Blame Me
Setting: Pre-Season

A/N: If you're wondering what this fic is, it's basically episode inserts, between scenes, episode bridges, vignettes, etc. all oriented toward trying to construct a cohesive narrative for Deb's side of the series. S2 has a lot of missed potential for her, and though it's clear why— she wasn't even the deuteragonist of the series yet —that doesn't change how I feel about it. So this project is my second large-scale effort to completely redirect the spotlight onto her.

It's not really necessary to have read my take on s1 to understand what's going on here, but it might help since they're cohesive and I reference it, especially everything related to the ITK attack.

Quick clerical note: s2 has a lot of date problems, especially from Deb's side of things, especially in the first couple eps. In order to make it make sense for her stuff, my calendar for the early eps differs from canon's dates, but it evens out somewhere around 2.04. This basically doesn't matter at all but I'm noting it anyway in case for some reason you do the math on my dates.

Actually, s2 has a lot of logistical problems/holes, but I'll address those in later notes as they come up.

Sharon A. Wheeler, M.D.

Practice of Psychiatry

I tap my heel once on the laminate, continue turning my phone over and over in my hands as I glance away from the door again, look out the blinds at the condos across Biscayne Bay. Down below, sunlight bounces off a couple boats on the water and the cars backed up on the causeway. There's not a cloud in the sky.

Another picture fucking perfect Miami day.

Yeah, whatever.

My gaze flicks back to the door.

Sharon A. Wheeler, M.D.

Practice of Psychiatry

It's...

I look down, check my watch.

9:22.

I've still got a few minutes.

I tap my foot again a single time, shift in my seat, settle back into exactly the same position as before. It's my fourth time sitting outside this office in three weeks, my fourth time using the back elevator to get up here. So far I've managed to avoid being seen by anyone I really give a shit about, as well as the ones that I don't. Still can't even convince myself to have a conversation with Marty the fucking Cuban food truck guy.

Even if that is pathetic.

Back out the window, back over the bay.

It's been a month. Over a month. A month three days ago since what happened happened and everything just fell the fuck apart. Now I'm parked here outside a psychiatrist's office waiting so a near-stranger can probe and poke at my feelings some more. Before the close of session one she told me I was displaying early symptoms of PTSD, gave me some mindfulness exercises and a script for an anti-anxiety med, told me to come back Friday.

I glance left, make eye contact for half a second with a janitor before looking away again. He keeps walking with his cart. My gaze drifts back to the door.

Sharon A. Wheeler, M.D.

Practice of—

The door opens.

"I'll see you next week," someone I don't recognize says as he pulls it all the way open. He doesn't really look in my direction as he heads off, and my attention returns to the half-open door before he's cleared the hallway.

"Debra," the owner of the placard I keep reading says as she appears. She has that look on her face already. "Good morning."

Is it? I want to say as I get up, shoving my phone in my bag and throwing it over my shoulder. "Morning," I echo instead, sneaking a glance at my watch. 9:30, right on the dot.

Her face is still locked in Grief Counselor mode as she moves aside to let me into the room. I glance around on autopilot as I walk in. The place looks pretty much the same as it did last week, except there are fresh flowers on the table and a small stack of books on her desk.

She shuts the door behind me, and I stop where I stand. Silently, I watch as Wheeler takes her seat across from the couch, but I don't move to follow suit. The anger I've barely been suppressing is already bubbling up, spilling over. "You catch the news yesterday?" I ask aggressively, as if, somehow, it's her fault.

She studies me for a beat. And even though I suspect she does, "What news?" she asks.

I smile humorlessly. "Apparently I was in league with the Ice Truck Killer," I say. I wish I had something to throw at her. Instead I push back my hair, cross my arms, look away. "Pascal's inquiry into me must've had a paper trail, and some fucker at the Herald took advantage of the Sunshine law and got copies, decided it would make a good story. Only they left out the part where I was cleared, because why have any respect for me or the department?"

She leans back in her seat. "I'm sorry," she says unhelpfully.

"Yeah?" I look at her just long enough to find her eyes, then away again. "I thought this was all going away. I haven't had to see his face or my face plastered all over the news for awhile. I was starting to hope that maybe the media's found some new bullshit to latch onto, but here it is again." I blow out a breath, walk to the window. For a long moment I stare blankly out at the water. "I don't know what's worse— having everyone believe I was his accomplice or that I was just this dipshit cop he seduced and tried to murder. I can barely leave the fucking apartment anymore without having someone gawping at me."

The silence stretches on for a bit. I don't know if she's waiting for me to continue, but I don't have any desire to anyway. Finally she says, softly, "Debra, you know we can't control the media cycle or public perception. What's happening right now isn't your fault, and it'll pass."

"Right, it'll pass." I turn to glare at her. "And what the hell am I supposed to do until then? Hide? Stick my fucking nose in the air?"

"What do you want to do?"

Jump out the window. Tunnel thirty feet underground. Strangle that fucking reporter. "I want to move on. But it's hard to do that when I can't go five minutes without seeing his face somewhere." I swallow. "I stopped going to the gym. That was one of the last places I could stand going."

"Why?" I can feel her gaze on me.

Outside, four people on jet skis rush from under the causeway. It must be fucking freezing but they're out there anyway. "It was hard enough before. I think the guy at check in must've told the whole staff who I am or something. They stare at me. I don't need to wait until one of them decides to talk to me." I exhale. "After this I'm meeting Dexter at this guy's apartment to pick up his treadmill."

"So you've decided to hide?"

I turn back to her. "What?"

"That's how you've decided to control the situation? You're going to hide?"

I pause. "Yeah," I affirm, walking over to the couch. "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to do." I plop down and cross my legs, recross my arms. "At least until this blows over."

"And you're okay with that?"

I shrug at her. "I'm okay with that."

She adjusts the notebook on her lap just slightly. I'm sure there's more she'd like to say, but I don't want to hear about it. I clear my throat, try to think of something far away from me or the ITK. "Dexter started bowling last week," is what comes up for some reason. "I didn't even know he knew how to bowl. Who knows, maybe it's just his way of giving me some space. Or maybe he's just getting some space for himself."

"Have you gone with him?"

"No." I squish closer to the couch arm.

"You don't like bowling?"

"No, it's not that." I wish I'd never brought it up. "It's just... it's a work team. They're all people from the job. I don't really want to see them until I get off disability, come back to work."

"You still haven't talked to anyone from work?"

"No." I shake my head, remember that's not quite true. "Well, Angel came by the apartment to give Dexter a shirt and a pair of bowling shoes. We talked for a few minutes."

"How did that go?"

I shrug. "Fine. It went..." I don't know. "It was nice to see him again, talk shop. He just got put back into the rotation." Somehow I say that as if him being out of it had nothing to do with me. I push the thought away. "He's the one who started the bowling team. I think part of the reason he came by was to try to recruit me."

"But you said no?"

"Yeah. Spending three nights a week with my brother and Masuka and Jimmy the Night Shift Guy sounds like a special kind of hell." I pause. "You know Masuka, right? Short little pervy freak who does forensics for Homicide?"

Something that looks like an emotion almost passes across her face before it's promptly swallowed up by her professional veneer. "Yes."

I grin at her. "Then you know what I'm talking about."

"Unfortunately," she offers after a beat, almost smiling. Almost.

I glance away, think for a second. She doesn't interrupt me. "But maybe I could stand a night of it," I say eventually. "After I go back."

"You still think you're ready to go back to work?"

"If I could I'd pick up a shift today." I exhale. "I just want my fucking life back."

"You mean your job?"

"No, I mean my life." Her correction annoys me. "I don't have any friends who aren't on the force anymore, and right now I can't even look at them. I'm sick of being asked how I'm doing."

"And you think going back to work will change how people see you?"

"At least I wouldn't be on fucking disability."

This time she's the one to pause. Then, "Would you mind if I asked you something?"

I feel my eye twitch slightly, cock a brow. "Knock yourself out."

"Do you believe you shouldn't be on disability?"

Several seconds tick by. I don't know how to answer that, and it kind of pisses me off that she asked. "I don't know," I say.

She sits there waiting with her Go Ahead expression.

I feel my face flush slightly. "He never actually..." My stomach rolls over. I swallow. "He never actually got around to chopping me up. There's nothing fucking wrong with me. At least, not physically." Another flush. I look away, find that ugly porcelain elephant in the bookcase across the room and just stare at it.

"It makes me feel damaged," I say eventually. "I know how it has to look to everyone. I look damaged to other people, to my coworkers, to my friends, to my brother. It's bad enough that everyone knows what happened to me, that half the station saw me on that table and the other half have probably seen the pictures of the scene." I swallow again, dangerously close to letting myself go back there. "The longer I'm away the harder it's going to be to come back. But even if I went back today I don't know if anyone's going to be able to look at me without thinking of the Ice Truck Killer. About how much of a fucking moron I was."

I still can't say his fucking name.

Her voice floats in from the left, "Do you really believe any of your coworkers hold what happened to you against you?"

"Against me?" I look back at her. "No. But I know what they must think of me. I know what I'd think of me."

"Do you still blame yourself?"

I blow out a breath, set my jaw, look back at the elephant. Every week the same goddamn question.

"You think the department blames you?"

My molars press together, apart. "I don't know."

"Is that why you're afraid to see them?"

A beat or two passes where I just grind my teeth. "Yes," I say eventually. And then I don't say anything for a long time. Because it's true and because it scares me. Because none of it should've happened to begin with.

Batista in surgery, his kid and half the squad and me and his ex-wife waiting outside the ER doors. Monique Santos gift-wrapped in Santa's Cottage, her head sticking out of a wreath, her limbs tied up in ribbon. Fred Harvey rolling beside me in the trunk of his own car.

None of it would've happened if I'd just fucking figured it out.

"I should've known," I hear myself say.

"Known what?"

I look in her direction again. "That the man I was sleeping with was the Ice Truck Killer."

"Is that how you feel about the other women Brian Moser victimized?"

"I don't know," I say. No. I don't know. Why can't she just leave it the fuck alone?

Her gaze still hasn't left my face. "You said you knew one of his victims, right?"

"Yeah." And now I wish I'd never told her that. "I knew her from when I was working undercover for Vice."

"What was her name?"

An image of the way he arranged her body parts on the ice pops into my head. "Sherry." I press my tongue into a tooth. "Her name was Sherry Taylor."

"Do you blame her for what happened to her?"

I don't say anything. It's not the same and she's pissing me off.

"Do you blame Sherry for being murdered?"

Sherry was probably fucked up on something when she got into that car. "No." All he probably did was flash some paper and open the door.

"Then why do you blame yourself?"

I feel something like fury. "Because I'm a cop. Because he got me into bed without having to pay me first. Because he told me he loved me and I fucking believed it. Because I agreed to marry him. I let him..." I trail off, heart squeezing. He's still a second away, a blink, fingers running down my skin.

"You're not willing to forgive yourself?"

The question punctures the memory, and I find myself glaring at her. "No."

I take in a breath, let it go slowly.

"I just need to move on," I say, tired suddenly. Because of course I still can't sleep for shit. "I just need to go back to work." I just need you to clear me. "I don't need to keep dredging it up. There's not a fucking thing either of us can say to undo what happened."

At some point the Grief Counselor face got replaced with something just a tad stiffer. "And you believe you'll be able to move on without forgiving yourself?"

"Yes." I move to adjust my watch, change my mind and get up instead. For half a second I can't think why and I grab an excuse out of the air, "I need some water."

"Alright."

She doesn't watch me as I head across the room for the water cooler and pull a Dixie cup out of the stack. I take longer than I need to filling the thing up, drink it slowly. Fill it again. Drink it again. Glare out the half-shaded window at the bay.

I don't fucking want to talk about this again, to keep beating this horse. This dead horse. He killed himself in his own murder rack, left himself hanging there for the world to find. For me to find. It's enough to be stuck going over it every second that I'm alone without having to schedule a special hour a week for it. The endless introspection is only succeeding at driving my head further and further up my ass, and I can barely manage to take a breath anymore.

The Ice Truck Killer— Brian Moser —is dead. I'm not.

And maybe one day I can get enough distance from that to make half a blessed fuck's bit of difference.

I crumple the cup, throw it away.