Disclaimer: I do not Dexter.

Spoilers: Let's say everything.

Rated for language and references to pseudo-incestuous feelings.

A/N: Am currently working hard to be less perfectionistic. As such, this could be considered warmed-over crap. Intended as a one-shot, it is both unrevised and unfinished, but the muse is gone and I don't know when it will be back. Intended to be set just after one of Deb's therapy sessions, although I never got around to making this explicit. It was intended to be vaguely Dex/Deb, although that may not be clear from what I already have.

Interacting with others is a big part of the reason I write. All feedback is greatly appreciated, any suggestions welcome. Also, feel free to e-mail or PM me if you want to chat. Reviews greatly increase the odds that I'll post something else soon, possibly even add more on to this.

Rudy.

That's the name she keeps coming back to.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.

Only, his name hadn't really been Rudy, had it?

And, looking back on it now, maybe it's... interesting she never picked up on the clues.

God knows there had been enough of them.

Also, she'd been a cop. She'd been trained to notice details, born and raised to assemble those details into coherent form. To look at a person and see what they were hiding.

There's another thing that's bothering her. Yeah, maybe she's biased, but she thinks it can't be that easy to get into her pants. Masuka's been half-trying for years. It had taken Rudy what, one long weekend to smile his way into her graces and her bed and her heart?

She remembers late one night, one of the first he'd spent at her place. Laying curled up against him, post-lovemaking, she'd been too tired and content to seriously object when he flipped the channel to that old movie with the dog, and the ending she never wants to admit made her cry as a little girl.

Head on his chest, she managed a bleary "No, what the fuck, change it back."

He barely glanced at her. "Relax. There's not much else on, anyway."

They'd ended up watching until the end, and Timmy was going to have to shoot Old Yeller. As the shot rang out she flinched, the ghost of the sorrow she'd felt as a child sliding out of her throat to fill her head. Tasting the residue of decades-old tears on her tongue.

She'd turned from the screen to look at Rudy, and he'd been smiling, his face creased in contentment.

She'd raised her head from his chest. "What's up with you?"

He glanced down at her, startled, and then an icy mask of control had settled over his features, and for a moment he'd looked somehow familiar.

"Nothing," he said, his voice casual but measured in the way she'd come to know so well. "I was watching the movie."

And she'd felt something, a warmth spreading through her chest, as though this was the way things were supposed to be.

He sat up to look at her, ran a hand through her hair, and to her own surprise she felt herself lean in to his touch. Only, this felt right, too.

In the back of her mind warning bells sounded. It was scary, this sudden feeling of belonging, and her first impulse was to run- to distance herself from the man who was causing her to have these strange, half-alien thoughts.

But she hadn't.

So. Maybe it wasn't that she hadn't noticed anything about her boyfriend.

Maybe she'd noticed too much.

And she'd liked what she'd seen.

But she'd never suspected him of being a serial killer.

She'd never suspected him of anything, actually- it was as though her mind refused to even entertain the idea.

Rudy was normal.

Normal was Rudy.

She'd felt this with such a deep and abiding faith that she never actually articulated it to herself.

A/N: Struggling with the transition to the second part, here. Decided to go ahead and post this, as I may never get around to writing any more. Feedback extremely welcome.