"Paul, we need to talk."
"What, now? While I'm in my boxers?" Dexter nodded, face straight and cool. Paul sneered. "Heh, sure, Mr Knight-in-shining-armour. Was she too much of a coward to come here herself? Or did you come here on your own or something?" Somehow, Dexter could already tell that this conversation wouldn't go down smoothly. Paul was much too emotional and Dexter was much too hard.
Since Paul made no move to let Dexter inside the crummy little apartment, he had no choice but to force his way in, which was rather easy since his opponent wasn't exactly well dressed.
"-You have to drop your charges against Rita," Dexter said once he was fully inside that crusty, messy apartment. Compared to his own, it was like summer and autumn. Messy, messy. Just the way Dexter hated it. If there was anything he hated, it was a mess. Messy blood, messy apartment, messy legal trouble. "If you don't-,"
"You'll… what?" Paul asked, closing the door behind them. His face was a relaxed, confident 'what'cha gonna do?' perfectly content with holding all cards. "Hey, she did this to me, remember?"
Oh, he remembered it alright. How he'd come home one day, only to find out that Paul had been there. Done things. Had things done to him. By all means, Rita did the right thing. Hitting him over the head like that. A little messy, maybe, he'd personally have gone for a sharper weapon, but it did the job. The bandage thrown about Paul's head made that clear enough. "And why did she do that, again?"
"Ask her, not me! I was just there to see my kids, it was my honest-to-God right to!" Paul said indignantly, shoulders and brows thrown up for good measure. The perfect picture of honesty.
Dexter threw him a glance before continuing through the apartment and taking a seat, placing his black tote-bag at his feet. "I asked her. She said you… tried to do something to her," Dexter said, eyes narrowing. "As charming as you are, I'm afraid I can't let someone like you intrude on her life anymore. On her kids' life. They need a real father, someone who will love them. Care for them. You lost that right the moment you violated their mother."
Paul's face darkened, his jaw clamped shut. "Don't you dare tell me I'm not their father." His hands clenched tight, knuckles whitening. "I love those kids more than anyone! More than you ever will!"
And maybe that was true. Dexter had no capacity for love, no sense of pity or care. However, that did not stand true for children. Not entirely, at least. He may never love Astor and Cody the same way Paul did, but in some way, he loved them more than anyone. In that way, he couldn't see them suffer. Rita was another matter. If it had just been her and Paul, if she hadn't been such a perfect cover, he wouldn't have hesitated to throw her to the wolves. Or, in this case, wolf.
No, since things were the way they were, he had to do something. The only way he could. "If you truly love them, you wouldn't hurt their mother," he said, leaning back. "Right now, you're just a rabid animal." -And what do we do with rabid animals?
Paul ground his teeth together, black fire raging in his dark eyes. "You-, I'd never hurt them! It was once, it'll never happen again!"
"Are you sure?" Dexter asked.
A simple yes-or-no question. The kind that usually didn't need thought to answer. Paul hesitated. His hands trembled, and when he looked at them, scowl deepening into a frown, could he honestly say they were done hurting? "I…" No, drugs or not, that wasn't the problem. There had been more to poor pent-up Paul than just booze, heroin and crack. Something that not even rehab could wring out of him. "...No, I can't promise that."
He sat down. Threw his body on the couch, all prior pride cast aside. Dexter straightened out, got a good look at Paul's face.
There was no sympathy in those eyes. Or, no. It was a sort of sympathy. Not one Paul saw often, at least, not outside bars. Sympathy from one hurter to another. One that couldn't promise to another. The sigh of a man having to put down a rabid racoon he used to feed bread now and again. Paul stared into those eyes, and he saw, for once, what he thought he saw the very first time he saw the man. Emotions peeled away. Anger, hurt, determination… It was all shed, revealing Dexter for what he truly was inside. Hollow.
There was a prick. Paul hadn't noticed how Dexter moved, grabbing something from inside his pocket. Thrusting the needle into Paul's neck.
It felt good. Like doing heroin all over again.
He fell asleep.
And just like that, Dexter broke two rules of the Code. Don't get emotionally involved, and don't hurt someone innocent, though he'd justified the latter one since Paul admitted he would hurt someone in the future. Nipping a problem in the bud. That's what this was. The problem just happened to be a person, and the bud was their throat. He briefly considered taking a drop from Paul, but… no. He couldn't. Paul Benett was not someone Dexter would be proud to have killed. He was… a mercy kill, if anything.
A rabid animal to be put down. That was how Dexter justified it.
Tools spread out on the small kitchen counter, Dexter waited for Paul to wake up. He hadn't brought most of his tools. Nothing fancy, just his line of knives and pliers, things that would make any dentist blush. Paul wouldn't take long. Dexter wouldn't let him take long. After all, letting an animal suffer needlessly was… immoral, as Harry had put it. Killers didn't count as animals, so Dexter could do with them as he pleased.
When Paul awoke, naked and wrapped from head to toe in tight, constricting plastic, he didn't make a sound. Didn't whimper, didn't speak a word. Not immediately, at least. Not until Dexter came around to stand at his side, looking down at him.
Dressed in his plastic gloves and latex, Dexter thought he must look quite dashing. Paul disagreed. "Pfff, how the hell are you dressed? Did you come straight from painters anonymous?" His eyes, upside-down from arching his neck to get a good at Dexter, wrinkled in amusement. "Or are you into that latex stuff? Real charming, try convincing Rita to-," Dexter stuffed a swab of cotton into Paul's mouth to keep him from saying that last part. What a rude man.
"Shh. No need to be like that, Paul," Dexter tutted, turning his back on his soon-to-be victim. Paul gave a hoarse laugher (with his neck tied by plastic wrap it was a surprise he could speak at all) that ended as soon he actually got a look at something that wasn't his wife's boyfriend.
The room. His kitchen. Wrapped head to toe in plastic. Dangling from the roof like hospital-sheaths. It made his kitchen seem so… sterile. White. Not-his. Something else. A room whose purpose had been altered. For… what, exactly? What was happening? Paul hadn't been able to tell until now, couldn't understand why Dexter was dressed like that, or why he couldn't move. Now he knew why. He was tied down on his table, every limb he had forced into paralyzation.
He arched his neck again, sneaking a glance at his captor. A band of plastic covered his head, kept his forehead down, but it was elastic enough to give him a glance at what Dexter was up to.
He was standing by the counter, arms still at his sides, carefully eyeing a line of metallic, shimmering tools. Deciding what to pick. What to use. When he turned back to Paul, his choice had been made, and a plier dangled loosely in his grasp. It was chrome, glimmering and as flawless as a surgical instrument. Paul hoped it wasn't about to be used for what he thought. Dexter flicked the wad of wool out of Paul's mouth. Giving him a chance to speak. "H-, hey, you can stop this now, I get the message, let's just-,"
His finger was broken before he could register it happening. Metal twisted and bit into his flesh, cracking the bone by mere pressure. A twist of Dexter's wrist ensured that it became more than that, forcing the finger in the wrong direction in the wrong way and the way Dexter's eyes lit up at the sight was so wrong and-,
Dexter stuffed the cotton back into Paul's mouth before he had the chance to complain. He jerked, body thrashing uselessly against his constraints, broken finger flopping where it was. Dexter didn't seem to mind.
"I'm only doing this as a courtesy," he said, grabbing Paul's wrist hard to keep it in place long enough for him to get a solid take on another one of his fingers. "Even if I'm only doing this to get rid of you, letting you slip away so easily wouldn't sit right." Slip by? Courtesy? Paul's mind thumped and beat with blood and pain, but through that pain, the mind-numbing pain that followed whatever the hell Dexter was doing to his hand, one thought cut through it all:
Who the hell was Dexter anyways?
The tools. The room. The outfit. The courtesy. His lack of emotion on this very moment... There was only one assumption Paul could make, and it put everything he cared for - everyone he loved in jeopardy. "Mpphh, mhhmph!" he mumbled through the cotton wad in his mouth, trying to keep his mouth and tongue from betraying how he truly felt. If he didn't keep his mind cool, he might just scream.
Dexter turned to him. His eyes were hazy, distant and true. No phoney smiles or fake jokes. It confirmed Paul's suspicions and worsened his fears. This man… was not human. Dexter stared deep into Paul's eyes, picking up on the determined look in them. "Will you scream if I remove the cotton?" Paul shook his head fervently. He wouldn't. Not that his crack-whore neighbours would hear him. "Well, alright. If you make one sound I don't like, I'll cut your tongue right out of your mouth before you realize what happened."
And with that, the dry thing that soaked up Paul's spit and drool was removed. He breathed for a few seconds. "I-, y-, you… don't-,, don't hurt them," he pleaded. Dexter's eyes turned owlish. "M-, my family-, don't-,"
The cotton swab was quickly stuffed back in his throat. "I heard you. Don't worry." The look Dexter gave him was unsavoury at best. "I'm not like you. I would never hurt those kids."
Somehow, Paul believed him. And it was the last thing he believed.
After all, once Dexter got going, he truly got going. Paul didn't even have time to write Dexter's name in blood before he no longer had any fingers to write with. Screaming didn't help, it just made his throat worse off than it already was. He wished, for a moment, that he'd had friends. People who would miss him if he disappeared. Knowing Rita, the way she'd been lately, all she'd do was heave a sigh of relief, knowing he was gone. That is, assuming that Dexter left a body for the police to find. His hands were gone now. Just… poof gone. Severed by the wrist. He'd gotten between the bones. No bone-saw needed. Maybe Paul would've been impressed if it wasn't his own hands that were cut off.
In the maelstrom that was his own death, he almost missed hearing the knocking. A faint knock on the door. Mere minutes before he succumbed. Dexter didn't miss it either. His head swivelled up, removed from his task. A moment passed in silence. Paul didn't have the strength to muster a scream.
Another knock. Dexter glanced down at Paul, understood that he would make no attempt, and got back to work. Paul's phone rang, but since Dexter didn't answer it, it soon flickered out, replaced by more knocking and shouting. The knocking continued for a few more minutes, growing stronger each time, until the person finally stormed off. Probably Ricky. He never did pay him back for those two rows of blow.
No matter, soon enough, that wouldn't matter at all.
And it didn't.
That very night, Dexter missed a date. It was unusual for him, leaving Rita stranded at South Beach all alone, waiting for company that wouldn't arrive. He'd never stood her up before, had he? Not that she could remember, at least, and it made it all the more memorable. She called him, left him messages, and he didn't respond to any of them. By 23, she chose to simply go home. The babysitter couldn't hang around all night and neither could she.
Before doing so, however, she swung by his apartment. Knocked a few times on his door. No response. Where in the world could he have been? Hopefully, he wasn't trying to confront Paul on his own.
Paul was a dangerous guy, Rita knew that very well, and although she really wished he'd come to his senses, that was for her to make sure of. Not Dexter. She loved Dexter, she saw him as someone she could… could what? Spend her life with?... Maybe so. He was important to her, she trusted him, but she didn't want him to deal with all the problems her husband left behind. Her problems weren't his, and she didn't want him to think they were.
For a moment, she considered swinging by Paul's apartment, just to see if he was there. But… no. She couldn't face Paul, not out in the open. Not somewhere they wouldn't be seen.
So, she went home and went to bed. When she woke up at seven, she found her phone overloaded with messages from Dexter. Well, overloaded might be a tad bit hyperbolic, but considering that this was Dexter, two whole voice messages was more than she could have asked for. The first one, from five in the morning, was filled with regret and tattered excused. Said he'd been fishing. She doubted it. In the next message he assured her that he'd make up for it somehow, ending it with a strange reassurance. "I don't think Paul will be a problem anymore," he'd said. Damn it, Dexter.
Later that day, someone she recognized (but wished she didn't) showed up at her doorstep, demanding to see Paul. It was Ricky. She thought that was his name, anyway. Even though she tried to convince him that Paul didn't live there anymore, he kept grumbling about how he hadn't been at his apartment.
Finally, he asked if she had a key to it, which she obviously didn't. He wouldn't tell her why he had to get into his department, but knowing Paul and his acquaintances, it was surely drug-related.
Another minute of grumbling and Ricky lumbered off, surely to extort money from someone that wasn't her or her EX.
At least, that was how she thought it would go down. Imagine her surprise when Paul was reported missing a mere day later.