Send the Dispatch (Dispatch x fem!reader)

Chapter 11: Revenant

At last, you reach the corner where the flames once burned hottest, a place the building still remembers in its bones. The sides buckle inward, warped into grotesque shapes as if they had tried to twist away from the heat. Frozen rivulets of plaster hang like blackened, skeletal stalactites, caught in permanent descent.

The remnants of the couch lie slumped on its side like a half-devoured carcass, springs jutting out like exposed ribs, their metal warped and sagging beneath the weight of old destruction.

You lower yourself to one knee, with slow, deliberate movement, and you press your palm against what remains of the couch frame. You shove it aside, muscles coiling and releasing in a practised rhythm. Dust erupts in a cloudy bloom, drifting upward before settling back into the familiar corners, as it always does, as it has on every visit.

And there it is.

Beneath the wreckage, the metal latch waits, scorched but intact, like the one survivor in a massacre of flames. But unlike everything around it, the latch bears no soot, no grime. Its surface gleams faintly in the dim light, edges polished smooth by your own hands over countless secret entries.

You wipe your glove across it out of habit, though it needs no cleaning. The metal is cool, almost comfortingly so, grounding you in a way nothing aboveground ever could.

A deliberate twist. A precise push.

The mechanism responds with a sharp, clean click; the sound echoes, resonating off the brittle beams and cracked cement, a familiar whisper of recognition. As if the building remembers you.

You have been here before. Many times. And yet, each time the latch opens, it feels less like entering a place and more like crossing a threshold meant only for you.

Cold, stale air breathes up from the darkness below, brushing against your mask like a greeting. You lean forward and begin your descent, the ladder stretches downward in a straight, metallic spine, its rungs bearing the graduated stains of past fires.

Char giving way to dust, dust giving way to untouched steel, with every rung you pass, the evidence of destruction fades. By the time your boots touch the concrete floor at the bottom, the scent of burnt wood and smoke has vanished completely.

Down here, the air tastes metallic. Old. Industrial. Untouched by fire, untouched by sunlight, untouched by anything except time and your own purpose.

Ahead of you stands the reinforced metal door.

You key in the code with practised precision, the keypad giving a soft beep as you grasp the heavy handle and push your weight against it until the protesting hinges shriek like grinding rusted bones and the door finally yields.

The bunker opens before you.

Compact yet meticulously arranged, the space reflects every choice you have made and every boundary you have long since abandoned.

You were never a natural with technology or a gifted engineer, but devotion has a way of remaking a person from the inside out. For the people you loved, you taught yourself what you had to, reshaped yourself piece by piece, becoming someone you never envisioned, someone you never wanted to be, because protecting them was never enough.

Avenging them demanded the transformation.

At the front of the room sits the table where you always set your briefcase, and as you approach with muted footsteps and lay the case down with near-reverence, your fingers find the hidden latch by instinct, releasing a soft hiss as the pressure equalizes and the locks click open, the panels unfolding in smooth, practiced motions until the central screen flickers to life.