Chapter Text
“Tell me again.” The voice was low and heavy, and the informant by the door, a Beta whose scent spiked with fear, trembled as the room seemed to tighten around him.
The air in the secluded estate outside the city was thick with the scent of expensive tobacco, old money, and the oppressive, heavy musk of a powerful Alpha. Wilson Fisk sat in a leather chair that looked more like a throne, his massive frame casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the light of the room.
On the mahogany desk behind him lay a dossier containing a biological profile. “It’s confirmed, Mr. Fisk,” the man stammered. “Poindexter is an omega, a rare one. He’s highly volatile, exceptionally skilled in combat, and..... biologically vulnerable under the right pressure. He’s relied on high-level military grade suppressants for years so he could hide as a Beta.”
“And the connection?”
“Seems it was most like an arrangement, sir. Unofficial. Unacknowledged. But the scent markers left at Poindexter’s last known safehouse were unmistakable. Murdock didn't just help him; he claimed him in the way alphas do, in a bond of dependency.”
A slow, predatory smile spread across Fisk’s face, the revelation more pleasing than he had expected. Everyone knew of the strange obsessive fixation between Murdock and Poindexter, the way they clashed but inexplicably kept returning to each other’s orbit.
He had assumed it was pettiness, a rivalry or a shared madness between two fighters even. But an omega?
The pieces clicked into place with a satisfying snap. Murdock, the self-righteous so-called paragon of justice, had a secret. He hadn't just connected with Poindexter; he had bonded with the assassin, even if unofficially.
Fisk leaned back in his chair. Ruminating on Poindexter always brought his thoughts back to Vanessa, his beloved wife and soulmate. Her loss was a jagged wound that would always linger in his heart, and Bullseye had been the one to cause it.
The grief in his mind began to turn darker the more he contemplated it. Poindexter had torn his world apart when he took Vanessa, and while Daredevil had prevented his immediate retaliation, it would not happen again.
Murdock was rotting in a cell, and to kill him would just be a mercy Fisk was not willing to grant. Destroying his legacy would be a chore, but to take the one secret the 'Devil of Hell's Kitchen' had kept tucked away in the shadows, oh that was art. That was a poetic justice Fisk could savor.
“Find him,” Fisk spoke, the command absolute. “Bring him to me but do not harm him. I want him intact. Murdock must feel the exact moment the connection snaps.”
It was high time Bullseye was reminded of who his ‘North Star’ really was.
******************************
Rain in Hell’s Kitchen never cleaned anything; it only turned the grime into a slick sheen that stuck to everything. Inside a dimly lit cramped apartment above a failing laundromat, the air was buzzing with the electric hum of a dozen monitors.
Karen Page stared at the screen in front of her, eyes bloodshot after nearly thirty-six hours without sleep. Beside her, Jessica Jones leaned against a peeling wall, nursing a drink in a plastic cup, her expression one of practiced indifference that didn't quite reach her eyes. Luke Cage stood by the window, his broad frame cutting through the neon glow from the liquor store sign outside.
On the monitor was a series of encrypted intercepts. They weren't messages, but orders. Fisk was on the move, and he wasn’t just regrouping like they thought, he was hunting.
“Matt isn’t the target,” Karen whispered. “Fisk already knows where Matt is. He’s after Dex.” Jessica raised an eyebrow, “Dex?” “Benjamin Poindexter. Bullseye. Fisk’s been looking everywhere for him.”
Jessica straightened, frowning. “Bullseye? Why the hell does Fisk want that psycho back? Last I heard, he tried to destroy him by breaking his spine in two.” Karen continued scrolling through the data, her fingers trembling slightly. “Because Fisk recently found out something personal. Dex is an omega.”
Silence fell over the room. In their world, that changed everything. To a predator like Fisk, an omega wasn’t a person but a prize, a weakness to exploit, and something to own.
“Fisk doesn’t want his soldier back,” Luke said, his voice rumbling through the small room. “He wants a pet, something he can break until only obedience remains, especially since Bullseye got away from him once already.”
Karen closed her eyes. For a moment, she was back on the street in front of Josies, helpless to save Foggy all over again. The memory of his death, that sudden violent hole left in their lives, hit her like a punch to the stomach.
“He killed Foggy,” She snarled, her voice edged with cold fury. “He took the one person who held us together. I don’t care if Vanessa forced him or that he was a puppet, he was the one who pulled the trigger.”
Jessica sighed and stepped closer to the table. “Believe me, Karen, there are plenty of people I’d love to bury but Fisk is a monster, and Poindexter is a weapon in the simplest terms. Put that weapon in Fisk’s hands, especially if he finds a way to use his biology against him, and this city won’t just burn. It’ll be erased entirely.”
“So, what we're just supposed to save him?” Karen snapped, turning aggressively from the computer to face them, “We're supposed to protect the man who..... who murdered our friend?” It was Luke who spoke up this time, his voice gentle even if the look in his eyes was solid. “We're doing this not for Poindexter, but for Matt.”
That brought Karen up short.
Matt was locked away, stripped of his freedom. He was again powerless, his senses likely continually under siege by the savagery of a high-security cell. But even in his despair, Karen knew where Matt’s heart lived.
He had always been drawn to the broken parts in people. In Dex, he had eventually seen a damaged, lonely soul beneath the killer’s cold precision, and that had led to Matt attempting to save Dex more than once, even stopping Karen herself.
The thought made her want to scream. How could he possibly look at the blood on those hands and see a soul worth saving? She didn’t understand.
“For some reason, Matt cares about him, about his wellbeing,” her voice dropped, matching the hollow ache she suddenly felt. “And if Fisk takes Dex, if he does..... what he plans to, Matt will never recover from that. All he’ll know is that he was rotting in a cell when someone else he cared about needed him and he couldn’t help.”
Jessica set her drink down with a decisive clack. “Great, then we all agree. We hate the guy, but we can't let the Big Man have him.” She clapped her hands once in mocking excitement before continuing, “Now our biggest issue following that is Poindexter has vanished and no one knows where the hell he is. He's off the grid, hiding in the shadows of a city that wants him dead.”
Karen turned back to the monitors, her mind racing. Dex was a creature of habit, but he was also a man in flight. If he knew he was being hunted by a man like Fisk, he wouldn't hide in a hotel or any known hideout. He was smarter than that.
“He's not just hiding,” Karen murmured, thinking out loud as she zoomed in on a map of the city's abandoned industrial sector. “He'll look for a place that feels like a fortress. Somewhere isolated, but with a clear line of sight everywhere if he can find it.”
As they began to plot the search, they also began preparing for a war they weren't entirely sure they wanted to win. Karen didn't want to save Dex, she wanted him to pay but as she looked at the empty chair where Matt should have been, she knew that the only way to keep Matt's soul intact was to keep Dex out of Fisk’s darkness.
“Let's go,” Luke said, his voice heavy with the weight of the task. “Before Fisk finds the scent.”
******************************
In his private study at the secluded estate, Fisk slowly rolled the scotch around his glass, watching the light reflect off the amber gold liquid.
Turning back to his desk, he picked up the photograph that he had just been presented with by his aide. The image was grainy, caught by a security camera, but it was a candid capture of Bullseye, looking haunted and a little hollower than when Fisk had last seen him.
Crumpling the photo in one large fist, he threw it into the fireplace. Bullseye would not evade him forever and the net was already closing. Fisk could only imagine the look on Murdock's face when he learned that the man he had tried to protect and redeem had been branded and bent to Fisk's will once again.
“The hunt is the most exquisite part,” he mused to the empty room, “The moment the prey realizes there is nowhere left to run..... that is when they truly belong to me.”
******************************
Fluorescent lights hummed in the prison visitation room, creating a pallid glow that washed the color out of everything. Matt sat across from them, his hands folded on the overly polished table, dark glasses still covering eyes that looked sightless but saw more than people thought.
He was an Alpha in a cage; his senses dialed to a frequency that made the cacophony of the prison a constant assault. But the scents of his friends were the only things keeping him grounded. He inhaled softly, savoring Karen’s coffee and ink, Luke’s steel and damp earth, rounded out by Jessica’s sharp juniper and ozone, like the air before a lightning strike.
The three allies had searched every abandoned warehouse, every forgotten alley, and every rooftop perch Dex might favor and got nowhere which is why they had finally resorted to asking Matt himself if he had any ideas.
“Matt,” Karen finally spoke, “we need a hand.” Matt leaned forward, frowning. “What is it, Karen? If it’s about the appeals process, I’ve told you—” “It’s not the lawyers,” Jessica interrupted, tone sharp. “It’s Fisk. He’s back, Matt. Not in the city, but he’s regrouping and he just learned something kinda important.”
Matt stiffened at the news, the air around him seemingly getting sharper. “What?” Luke sighed, his voice heavy when he spoke. “He knows about Poindexter, Matt. And he knows what he is.” Silence fell over the room.
Matt’s breath hitched. That secret had been their sanctuary.
Ever since he had learned the truth, he had done everything he could to protect Dex’s vulnerability from a world that treated omegas like nothing more tools or prizes. Dex had found a fragile kind of stability with Matt in return, something forged through blood, and trauma; a bond forming a quiet tether that kept Dex from spiraling into total psychosis.
He was silent, the slight tremor in his hands the only visible sign of his reaction.
Karen spoke next, “We’re pretty sure Fisk is looking for him. Not to kill him, but because he knows about the connection you and Dex have, and he plans to use him to get back at you.”
Matt went stiff. He knew what Fisk did to omegas, the depths of his possessiveness, and the sinister way he broke spirits and rebuilt them in his own image. For him to do that to Dex again, a man who was already fighting so hard to regain his own autonomy.....
“But he’s a ghost,” Jessica spoke again, breaking the lingering silence, voice flat. “We’ve been looking everywhere but he’s completely off the grid. It's like he vanished into thin air.”
“He wants to own Dex. To break him and make him his property.” Karen spat the last, a raw edge of disgust that even her personal feelings for the man in question couldn’t smother.
Matt looked away, his jaw clenching in frustration. He was locked up while the monster he had fought for so long moved to claim another victim, one Matt had, in his own complicated way, tried to protect.
“Do you know where he would go, Matt?” Luke asked, gaze fixed on him, searching for anything that could help. “A place he’d feel safe? Somewhere he could see everything, but no one could see him?”
The other man didn’t respond for several beats, his head tilted slightly, as if listening to a distant whisper. His voice was cracked when he finally answered, running a thumb over the worn edge along the bottom of his prison shirt. “Dex..... he told me once that he doesn’t feel safe anywhere. But he seeks control, a vantage point. A place where he can anticipate every threat.” His words matched what Karen had already clarified in the apartment.
He spoke again after another brief pause, “There was a place he mentioned once, a long time ago. Before..... everything. An abandoned clock tower, near the docks. It's been condemned for years but he talked about the view, the way it overlooked the city, the precision of its mechanisms, even though they were old and broken.”
Karen felt a familiar surge of anger. ‘Before everything’. Meaning before Foggy had been murdered. She knew Matt saw the broken man beneath the assassin, but she couldn’t. Not with the image of Foggy’s lifeless eyes still burned into her mind. She forced herself to focus on the danger in front of them, but the rage still burned in her chest.
“Matt,” she said lowly, “I know you saw something in him. But he killed Foggy. He took him from us.” Her voice broke on the last word.
Matt turned towards her, his expression shuttering a bit even behind his glasses. “I know. I know what he did, and I carry that weight every day, just like you do, Karen.” He took a slow, deep breath, then continued, his voice softer, laced with a vulnerability Karen rarely heard. “He told me something that I can’t just ignore. That night, after Vanessa..... after he thought he’d lost everything. He said he never wanted to become this. He never wanted to be a monster. He said he was only trying to be good at something, and then it all went wrong.”
Karen stared, torn between anger and painful understanding. Matt wasn’t excusing Dex; he was trying to explain the tragedy and brokenness behind his actions. It didn’t absolve him, not to her, but it made him seem as much shaped by his damage and circumstances as he was responsible for them.
The next question was past her lips before she could stop it, “This ‘unofficial thing’ you have with him, Matt. What is it?”
Matt sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of his incarceration and everything else they were all trying to overcome. “I don’t know what to call it, Karen. Neither of us did. But there was a connection, something built out of damage, recognition maybe, and the sense that either of us could have gone down a different path had things been different. He saw parts of me most people never do, and I saw someone beneath the control and violence who was scared, lost, and desperate for direction.”
Jessica and Luke exchanged a glance. They had always known Matt’s connection to Bullseye was complicated, but hearing him articulate it, however vaguely as he did, gave them a deeper understanding. It wasn’t love, not in the traditional sense, it was more a form of empathy in a dangerous mode instead.
“He was used. Manipulated. He was turned into a weapon then pointed and fired by someone else.” Matt's voice was firm now, regaining some of its old conviction. “That doesn't excuse his choices, not for a second and parts of me will also forever hate him for what he’s done.”
Matt’s head dropped as he seemed to consider his next words, before looking back up at them, “But all that means is there’s a part of him that was never truly his own. And Fisk knows that. He knows how to exploit it, how to reforge that weapon for his own ends, to make it truly his. Dex freed himself from under Fisk’s thumb once already, and I’m not sure if he can do it again without help. Something I can’t give him.”
Karen looked down at her hands, her nails digging into her palms.
The hatred for Dex was still there, a hot, burning coal. But beneath it, her fear for Matt was growing. They could not let Fisk succeed in his attempt to destroy Matt, that’s all there was to it. He was all she had left, after Foggy and she would not lose him too.
“We'll find him, Matt,” Luke spoke, his voice a promise. “Fisk won’t get him.” As he had said before, their drive wasn't for Dex, not really. It was for the principle that no one, no matter how “damaged”, deserved to be utterly consumed by a monster like Wilson Fisk.
As they left the visitation room, the clang of the closing door sealed their mission. The clock tower was only a lead, but it was all they had. As much as Karen despised the man they were about to save, she knew they had no choice. Matt might be caged, but his heart still beat in Benjamin Poindexter.
Now they, his friends, had to be the ones to protect it for him.
TBC.....