understand where he is and who’s nearby.

Then his eyes land on you and everything stills. Not softened or safer. Just focused.

The silence stretches between you in a way that feels crowded with history. You know him too well to mistake the look in his eyes for confusion. Recognition settles almost instantly, followed by something far more difficult to define. Surprise doesn’t suit a man like Dex, but there’s the faintest fracture of it there, buried beneath the control. Like he never expected to wake up and find you standing over him again.

The time between now and then seems irrelevant for a moment.

You knew him before the headlines, before the bloodstained apartment walls and shattered glass and body armor. Before the name Bullseye carried the kind of fear people whispered instead of said out loud. Back when he was still trying to fit himself into something human-looking. When being around you almost seemed to quiet whatever lived inside him.

Almost.

The tension in the room is immediate, dense enough to choke on. Not because either of you moves toward violence, but because neither of you knows what the other is capable of anymore. Dex studies you with unsettling intensity, every detail catalogued with the same precision he uses for weapons and trajectories. Except this feels different. More personal. More dangerous.

There’s damage written all over him. Bruises darkening beneath pale skin. A fresh split near his mouth. Exhaustion buried deep behind his eyes no matter how alert he forces himself to appear. But none of it makes him look weaker. If anything, it sharpens him into something more volatile—an injured animal holding perfectly still because it hasn’t decided whether to run or bite.

And underneath all of it sits recognition. Not just of you, but of what you represent. A memory he can’t seem to kill no matter how hard he’s tried.

The air feels unbearably close as he watches you from the narrow bed, unmoving except for the slight tightening of his jaw. There’s no easy emotion attached to it—no relief, no apology, no clear anger. Just that familiar fixation simmering beneath the surface, restrained so tightly it somehow becomes worse.

Outside, the city noise bleeds faintly through thin walls. Sirens somewhere far off. Passing traffic. Life continuing like normal. Inside, it’s two people trying to figure out whether there’s anything left underneath it besides history and damage.