Disclaimer: If you recognize them, then they don't belong to me.

A/N: So, ever since the finale, this idea has been nagging at me, so I've decided to give it life. Hopefully, you will enjoy it and this idea won't have been born in vain! So, please read, review and enjoy. Let me know what you think, the good, the bad, the ugly, just let me know! Enjoy!

Prologue

A Detour To Your New Life

Some people might be worried if they knew about all the nights I'd dreamt up death for her. A different night meant a different way to die, and there are endless ways to die. Even a stickler for tradition like me knows that. Someone privy to my thoughts might think I had a grudge, had some unresolved feelings of anger, that she died nightly in my dreams because I had nothing but hatred for her in my heart. But that's not true. These nightly dreams are just residue from the days when the wolves still stalked outside our door.

Dexter Morgan awoke with a start, the same way he did every morning, shirt tousled and damp with sweat. His chest heaved as his heart pounded beneath his ribs. His eyes slid to the clock on the nightstand beside the bed: 3:33 AM, right on time. Sighing heavily, he laid back against his pillow, which was also wet with sweat, causing him to grimace. Dexter flipped the pillow over, caught the faintest (imaginary?) whiff of her and closed his eyes.

As always, trying to go back to sleep, trying to imagine something different than the dream that had just roused him only conjured up the very images he was trying to resist. They played on the insides of his eyelids, a tattoo he couldn't remove. Tonight it had been a classic, replayed for his personal enjoyment. Lumen Ann Pierce. In life, she lived up to the meaning of her name; in life, she was a source of illumination in a place controlled by the Darkness. In his dreams, she is a sacrificial lamb, lead to slaughter by his psyche. Tonight he is too late to save her, too late to do anything but watch as Jordan Chase plunges the knife into her chest, as scarlet blooms across her shirt and her eyes roll back so that she was looking at him, wondering how he had failed her.

He dreamt this quite often when she slept beside him, dreamt it more when she stayed in the house he should have rid himself of long ago. Dexter would always bolt upright, sweaty, panicked, the familiar darkness of his room doing nothing to reassure him. On the nights when he could feel her sleeping beside him, she was a balm, a way to soothe him back to sleep and convince him that those monsters under the bed were only shadows and too many horror movies before bed.

But now he slept alone. There was no warmth to draw him back to dreamland, no form to wrap around and fuse into and breathe in. There was nothing but empty white sheets, shimmering orange in the glow of the streetlights through the window. Dexter turned so that he was staring into the empty space where Lumen once lay and he tried to remember her as she had looked in those nights, lulled into peace by sleep, ordinary and strong. In sleep, her Darkness left her and she was the woman he knew she was before Chase and his friends had decided that she was the next one for their collection. Lucky thirteen. But instead of picturing her that way, Dexter's mind gave him only the images from his dreams, the dying Lumen, the Lumen Chase made beg for his help before he killed her, the Lumen he could never truly save.

Sometimes, he would get a real life memory to play him through the night. Lumen in his kitchen, telling him she was leaving. Lumen walking out the front door and not looking back. Lumen leaving him behind.

It was almost easier to dream her dead because he could live with his inability to save her life. He could live with the idea that he could only fail those he cared about, that he could never make it quite on time. He could not deal with the idea that he had failed to keep her.

But still, in the months since she'd walked out his front door, he still dreamed. In his mind, she died every night. And, as always, he was the one who killed her.

If she watched the lights pass outside her window for too long, the world became blurry and unreal and she had to blink and turn away just to remind herself of who and where she was. The lights would blur the world passing quickly outside and nothing seemed concrete anymore, nothing seemed real.

But that was hardly a new concept. When was the last time that anything had felt real? Okay, that wasn't entirely fair, she could answer that if she was being completely honest. But honestly was never the best policy. So instead she chose to pretend the last time things were real had been when she was a little girl in Minnesota, catching snowflakes on her tongue and chasing the family dog through the snow. Then it had become expectations, growing up, proposals and fear. So much fear. But she had left all that behind when she had been born again, baptized in the blood that was shed for her. Things hadn't been real then and things far worse that passing lights in the night had blurred the edges of her reality. But that had all changed and reality…

No, she wouldn't go there. Lumen sighed and her breath plumed on the window and she leaned her forehead against the cool glass. She had no idea where she was, on some Greyhound bus driving through the night. If it had been possible to buy a ticket to nowhere she would have, rooting herself in the seat and watching people get on and off, riding on to families, homes, life that didn't blur around the edges. But, wouldn't you know, it seemed that life was about the destination, not the journey and she'd had to give a location, a fixed place in time. For two months she had spent everything she had on tickets to cities that didn't know her and bus depot coffee and food but the money was almost gone and she was still no closer to discovering exactly what it was she wanted. So now she was going the only other place she knew, the place she had belonged in before her desire for a fresh start had been fulfilled.

But that placed belonged to someone else. That Lumen had died there in Boyd Fowler's basement and she didn't mourn her loss anymore. She wondered if anyone would. Would they look at her and know that she was different, that this Lumen, born in blood, would never catch snowflakes on her tongue again or chase a dog through the snow. Would they see what he saw in her? Would they hold her when she shivered, not at the cold but at the world? Or would things continue as usual? Would the kitchen smell of pancakes as questions about expectations and responsibilities and life were asked casually? Would they even ask about her absence or just write it off to her flighty behavior?

Lumen lifted her eyes once more to watch the lights flash by the window, staring until the streetlights and houses and fences and yards and roads fused together and life blurred at the edges once more.

TBC