This was it, then.

He'd said it. He said it, and they believed him.

Angel would take care of Harrison, and Dexter would… Well, his fate had always been sealed. Ending up in old sparky was pretty much a foregone conclusion in his particular business. Somehow, he thought he'd take it worse. That he might bite and scratch and try to drag a few people down with him. Maybe he'd even earn himself an on-site impromptu execution by an unwilling fire-squad.

But that wouldn't be what Harrison needed.

He'd seen it in him. When Dexter killed Kurt, he had looked into Harrison's eyes and he saw nothing there. No joy, no carnal glee, no horrific happiness. Just the usual shock of watching someone die. Dexter had thought it was a fluke at first - after all, killing someone versus simply watching them die could elicit very different responses. And still, once Dexter got to the typical butchering, the expression on Harrison's face turned for the worse. He was startled out of his shock by the blood.

And then, he left.

That reaction… It hadn't been that of a man guided by his dark passenger.

It had simply been the reaction of someone traumatised.

When Dexter killed someone his first time, it had been a fumbling and amateurish attempt, but it had been absolutely gorgeous. The joy he'd felt in that moment had been unlike anything before. It was like the knife had simply been an extension of himself - a limb that he'd only now gained. Killing was as typical in his nature as hunting was to a wolf.

But Harrison wasn't like that. Harrison took no joy in killing. He was curious and he was uncertain, but if Dexter guided him, he knew he'd turn out just like his dad.

This was the best he could do for him.

As much as it hurt him, this whole affair with Angela and Harrison simply told him that he could never have the family that he so direly wanted. It was impossible. He was a monster, and they were human. An alligator didn't befriend ducks. Lions didn't care for mice. Orcas didn't swim with seals.

Before him, Angel sat, his eyes desolate and haunted. Something in there had broken. It was so obvious, and still, it seemed as though Angel was keeping himself together. His hands trembled, but his eyes were clear. Piercing through Dexter's own. Somehow, sitting in front of someone so resolute, Dexter almost felt pathetic.

But he was calm. He knew he was going to die, so he was calm.

"...Did you kill Marcus White?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill Olman Estevez?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill Oscar Sota?"

"Yes." And on and on it went. Angel listed one of the confirmed victims of the Bay Harbour Butcher, and Dexter confessed to killing them. It was that simple. The only difficulty was in proving that he did it personally. Any and all information on any one victim could have been easily accessed by him, considering that he worked on the case personally.

Within only a minute or so, the eighteen victims of the Bay Harbour Butcher had been gone through. But they both knew that they weren't the only ones.

Angel's steely eyes locked with Dexter's. "Did you kill Sergeant James Dokes?"

"No, I didn't," Dexter answered confidently. Going by the way Angel blinked at him, it was all-too-clear that he hadn't expected the response. "Lila did."

"Lila?" His eyes widened. "Lila West?"

"Yes. I assure you that I didn't order her to do it. In fact, Doakes was… I had originally locked him up in order to frame him, but he…" His voice grew heavy. "He convinced me to turn myself in." He turned to Angel, and with all the effort he could muster, he attempted to show his earnesty. "I hadn't meant for him to die."

Angel almost scoffed, but in the end, he stopped himself. "What happened with Lila?"

Dexter smiled. "I cornered her in Paris and killed her in a hotel room."

For some reason, that didn't seem to make Angel any happy. As a matter of fact, his reaction was more so to silently bury his face in his hands. Dexter was so stunned he wasn't sure what to say. Was he supposed to comfort him? Tell him that she died quickly? Or maybe he should say that if he hadn't killed her, she would have kept killing?

But then he realised that he didn't need to do anything. The rules didn't matter anymore. Right now, he didn't need to do any pretending. He could just do what he wanted, instead of what he had to. No more running, no more acting.

Dexter stared at Angel's quiet form.

"It's alright," he said. "She died painlessly."

Angel removed his face from his hands. He took a slow breath. "Who else?"

"...How do you mean?"

Angel shook his head. "Who else that I knew have you killed?"

Dexter frowned. What an intrusive question. "Not counting the criminals we've dealt with?"

A nod.

Quite the extensive list. Without his blood slides, Dexter had almost begun to forget his victims. Almost. Never would he fully forget all of those pleasant pretty playdates. But, as for the ones that Angel knew as well… A face popped up almost immediately and Dexter felt something bitter take hold of his throat. Not many people could make him feel like that, but he was one of them.

"Miguel Prado."

Angel's frown deepened. He'd probably frowned more that day than he had in ten years. "...You're serious?" A worryingly concerned look found itself in Angel's eyes. "W-, wasn't he your friend? Didn't the Skinner kill him? I thought you-,"

Unwittingly, Dexter scowled. "It's a complicated story."

"Make it uncomplicated, then."

Dexter sighed. "I had my sights on a guy, but Miguel's brother got there first. We met inside the house, and I killed him in the scuffle. I didn't even know who he was until I arrived later at the crime scene. To make up for it, I found the guy I originally intended on killing, but after I killed him, Miguel walked in on me. Apparently, he also had these… urges. We joined forces for a while until I found out he'd been playing me, at which point I was unable to stop him from killing Ellen Wolf. Since I knew he'd continue, I had no choice." A small smile. "Seeing him realise I killed his brother was… Interesting."

Under his intense gaze, Angel squirmed. Quietly, in a hushed whisper, Angel asked, "You never had any thoughts about killing me?"

And for the first time that day, Dexter was stunned to the point of silence. "I-, you…" He shook his head. He didn't even need to try to form his face into a mask of indignation - it came naturally. "No! Why would I ever-, you haven't killed anyone, have you?"

"Of course not - I would never!"

Dexter leaned back. "See? I would never kill anyone innocent. Especially not a friend." Why would he even ask that? By this point, Angel should know his code almost as well as he did. Then, rather… It wasn't because he had killed anyone or otherwise fit the code, but more so…

He glanced up at his friend. The way he shifted uncomfortably. The conflict that was evident in his eyes and face.

…Was Angel uncertain about their relationship? No, rather, it seemed like he was more so having trouble connecting who Dexter was to who Angel knew. An understandable situation, all things considered, but it really was unnecessary.

Maybe if it hadn't been Angel, Dexter wouldn't have cared.

But he did.

With all the tenderness he could muster, he caught Angel's gaze. The man flinched. "We're friends. We've always been friends. I may have lied about a lot, but I didn't lie about that."

With venom in his words, Angel snarled, "How can I trust you? How can I possibly trust you after all of this?"

"You can't." Strangely enough, saying those two little words made Dexter feel an emotion he rarely felt - grief.

For once, Angel seemed to take his word for it.

Following that, they continued with the situation. In order to be able to properly persecute Dexter for his crimes, Angel demanded that he write a list of his victims. Not only that, he should explicitly write how, when and where they died, alongside a small report on what led to their death. All the way from Nurse Mary to Kurt Caldwell, their manner of death and current position of remains were logged.

All and all, the list totalled to 189.

Many couldn't be entirely proven due to the manner of their disappearance, but Angel clearly believed him. After Dexter had written it out, from first to last, Angel simply spent a few minutes going through them all. Sometimes, he'd turn his face and ask Dexter to clarify one or another, or his eyes would simply light up in recognition.

At one point, pretty early in the list, his face twisted in a strange mixture of awe and disgust. "You killed your own fucking brother…?"

Mercifully, Dexter decided not to say anything. The entry already had a record of the method, his thoughts on why it had to be done that way, as well as an explanation of his motivations (beyond the typical being-a-murderer thing). There was nothing he could say that would add anything.

Faced with such silence, Angel continued. Entry by entry, name by name, until the victims all melded together into a long line of linguistic gravestones. Killers he'd thought had gone underground. Drug dealers who apparently had a side-gig. And then, again, his eyes paused. Carefully, he heaved a deep sigh, as though unsure how to approach it. Like the name was barbed. Dexter knew exactly which name it was.

Camilla. A mercy-kill he'd taken no pleasure in executing. She was one among the few names he wished didn't have to be on the list.

Graciously enough, Angel didn't ask about it.

At another part, he went over two certain names, and mumbled something about how, "I fucking knew it…"

Once he got to the end of the list, he turned the paper over, looked at the blank page, turned it over again, and read through the names again. "...She isn't here. You said-,"

"I tried to. I wanted to. But Deb arrived, and then… LaGuerta told her to shoot me.I told her to shoot me." The scene flashed in his mind, as vividly as the day it had happened. "She shot LaGuerta."

Again, Angel buried his face in his hands, muttering about one son of a bitch or another. Knowing him, today had probably been a bit too much. Maybe he should just shut up completely. That way he wouldn't upset Angel anymore.

"...The paperwork is going to be a nightmare," Angel mumbled with about the same passion as a dead man might groan about taxes.

Dexter smiled wryly at his friend. "I'll help in any way I can."

He didn't respond, but something told Dexter that he didn't appreciate the sentiment.

An hour or so later, Vince and Angela returned. Vince didn't seem all that disturbed, something Dexter had fully expected, but Angela looked as though she'd seen, well… Over twenty still-life corpses.

Seeing such a look on her face felt more wrong than he would have thought.


"Yeah, it was there, alright. The blood too," Vince said, bringing up a small vial with a reddened swab in it.

Angel felt nothing looking at it. As a matter of fact, he wasn't really feeling anything at all. His chest felt hollow. Maybe at one point, there had been something in there - anger, relief, grief - but now he just wasn't feeling anything.

The list, still pinched between his fingers, didn't make him feel anything either.

Maybe he should be happy that all of those monsters were dead. Little Chino. Father Donovan. Arthur Mitchell. If he totalled all the murders committed by those on the list, it would likely amount to over a thousand innocent. Even then, a fourth of those were all on the Trinity Killer. Angel couldn't bring himself to feel any relief about that.

13'th of December, 2009. Bludgeoned to death with a hammer at 19:36. The body was then dismembered and disposed of in Biscayne Bay.

Going by the time frame, Arthur Mitchell had been killed after Rita's murder.

If Angel didn't know Dexter, if he only knew him as the Bay Harbour Butcher, he might have come to the conclusion that Dexter arrived shortly after her murder, at which point he left to go capture and kill Mitchell. But that clearly wasn't what happened.

Despite everything, despite what Angel saw in him now, he knew that Dexter had cared for Rita. After her death, Dexter had been more shaken up than Angel had ever seen him. He hadn't cried or anything, but for someone who clearly lacked an aspect of human feelings, he'd been awfully emotional.

This was even more evident by the next entry on the list. 'Bludgeoned to death with an anchor.' Most importantly, as per his written reasoning, he had done it out of anger.

He had emotions. He cared for some people.

And one of those people was Angel.

He felt sick.

As Vince began rambling about what they'd seen, trying to fill the awkward emptiness in the room with scientific rabble, Angel looked down at the list one more time. Lance Robinson, strangulation. Cole Harmon, stabbed. Stan Liddy, sta-,

He paused for a second. Stan Liddy? Wasn't that the guy Quinn had follow Dexter or something?

A sigh rose out of his chest and he placed down the list. "I'm going to go get some air."

Vince stopped his rambling. "You-, you are?" Angel didn't bother with a reply. "Er, uh…" Struck with a strange sense of apathy, Angel simply stood up, moved around the desk and shouldered past Vince and Angela before they could say anything else. "Hey, wait a minute!" Going by the sound of graciously audible footsteps, Vince had followed him outside the office. Angel couldn't bring himself to care.

Like a spectre, he moved through the station until he suddenly found himself blocked by a young boy a couple of inches below him. With how exhausted and drained he felt, Angel really wanted to simply move past Harrison.

"How'd it go?" the boy asked, his voice tinged with hope. "You seem like a good cop, so you must have realised how bogus this-,"

"He confessed." The words dropped from his lips before he had time to consider them. "He confessed to everything."

Harrison's young face froze. "He-, he what?..."

Angel said nothing more. His heart was already overburdened with too many horrors, so with a tired, exhausted hurry, he moved past Harrison and exited the station. Cold air hit his face and turned his breath to white mist. Snowflakes of purest white fell silently from the sky, dropping down on his bare head. Just over the tops of the trees, the lingering, fading rays of the sun grazed easily. It felt like he'd spent only a few minutes in there. He felt as though he had aged a hundred years.

Filled with a tiredness of the soul, Angel collapsed onto the steps outside the station. The stone steps were cold and snowy but he didn't care. He felt numb.

White static screamed inside his head but nothing came out of his mouth.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to punch something. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to scream. But he couldn't do any of that. All he could do was sit there, alone and desolate.

Angel's head felt awfully bare without his signature hat. In his rush to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the station, he'd forgotten it. But going back to get it was out of the question. This was why he didn't like the god-awful cold. Before he knew it, his ears were sure to go all red and-,

A hat was placed atop his head and Angel glanced up to find Vince looking down at him.

Silently, with the softest thud, he took a seat beside him. Unsure what to say, Angel remained quiet.

For a few minutes, neither said anything. With all the thoughts and questions and answers buzzing around in Angel's head like flies drawn to a carcass, the silence was better. The rustling of treetops and hum of the distant highway was all the sound he needed, and Vince seemed to know it. Vince had always somehow been known for his lack of tact in grave situations ("I've always wanted to see her naked… but not like this."), but Angel knew very well that wasn't all that was to him. Beneath that goofy persona, there was a man who truly cared for his friends.

Beneath Dexter's goofy persona, there was apparently a serial killer.

Angel drew in a deep breath only to instantly choke on the freezing air. Damn this winter breeze. With no other expression to properly give, he grit his teeth.

He glanced at Vince. "Did you read the list?"

"The one on the table?"

Angel nodded. "Yeah."

A shake of the head. "You kinda stormed out, so I had to prioritise. I think Angela might be going over it with him right now. Due to the nature of his crimes, he might need to go over, like, lesser charges as well."

A brief pause. "He killed his first victim when he was twenty."

"...Seriously?"

"Yeah. A nurse. She killed patients as an act of mercy." The words fell from his tongue monotonically, as though he was just speaking straight from a cue card. It didn't even feel like he was talking about a human at all. Just a name on a list with accompanying time of death and method of dismemberment. "What were you doing when you were twenty?"

Vince watched a car slide across the road in front of them. "Studying at uni. I kinda had my hands full, so having a side-gig of killing people would've been out of the question."

Angel wasn't sure whether to agree with him or slap him for making light of the situation. In the end, he went with the former, if only because he knew Vince wasn't trying to be insensitive. Right now, a little humour might be exactly what he needed. If only to feel something different, Angel allowed himself to chuckle. It was dry and stale, but it helped unclog his throat. "Can't have been easy for him to keep top scores while also scouting out murderers. Makes you wonder how he does it."

"Maybe he's like a bloodhound? But for killers instead of whatever it is bloodhounds sniff for?"

"Maybe if he'd become a detective instead of a killer, we wouldn't be here to begin with." His smile grew sad. "His old man would never approve of this."

For a few more minutes, they simply sat there in silence. And then, with a decisive slap to the knees, Angel stood back up. "Alright, we've got a mountain load of paperwork to get through. Not to mention contacting the FBI. This is going to be a legal hellscape to get through, but as character witnesses, they'll probably keep us updated."

"We can always hope," Vince replied, standing up as well.

Their eyes met. Vince smiled. Although Angel hardly felt in the mood to, he smiled, too.

This would be for the better.