Title: For the harsh realm

Fandom: Dexter

Rating: M for language

Disclaimer: I do not own Dexter or any of its characters. I probably would have included this scene if I had any part in the production of the show, which is how you know I don't have any part in the production of the show.

Author's notes: This requested fic is written for my dear friend the harsh realm for her inspiring willingness to get behind me as a new author and my book series. I am so pleased to call you my friend and to take part in our deep and fantastical conversations :) the harsh realm was disappointed by the Dexter showrunners' choice to short-change viewers on a real conversation/confrontation between Deb and Dexter about Doakes, and that Dexter's admission about the Ice Truck Killer was avoided altogether. I have written this canon-consistent piece to slip into the episode 'Sunshine and Frosty Swirl' in the minutes following Deb's first confrontation with Dexter following on from 'Are you…?' I have also made this fic to be Break Me-consistent, with a few references, but it is not necessary to have read the larger fic to enjoy this one.

The two songs that spoke to me while I was writing this were What I've Done by Linkin Park for both the lyrics and the rise and fall in intensity; and I Know Places by Taylor Swift. Again, the build in intensity fitted with the feel of the fic, especially at the beginning, and I also saw the 'pause' effect in the music between verses and chorus as being like a break in a game. Chess players rearranging their pieces, fighters regaining footing, a breath between arguments. There are a couple of moments in the fic that feel like that to me.

The next requested fic on my list is for AngryHellFish :)

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She comes over, and I realise she's finished making her position clear. Her posture isn't confrontational but there's a gun hanging by her side, held loosely yet capably; she can shoot me without much effort or thought. She's a good shot and she's quick. I've no way of knowing she won't.

I suppose I think I can challenge her, force her to reveal her hand, because I stand up slowly, rising confidently like I'm on a more stable footing than I honestly feel. Deb knows, Deb knows… This was never meant to happen. I hope my stoic expression hides the chaos inside me.

How far from normal we have strayed.

"So," I say coldly, much more coolly than I ever really need to use with her, and I open my hands at my sides. "What are you going to do?"

I don't know what I expect from her, but I need to know now what her next move will be. Is she going to arrest me? Of course I can't let her. I have too much to lose, and so does she. If I'm charged she'll be the one hurt the deepest by what comes out in court. Is she going to call someone else to come and arrest me? Again, I can't let her do that. No one else can be involved. It's bad enough she is. Is she going to bolt again? Is she going to shoot me? I don't know. But what do I do? Do I grab her bony wrist and twist the gun out of her hand? Do I snatch up one of the weapons she's laid out and ward her off with it when she comes at me with cuffs? Do I shove her into the bedroom and lock her in there so she can't tell on me? I've never manhandled my sister before and I can't imagine starting now, even when the stakes are higher than they've ever been.

Her fist whips out of nowhere. I've never had cause to fear Deb so no emergency defence systems are in place in my brain to intercept her hand and I take the punch to the jaw. Yow… I squeeze my eyes shut and cover the point of pain with my hand, and in my self-imposed brief darkness I feel rather than see her brush past me and stalk to the door. She wrenches it open and leaves without a backwards glance, leaving a tangible sense of fury, betrayal and disbelief in her wake.

I turn to watch as the door clicks shut. She doesn't call 'goodnight' over her shoulder. I shouldn't expect her to, not after that, but I find myself wishing she had all the same. The normalcy of the traditional farewell, the unspoken promise that we'll see each other again tomorrow or the day after, the casualness of that gesture… I notice its absence much more keenly than I would ever notice its presence.

"I never wanted her to go through this, Dex," our father, Harry, laments helplessly from where his ghostly visage sits in one of my chairs. I lower my hand, my jaw bone still throbbing and my frustration mirroring this pain internally. My conscience, manifested as my late father and mentor, always seems to select these inopportune moments to appear to me.

Maybe there's something in that.

"Neither did I," I reply irritably. Of course I didn't want Deb to know. Even when I really, really wanted Deb to know, I still didn't want her to know. Because look what has happened. Everything, all our lives, has come apart in a matter of days. The sister whose unconditional love I have relied on all my life has walked out on me in utter contempt and disgust with what I am. She saw me. And she hates what she saw. She never hated me before, but that was when she knew what she was allowed to know. She liked that Dexter. She liked me. Now… Now I don't even know if she'll be back.

This may be irreparable.

"Then you should have been more careful," Harry accuses. His frustration and disappointment are unnecessary. I already feel both intensely. My sister, his daughter, the one person this whole lie was originally, honestly, constructed to protect… is out in the open. Defenceless. The walls we built between her and me, and the blindfold we laced delicately over her eyes for years and years, it's all gone, burned away in the fire she and I lit to cover up what I did to Travis Marshall.

I should have been more careful. With her. She was my responsibility to keep safe once our dad died and left us alone. For this to have happened… Were he alive, he would hate me just as much as she does.

"She didn't arrest me," I comment, trying to find the silver lining here. It's faint. It's hard to see with all this ugliness surrounding me, this ugliness Deb dredged up in her determined search for answers I couldn't give. I wonder now whether she regrets going looking. Or if she just regrets that our father brought me home one day and gave her a brother, setting in motion this devastating sequence of events.

"Not yet," my father's ghost reminds me. My hopes are shot down. Deb is out of my sight and out of her mind with confusion and rage. I don't know this Deb; I can't predict her. She could do anything.

She's a liability. A threat. My little sister – a danger to my existence. The same little girl who wore pigtails to her first day of school; the same little girl I taught to drive a car. Who would have ever thought?

I walk slowly through the ugliness Debra uncovered. She didn't make this mess. It's mine. Aside from strewn and torn furnishings and cushions, the ugliness is made up of everything I am that she never knew to look for. Knives. Syringes. A wooden box full of blood slides. The prosthetic arm of one of the Ice Truck Killer's last victims, drawn all over with permanent black and red marker.

I straighten a seat cushion and sit down on the couch. I lift this one misfit clue out of the sea of ugliness. "What is this doing here?" Because it isn't mine, and I haven't seen it in years, and had it not been here, Deb's reaction and resultant mood might have been more pliable. "Is it some kind of message?" Brian Moser tried to kill her. This arm represents a trauma she's been carrying around for most of a decade. Did it spook her?

Worse – did it scare her? Did she see it and immediately throw me into the same mental category as her ex-fiancé? Is she afraid of me now? Is that why she ran out of here twice tonight? Is that why she threw up on my lawn? Did she only return from outside with me because she was scared for her life if she did not, instead of by choice like I initially believed? Did she hit me to slow me down if I were to chase, rather than out of anger?

That unsettles me. I don't want Deb to be scared of me. At the end of the day, whatever else I am, I am still her brother.

"Maybe someone else is onto me," I suggest darkly to Harry. Like my circumstances could get any worse.

I put the arm down and run my fingers over the edge of the most damning piece of evidence in the arsenal of ugliness. The blood slide collection; the wooden box. I find my fingertips skirting to the slides Debra removed and cast about the table in her frantic search for life-ruining news. I will never be able to put these back into the correct order, damn her. But it's hard to justify feeling angry with my sister, even as I replace the slides and come across a broken one. She's too smart for the flimsy cover stories I fed her and I knew that, deep down. In truth, when I heard her gasp in the church and I looked up and saw her white face, I knew I was screwed. There was no way out, no answer, no solution. Trying gave me, what? A day? Everything was shattered at that moment she saw and nothing done in the aftermath was going to save either of us.

I dug my own grave, and in doing so I dug hers, too.

My next breath doesn't come as easily as the last one did, and my vision swims. I abandon my task to press my palms over my eyes. This wasn't meant to happen. My worlds are colliding. Deb wasn't meant to be in the church. She exists in this other world, separate from my killing, separate from my dark hunger and separate from my secrets. She lives out in the light, and whenever she's dipped so much as a toe into the other parts of my life in the past it's always ended badly for us both. She's just not supposed to be in this world. My brother dragged her in once. I had to kill him for it.

It's not allowed.

"Dexter," my father's ghost warns, only a second's premonition, and he disappears. I look up at the door as Deb strides back in, grabs the door and slams it behind her. Locking herself in with me. Not even remotely scared.

Time for a rematch. I see it in the determined set of her eyes.

"You're back," I say, more relieved in tone than I intended on giving away. I really wasn't sure she would be. Of course I knew I'd see her again – I always see her again, she's never out of reach – but I assumed our next contact would need to be initiated by me. After all, she didn't even say 'goodnight'.

"Take two," Deb agrees without a smile, without any give whatsoever in her demeanour, her tone, her entire being. I deflate slightly. She's not here to lose; she's here to take names, or mine at least, and to kick my ass as hard as her life has become.

I'm so screwed.

"You're the Bay Harbour Butcher," she states, a demand for confirmation. She asked twenty minutes ago; I couldn't tell her, but I couldn't deny it either, and I know she knew. "You as good as told me already. So? Give it to me straight, Dexter."

I don't want to be having this conversation! She shouldn't be asking these things. I shouldn't need to explain. I was never supposed to explain. She shouldn't know enough to realise that these questions exist to be asked.

"Jesus, Deb," I exhale, looking away. Why does she insist on taking the hard roads? Why couldn't she swallow the lies, drop the bone? "Why does it matter?"

"Answer the fucking question, asshole," she spits, eyes narrowed. "Are you or aren't you?"

"Yes. Alright?" It comes out short, irritable, but my irritation is purely a mask for the discomfort I feel. "I'm the Bay Harbour Butcher. Happy?"

"Far fucking from it."

"Then what? Why do you need to know?"

"Doakes." Oh. She looks at me so discerningly, without warmth, without any of the softness I usually associate with the true Deb. I wonder if I'll ever see that version of Deb again. I wonder if it still exists after the trauma of the last couple of days. Those cold eyes move from me to the box before me. "We found blood slides in a box exactly like that one in his car… but they weren't his, were they?"

I hold her gaze. "No."

She nods slowly. This was what she expected to hear, but it still takes a moment to sink in and assimilate with the knowledge she previously had on that topic. She says, carefully, "We connected him with dozens of cases and could hardly believe he had managed to maintain appearances with everybody around him. We couldn't believe he'd been hiding behind this mask for so long and that we'd all been fooled. But he wasn't the one fooling us." She pauses, and looks back to me. I feel the weight of the betrayal she conveys as she adds the punch line. "You were."

But she's not worried about me fooling everybody else. The betrayal is that I had her fooled, while she, my darling open-book little sister, has never kept a secret from me longer than a day.

"Yes." I don't add that it was for her own good. I don't add that it was to avoid this very awkward situation we're in right now.

She swallows, and I feel a little pang in my chest. I hurt her. That was not my intention, and that feels worse than the displacement and confusion associated with her finding out about my ways.

"He was a good person."

"I agree."

"We strung him up as the Bay Harbour Butcher," Deb says slowly, tightly, and I worry that she might cry again. "We called Doakes a killer and we chased him into hiding. We let his family bury him as a criminal. And all this time…" She shakes her head at me, and it's like a parent saying 'I'm not mad, just disappointed', except she's also mad. "All this time, it was you."

Ah. Something else I've done wrong.

"I-"

But my explanation is unwanted or unworthy, because she barrels over the top of my voice, striding closer so swiftly and threateningly that I lean back in my seat instinctively.

"You let a good man take the fall for you," she snarls, finger pointed in my face as she gets near and towers over me. I stay down, looking up at her. "You let everybody believe he killed those people when it was you. You let me believe that my friend, my partner was this psycho fuck murdering his way through Miami. How the fuck do you justify that?"

I sigh. "Deb-"

"Don't," she hisses. "Just don't. That's how it went, isn't it? You framed him. You used us, our department – me – to bring him down in your place so Lundy and I would stop looking for you. Isn't that what happened, or have I got it wrong? Just go ahead and fucking tell me I'm wrong."

"No." She's missing details and extrapolating on others, but basically, she's got the gist. "That's close enough."

She's disgusted. She straightens, rising to get away from me, but doesn't step back.

"Who in fuck do you think you are?" she asks breathlessly, disbelievingly. She raises her hands helplessly. "You're a murderer; the scum of fucking society-"

"I told you," I interrupt, "I only kill certain-"

"Don't try to justify it like that makes it okay!" Deb shouts, and I try to shush her, thinking of my neighbours. She must understand. Frustrated with having to control her volume, she turns and kicks my coffee table. It tilts and most of the ugliness piled on it tumbles off with varying crash noises. I cringe. She turns back to me, furious. "It's not okay! It's a fucking crime, Dexter! It's a crime and I'm a fucking cop, and you work for the cops! Regardless of whatever bullshit Dad and you might have decided in all these secret conversations you apparently had without me, murder is wrong. You're a bad fucking person and you set up a good man to take the rap for your actions. He died." She pauses, and what colour has returned to her face begins to drain. She leans back as though about to step away. "Did you kill him?"

"No!" Finally, an opportunity to tell a truth she'll like. "Lila did."

Deb's eyes widen. She doesn't like it after all.

"Lila what?"

"And I killed her," I add hurriedly. It doesn't help. It just adds to the pile of ugliness already around us by adding another awful chapter to this story Deb was never meant to hear. I decide to redirect, even though the main plot isn't one I enjoy. "Look, forget that. I didn't kill James Doakes and I didn't want him to die. It just happened that way and it just happened to work out in my favour."

"Oh, goody for you," Deb sneers. "So you had no part in the misdirection of the FBI investigation? It just happened by fucking magic?"

Well, no. "I might have nudged, when the opportunity presented itself."

"You took the wheel and veered us in his direction. You threw him under our bus and let us take him out."

"He put himself in your sights," I argue, still looking up at her from the couch. "He could have saved himself a hundred different ways. Instead he came after me on his own."

"And he got what you deserved," she finishes coldly. "Why do you get to decide who lives and dies, Dexter? Why do you get to live fancy fucking free while a better man dies with your rap sheet stapled to his chest?" She glares at me with such contempt. Her words pound through my head. A better man. "Who do you think you are?"

I stand. I'm toe-to-toe with her, and she doesn't move back. "Your brother."

She pushes on my chest and I fall back into my seat. "You're not my fucking brother. I haven't got the first fucking clue who you really are. Every conversation we've ever had, every memory; what was real? How am I ever going to be sure?" she adds, speaking over me when I try to insist, unexpectedly hurt, that of course it was all real. She's the realest thing in my cover life. All these years, she's been the centre of it, the gravity holding it all together when I didn't know how. She's the person I've been simultaneously my fakest for and the most genuine with. "You look exactly like the boy who taught me to tie my shoes and walked me into school on my first day." Unexpectedly, she touches my face lightly; my inner tension halves, disarmed by surprise at the contact. "You feel just like the big brother who turned up at Jess Waterhouse's party in just shorts to collect me the night my dad died." She inhales slowly, eyes clinging to mine, and I can't break contact. I say nothing, and try to breathe shallow little breaths. The intensity of the argument seems to have condensed into this tightly coiled, quiet tension directly between us, and I don't want to set it off. "I want to believe you're still my brother but my brother isn't a serial killer. He's better than this."

Better.

The coil snaps and I stand again, rising to stand in her personal space, directly before her. Confrontational. Threatening. Offensively close. She doesn't back down, even when I glare straight into her eyes with all the ugliness of the room.

"I'm your brother whether you like it or not," I snarl at her, angry that she would dangle that threat before me, like she can retract on her unspoken vow to eternally love me. We're siblings – there's a universally acknowledged contractual agreement in that, one she doesn't get to renege on. "That's why I did what I did. I didn't want James to die. I wish things had gone differently – lots of things, from Rita to Lila to James to you walking into that fucking church – but I don't regret it. Not that, not what I did to his name to preserve my own."

"What makes your name so damn precious?" Deb demands, glare as sharp as mine. "Why did yours deserve preservation at his expense?"

"Because it's yours, too," I throw at her. "Yours and Dad's, and now my son's. Doakes backed me into a corner and it was him or me, and I chose me, for you. I was thinking about you."

"Me?" she scoffs. "You did it for you, not me."

"I was going to confess everything to you. Right there." I point to the couch beside us where we were sitting together five years ago, eating steak and drinking beer, while our department desperately sought my patsy. "I was going to clear Doakes and let you take me in. But tell me that would have been easier for you to swallow. Tell me you would rather have known the truth than accept the lie – that it would have made you happier. Tell me, Debra," I order, grabbing her chin on impulse when she looks away, conflicted. "Tell me it would have been better for you to arrest your own brother as the Bay Harbour Butcher and to know it wasn't your friend Doakes. Be honest with me, since I'm being honest with you." I hold onto her jaw when she tries once to jerk away and give her a long moment in which to respond. She doesn't. She doesn't try to pull away again, either. "It would have crushed you," I confirm. "Admit it. You've been much happier living the lie."

"Doesn't make it right," she whispers, eyes down.

"Right is contextual," I state. My voice is softer now; my hand holding her face, it doesn't seem necessary to speak as loudly. But she still won't look at me. "It wasn't right to frame him. I've always known it isn't right to lie to you." She blinks. Eyes still down. "The alternative was this, tonight. To let you in, to break you. That felt more wrong."

"You used me. You manipulated me. You don't give a shit about me."

"You don't believe that. You're my sister."

That makes her uncomfortable. She squirms away, twisting to free herself from my grip. "Don't-"

"Deb," I say, reaching after her, catching her shoulders and pulling her back. The balance of power has slipped and she's trying to pull away again, and I push my advantage while I have it. "Don't try to run away from the fact. It was the only thing to do. You're my sister and I would let a hundred good men die dishonourable deaths if they each gave me an extra day of keeping my darkness from touching you." I let that sink in. She's my sister, the good Morgan, and I wanted her to be able to stay that way. She has to accept at least that much. "I didn't want this for you. I didn't want this for us." I pause. She says nothing. She still won't look at me. "I'm still your brother. I'm still the same guy as before. I held your hand on the first day of school and I got wasted with you the day after Dad died." I pause again, feeling awkward, but I should say it. She should get to hear it. "I love you."

My sister struggles with this. She keeps her eyes downcast and her cheeks fill with colour. She says, without strength, "Funny fucking way of showing it."

How do I make her see? How do I get through to her, show her that what happened with Doakes was necessary, that I'd always do what was necessary to defend my family against my own darkness? He was going to unleash it on them. I had to find a way to keep it contained to him, and Lila did that for me. Her only decent contribution.

I finally say, "I'm not sorry about the way I took advantage of Doakes's obsession with bringing me down. I'm just sorry he also had to die, because he didn't deserve that, and I'm sorry you had to find out. That's it."

"How generous of you," Deb mutters.

"I'm not sorry for sacrifices I've made to stop threats to my family. To you."

Deb laughs coldly. Her shoulders roll under my hands and her every exhalation brushes my face; we're so close. "Yeah, I'm sure in your illustrious criminal career you've made a fuck-tonne of selfless fucking sacrifices for me."

"You might be surprised."

"Well, fuck me," Deb comments, raising her hands and shoulders under mine in an inviting shrug. "Alright. I seriously fucking doubt it but give me your best shot. Surprise me, brother."

She acknowledges I'm her brother. That's a step up on a minute ago. There's only one thing to do, one thing to say.

I can't believe what I'm about to tell her. I look down at my hands, curled over her narrow shoulders. She was almost out of my reach that day – I almost lost her, and tonight again she's slipping away, in a different way. I run my hands silently over her collarbone, up onto her neck. She shivers inexplicably; she's not afraid, so I don't know why her eyes darken and her breath catches at the feel of my touch on her skin. I lean towards her and hear her breaths quicken in anticipation. Can she read from my signals the significance of what I'm about to say? I tilt my head and bring my lips to her ear, so close I can feel the heat of her cheek radiating onto mine.

I choke on the words. I can't say it.

"What?" she asks breathlessly, her voice in my own ear.

I can't say it.

But everything else is out, every ugly truth and hideous fact. Why not the most horrifying beast of them all?

"Deb…" I suck my lips inside my mouth to run my tongue over them; they're dry with nervousness. To simply lick my lips would result in licking my sister's earlobe and I'm led to understand that this is not normal, acceptable practice between siblings. "I… It wasn't suicide. I killed him."

"Doakes?"

"Brian Moser."

She seems to stop breathing. She goes so still.

"I killed my brother. I slit his throat and I sat with him while he bled out. It… It hurt so much. I didn't think it would hurt that much." I swallow the lump that forms. Deb shifts slightly, enough that her cheek brushes mine. "I loved him. I know he loved me. I wanted to disappear with him, to just be. We were the same. But I killed him. Now he could never hurt you again."

I can't stand the suspense. I pull away enough to see her face. She's looking at me now, eyes wide and dark and deep with things unasked and unsaid. I look for the broken shards of her soul inside her – how much damage did this latest shot of ugliness do?

But she doesn't break under this weight. She just looks at me. I don't know what she sees.

Time stretches for so long. Then she says, "If you loved him, why did you do it?"

The eternal question. "You're my sister."

"He was your brother," Debra counters. My hands, firm but not tight around her neck, detect her swift pulse. I wonder whether she fears my response. Could she handle it if I admitted I considered Brian's offer? That I briefly imagined putting the knife through her quickly before she woke to the horror and terror of seeing us as our true selves, towering over her defenceless body, and disappearing with him through the door into the night to live a life, long or short, without the fear of failing my constant responsibility for Debra's innocence.

I can't tell her that any more than I could allow Brian to drive the knife down when he realised I couldn't.

"You're my sister," I say again, eventually. "I would never let anything happen to you. No matter what the cost to me… or anybody else."

I don't need to spell out the names. I see in the haunted look in her eyes that she understands fully. Doakes lost his life and his shining reputation for her. Brian Moser died for her. Arthur Mitchell joined my hit list when I thought he'd shot her. Miguel Prado added his own name to the very same rhetorical list when he threatened Deb's job as a means of hurting me. Anyone who hurts my family hurts me, and so I hurt them in turn. I know from the strength of our shared gaze that she's starting to see. She's always known I care; she's always known where to find my support and loyalty. She just didn't know before tonight how deep it goes.

Maybe there is a silver lining here after all.

I become aware of this growing intensity between my sister and I, something I've never noticed before. She looks at me with such unfathomable depth and I feel like I can't look away any more than she seems able to. Under my hands I feel a near-undetectable quiver move through her. Is she alright? Afraid? Afraid of what?

She snaps the connection with obvious effort.

"Fuck balls, Dexter," Deb mutters, grasping my wrists and looking down with a helpless sigh. "I've gotta go."

She prises my hands from her throat and holds them between us. She looks reluctant but holds them there, along with her next inhaled breath, like she's trying to prolong something.

"Where're you going?" And what are you going to do? Report to Thomas Matthews? Call the FBI?

"Home, to get plastered, if I can," she answers. She brings her eyes up to meet mine. We're still standing uncharacteristically close, toe-to-toe, hands between our chests. But what's characteristic of us now that we're co-conspirators in a massive serial murder cover-up and twenty-year-long façade? She releases the breath, drops my wrists. She pushes away and takes a few steps towards the door. "I need to blast this whole fucking event from my memory before I sleep and it gets transferred to long-term. In fact," she turns into the kitchen and opens my refrigerator, "I think you owe me at least four beers for this fuck-around."

'This fuck-around' presumably being the fuck-around of being revealed as a serial killer and the deconstruction of her ex-partner's reputation, and of ruining an otherwise perfectly nice night. I say nothing as she raids my fridge as I'm sure I can only lose any argument I spark. I owe her much more than some beer. She snaps the door shut and straightens with her armful of bottles.

"That won't get you drunk," I comment, stupidly. Like she needs encouraging.

"I have more," Deb replies. She goes to the door, stepping over scattered ugliness. Aside from the backdrop she's the picture of normality. She glances disdainfully at the crap all over the room. "I would offer to help you tidy the place, but I maintain this is your fucking mess and that makes it yours to clean up."

"No argument," I promise quickly. She's even again; back to base level. I want to keep her this way, any way I can. I won't remind her that my place looked fine before she got in here and tore it apart. Metaphorically speaking, she's totally right. This is my mess. I need to clean it up.

She opens the door and steps out. It's so different from the way she left the last two times tonight that I can't help calling her back, struck with hope. "Deb!"

She leans back in. No hesitation, no fear. It's surreal – Debra knows what I am but she doesn't cower behind the doorframe, afraid of being shot. She knows what I am but she still responds to my call. She knows and she stood in here with me tonight, no witnesses, no weapon drawn between us… She let me wrap my hands around her neck. It hits me that she didn't ask if I was going to hurt her. She knows and she knows. She knows I'm a killer but she also knows what she's always known.

She's safe with me.

"What?" she asks irritably when I take too long.

"Goodnight, Deb," I say. Hoping to maintain this normalcy for just a bit longer before she gets in her car, goes home and drinks in silence, allowing resentment and bitterness to rise in her again. Hoping to hear 'Night, Dex' in reply. Just a simple marker that things might be okay one day. People talk about ending arguments on a positive note. I hope that's what I'm doing.

She rolls her eyes. I assume that's my answer. But no, she's got more for me.

"You're a fucking piece of work, you know."

Too much to hope for. "Yeah. I know."

"We're not done talking about this."

"I figured."

"I'm really fucking mad at you. Don't think I've forgiven you or anything because I'm still really not okay with any of this. I still think you're a cock-sucking, ass-fucking dickbag for what you did to Sergeant Doakes."

"I understand."

"It's low as fuck."

"I know."

"I still can't believe it. I can't fucking believe you, Dexter. You're..." She shakes her head. She laughs once, amused by our ridiculous circumstances.

I nod, all out of self-deprecating things to say to appease her. It's not as though I expected it all to work itself out after one conversation. Honestly, I didn't think we'd ever make it to this point – civil discussion – after she stumbled across my secret. This is wholly unchartered territory. But it's certainly better than expected.

We're talking, and neither of us is crying, screaming, bleeding or dead.

Harry would hate me but he'd also be pleasantly surprised by his daughter's resilience, I think.

My sister leaves.

"Night, Dex."