Chapter Five:
The Break Point
There's something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
Consuming, confusing
Dexter Morgan's head swayed underneath the crest of water, his body flipping on its head, his world taking a twist as he span, direction lost, senses missing, the world above a smear of silhouettes and short shaped oblivion.
He held his breath deep into his lungs.
The instinct not to breathe underwater was a strong one. So much so that, in most cases of drowning, it overcame the agony of running out of air. Most drowning victims only ever inhale in the last possible second, when there genuinely was no other choice but to do so. By that point, there would be too much carbon dioxide in the blood, so little oxygen to counter balance, that the chemical sensors in the brain activates an involuntary breath whether the person was still underwater or not.
It was known as the break point.
Eighty-seven seconds was the average to cross that line.
After that… Things got messy. The first involuntary breath occurs when most people are still conscious. An unfortunate truth. The only thing more unpleasant than running out of air was breathing in water. After that, the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things take place.
In about ten percent of people, water touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood and reacts accordingly.
This is called laryngospasm.
It's powerful enough to overcome the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person and they drown without, or with very little, water in their lungs.
In the other ninety percent of people, water floods into the lungs and ends up waning transfer of oxygen to the blood.
The clock is running down now.
Half-conscious and enfeebled by the oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight their way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking ship.
Dexter's foot hits tile, and he pushed forward, back to the surface of the pool, striking out to swim across in a lap.
Drowning.
Dexter has often thought himself as a man who was drowning eternally. A man trying to survive in a world not meant for him, where he should have gills and not lungs. The only break he has, the only gasp of oxygen he can take, is when he kills. Then his head goes back below the salty sea foam, and he has to wait out those eighty-seven seconds of hell all over again before he could risk another gulp of sweet air. He was drowning, all the time, in his ordinary nine-to-five, in his meticulously assembled life of normalcy, with Rita and Debs and Metro Homicide.
And then Poppy Moser stumbled into his underwater world, and suddenly he could breathe again.
Dexter doesn't understand it. She isn't much. A slight, white, entangled thing with scuffed boots and scars. A lot of scars. Three he had seen. One, a bolt down her forehead over her dark brow, the other, chicken scrawl across knuckle, and the last, a starburst blast on the underside of her left forearm-
History of abuse.
Nothing so special, as unfortunate at that was. One in seven children in the US has experienced childhood abuse and neglect. He suspected Britain to be much the same.
Poppy Moser has a lot of company, and yet none at all to Dexter Morgan.
When he first saw her standing behind him he had pictured her as a shadow, a flat 2d thing that had somehow, unbelievably, broken out the confines of the walls and floors it had been trapped in to walk amongst the colourful. He had thought it was a by-product of her job, knowledge on how to blend in with the monsters, how they worked, where they walked, that helped her track them down… Camouflage she had forgotten to wash off. And then she was there this morning, in his office, sitting amongst his things, a shadowy suggestion grinning with a bag of lollipops in her hand, and there it was again, that silly, pathetic sensation of-
Being able to breathe after drowning for so long.
Dexter does not understand it… So he had done some research after sending off for the DNA sequencing on the lollipops.
Her BAU file was… Impeccable, faultless, and far too easy to get into. How could it not be unblemished with a ninety-eight percent success rate tagged on top? All the reports inside stated she was dedicated, hardworking, respectful-
And nowhere, not once, in the endnotes of documents or a snippet from a professor's transcripts that Dexter had poured over, was anything given more than dull surface tones of detachment and distance. The most a teacher in her second year of the Academy could give at her end of year report was she was always on time. Although her test scores were typically in the ninety-ninth percentile, no one knew or could say a personal thing about her. It was like, one day, she had merely appeared out the fog, half there, half gone still.
A shadow, indeed.
A shadow with sharp teeth if her three-hundred and seventy-six successful arrests were being taken into account in a four-year span of active duty. That was ninety-four serious offenders off the streets a year. That was a little under eight a month, and those were only the significant felons she had dealt with. The rest? Speeding, drug distribution, domestic abuse?
She'd personally dropped the Quantico crime rate from 1.81 to a solid 1.
Sharp toothed and sleepless, then.
And all without once, according to her file, having to pull out a gun.
While there were some speeding tickets attached to her name and a bike, a Triumph 650 T 120 Bonneville, a motor offence from Louisiana for running a red light, and one undergraduate caution for active participation in a bar fight in her first year, she was a regular day saint.
It. Didn't. Make. Sense.
Why was he reacting the way he was if she wasn't hiding her own Dark Passenger? If she was not someone destined to meet the sharp end of his scalpel? Someone to hunt?
Dexter spun underwater and swam the length of the pool again.
His deep dive into her files was a bust, but this sensation of being able to breathe wasn't. What did it mean? What could it mean? It had to mean something.
Dexter had only ever felt… Empty before. Empty and unoccupied-
And then along came Poppy and the Ice Truck Killer.
Now she had lollipops, pieces of the Ice Truck Killer's riddle that he, himself, had somehow impossibly missed. How did she see what he couldn't see? How could she find what he couldn't find? Additionally, what was the link between the lollipops and the Ice Truck Killer?
All clues so far had been personal to Dexter, bits of Tony Tucci spread in snapshots of his childhood from his photo album, and whatever else the Ice Truck Killer was trying to tell him with his barbies on hoarfrost, his own private comm channel of serial killer's anonymous, but Dexter had no clue what lollipops, lollipops made from blood, could possibly mean to him.
What was the Ice Truck Killer trying to tell him with this?
Don't forget to brush your teeth before bed?
Dexter broke the surface, breathed in deep through his nose, and heaved himself out the pool and onto slick, cold tile, feet padding for the changing room.
His lunch break was over, his unplanned trip to the local swimming baths useless, his mind still a jumble of questions and no answers, and now he would be, due to traffic, half hour late to his afternoon shift.
Along came Poppy… And out went Dexter's routine evidently.
She and the Ice Truck Killer would get along swimmingly.
This lack of self-control I fear is never ending
Controlling
Dexter was back in his office and laptop when the bang at his window came. He startled slightly, a jump and a bump in his seat, and he swivelled to face his window, a grinning Poppy Moser behind his blinds peering through, closed fist still raised at glass.
How does she keep doing that-
She was chuckling all the way around his window, like that old nursery rhyme Dexter hasn't thought of in years, Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, eating all the gumdrops he can see. Stop, Kookaburra, stop, Kookaburra, leave some there for me, right until she strolled through the door to see his scowl without the glass between them.
She likes that, Dexter thinks. Making people startle. A diet scare, a tiny gum drop for the laughing Kookaburra. Dexter can't really fault her for it. He likes that too.
Being on the receiving end, however, not so much.
"Any results yet?"
Dexter shut his laptop down and closed the lid with a thunk.
"It's early afternoon, so no. The lab will still be on break."
Poppy huffed at his doorway, rolling her shoulders underneath the soft-worn leather jacket she donned, clearly irritated by the slower pace of a local police precinct rather than the fast boil of the FBI headquarters, kicking one long leg over the other.
For someone so short, she had a pair of legs on her. She'd be difficult to beat in a foot race. Swift, snappy, able to take corners sharper.
"Ah, shame."
Well, if she wasn't going to go away, and let him dig deeper into her personal history on his laptop-
Dexter pivoted in his chair towards her.
"But I was just about to message you. Deb said something about a meet up at Nancy's, a small bar off 8th street, seven tonight."
Poppy sagged where she stood, and it was a little like watching a balloon meet a pin, the puncture just big enough to start letting air out with a pitiful wheeze, but not enough to go pop.
"Fuck. Forgot about that."
Dexter almost smiled, knowing too well the consternation of having evening plans and the scrabble for a none existent excuse.
"You going?"
Poppy asked, but Dexter shrugged.
"I don't think my sister would let me out of it. She's determined to try and get you alone to pick your brain on the Ice Truck Killer case. I wouldn't try and fight it if I were you. She'll win in the end and she'll make you pay for drawing it out. Last time was karaoke, god knows what she'll use next."
Poppy cocked a curious brow, and Dexter shrugged again, tone even, flat, barren like a Sahara desert.
"Deborah Morgan…"
For a split second, Poppy's evergreen gaze enlarges.
"Shit… Sister? Huh, I didn't see it."
Dexter's… Not quite used to that. Perhaps because he had spent his life here, in Miami, where everyone knew the Morgan's in some way, their own sandbox of familiarity, their decorated police father, the dynamic brother and sister duo, one in a lab and one out on the field. An everyday American dream team. If only they knew the truth.
He, once more, shrugged, settling on a quick and closed answer.
"Adopted."
"You or her?"
"Me."
This was, typically, where people became sympathetic. Commiserating almost, as if Dexter wasn't lucky, that he deserved pity for having a father as he did, one that understood him, understood his… Needs, and a cover of a name to use as a safety blanket. They usually said sorry at this point, as if this was something to regret, a circumstance made better by one lone word. Dexter wouldn't really know if it was or wasn't without regret, but he didn't think it was.
That moment, however, never comes. For some reason, a reason Dexter can't see, this brought a smile to Poppy's face and a lackadaisical one-armed shoulder knock-up at his questioning stare.
"Adopted kids. We always manage to find each other."
Poppy tiptoed fully into the room completely, feet carrying her to his side desk, fingers skimming over his empty test tubes in neat racks. She drummed her fingers along their red caps in a bout of seven.
Morse code fashioned despondency.
He thinks she's the type of person who always needed to be in movement, doing something, anything.
Explains how and why she'd caught so many criminals.
"Put two in the same building and you can bet your bottom dollar they somehow find each other to wax poetically about their genetical absent woes."
Dexter leant back into his seat.
"You too?"
If Poppy Moser was adopted, it might explain why he had found nothing on the databases before eight years ago, around the time she would have been nineteen. Moser could be the name she was taken in by, or a return to a life of before after breaking out on her own. Either way, the odds were at some point she might have had a different name. A name linked to Moser. Was there a way to hack into the British archives? Dexter would have to look into that.
Poppy looked up from the tubes to his wall, to his prints and posters, the blood splatter across his wall ensnared in glossy photo paper.
Dexter thinks he sees her wince at them, a little skip at the corner of her eye twitching.
Hematophobia.
A discomfort and fear at the sight of blood. A pretty common fear.
She turned from the photo's swiftly, solidifying Dexter's guess in his mind, facing her back against the images resolutely, as if it was that simple to ignore blood.
Dexter almost envies her.
Almost.
She must have seen her fair share of it in her line of work, just as he had. She just didn't hear the call of it like he did.
Relentlessly.
"Aye, biological parents died in a car crash when I was two."
Dexter froze where he sat, a tree without the roots to ground him, inexplicable sudden sensation of not daring to move, or breathe, or blink. A rabbit caught in the headlights, unable to see the death swerving towards it with none of the fear but all of the wonder of huh, this might sting.
Dexter shook that uncomfortable feeling right off.
"History likes to repeat itself, or so I've heard."
Poppy peered out the window, through the blind slats, out into the bull pit of the precinct, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Pulled from the wreckage by a cop too?"
Dexter smiles a trivial entity, thinking of Harry, of his Code, of the cops orderly life that saved his own-
Of the lie Harry had told him as a boy when he said his biological parents were dead, only his father still lived, in the same state, dying and leaving a will and a house to Dexter not a month ago.
He's coming to find out that Harry Morgan was not the man Dexter had painted in his head, and that…
That didn't hurt, deliciously hollow Dexter doesn't feel hurt, or so he tells himself, but it does itch.
"Yep."
The P pops in his mouth, and it tastes somehow bitter before he continued.
"Only said cop adopted me."
He doesn't know why he tells Poppy this, this small bit of personal information, perhaps the most personal Dexter has not withstanding his Dark Passenger, but it was out before he could reign it in, and he doesn't know why Poppy momentarily frowned before it was gone, there in a blink and lost in the next.
"I was handed off to the cop's sister and brother-in-law. A British couple related on his wife's side, hence the marvellous accent I know have."
She laughed, deep, dusky, decedent, and it was-
It was a… Pleasant sound. It reminded Dexter of moonlight at midnight, of things best left to the dark.
"I was actually born here. Right in Miami, or so my original birth certificate states."
Dexter-
Dexter feels as if he's suddenly swimming again, trundling underneath the water, only this time it wasn't himself that had put his head under the wave, wasn't a pool he could climb out of, but an ocean in a storm, bashing him against the rocks.
It couldn't-
But then Poppy glances over with her prickly smile, locked gazes, raised the metaphysical gun she had hidden in her hand, and shot Dexter right between the eyes.
"Small world, right? Harry Morgan… The cop that pulled me out? That was his name. How many Morgan's are in Miami anyway? You, Deborah, couple of hundred more? I passed three restaurants with the name Morgan on my way in the other day, and we all know how common the name Harry is. A common name for a common car tragedy, I suppose. Still… Might have to try and track him down at some point, you know? Say thanks for not letting me sit and stew in my own blood while the engine exploded twenty-odd years ago."
Dexter can tell it was a joke, a poor joke but a joke all the same, he knows the words she says and how they are said, the order they come in and the context they have, and yet-
Yet none of it really touches him immediately, as if he was abruptly above all that, out his body and in the sky, staring down at Poppy Moser and Dexter Morgan in his lab like two figures in a doll house.
There was a grace period, an eighty-seven second cerebral countdown detonation, where, idly, frivolously, Dexter had never before noticed how time was so much like water.
It passes slowly, in a trickle. It can even freeze, a lake iced over-
Or it could rush right at you, a rapid of a river. The clock alleged time was a measured constant, a tick and a tock that was countable, an echo to a tidy world.
The clock lies.
It bursts at him then, inside, outside, everywhere, and abruptly, irrevocably, the words register entirely.
The last twenty-four hours pass in his mind like his crime scene camera shots clicking in his mind. Every interaction, every glance, every wayward meeting with Poppy Moser. Not Morgan, not Driscoll like his father, but Moser.
In this sluggishly filling time bubble, the babble from outside this small office was louder, the coolness colder, the colours blinding.
Dexter sees red. Feels it, sticking to him, soaking in him, a puddle he can't drag himself out of, a puddle threatening to drown him. There's a rumble too, an unexpected, terrible ground shaking roar in his ear like a chainsaw echoing a name, that name, Moser, Moser, MOSER. All the while his insides felt as if there was nothing there, nothing to feed on, nothing to have need of anything at all but that name.
M.O.S.E.R
How many Morgan's were living in Miami? A couple of hundred at least. Morgan was a common sir name, unremarkable, perfect for Dexter and his dark desires.
But how many of those were called Harry too? How many of those went around pulling children out from car wreckages and adopting them into the family?
Dexter knows of only one, suspected there could be only one, and he realized Poppy didn't know what she had done, what she had awoken, as she blinks at him, she doesn't know he and Deb were from here too, born and raised in Miami and not transplants from another state as sometimes happened in precincts when detective numbers grew low.
The sister and the brother-in-law-
"Lily and James Potter."
His voice is rough, stony, cavernous. A split in the earth opened up like a maw spewing up lava and molten rock and things best left buried in the broken earth.
He remembers the photos in their little wooden frames, pictures he had seen on Dorothy Morgan née Evans boudoir, pictures of three sisters, blonde, brunette and ginger as if their parents were trying to bingo a genetic trifecta. The sole vacation they had together as children.
Dorothy was the product of an affair by the sister's father when he had been on a business trip to America, Harry had once explained to him and Deb when the latter got curious why they saw Grandpa and Grandma from dad's side for Christmas but never mothers.
And like most unpleasant reminders of a clandestine affair, Dorothy Evans had been swept under the rug, given a name and nothing else, a name she would later happily trade for Harry's.
They didn't get along, the other woman, Lily's mother, and the blond child, only Lily had kept in touch-
Another photo, another shot.
The Red-haired woman in white standing next to a black-haired man in rounded spectacles, Dorothy and Harry smiling in a brides maid dress and tuxedo-
Poppy swung a squint his way, pins and needles and something spiny.
"How did you-"
But Dexter was out of his seat, wobbling, quivering, shaking like a newborn, maybe as feeble as he was when Harry Morgan had pulled him from the wrecked car so long ago, along with another-
Dexter rushed for the door as the walls, his blood splatters, seem to close in on him from all sides.
"I need to go."
Poppy went to follow, but Dexter was already halfway across the precinct floor by the time her head peeps over the threshold.
"What about the results?!"
The elevator doors close, and Dexter fell back against the metal.
Is this what he's victims feel like when they're strapped down to his table? About to be chopped up and bagged, thrown in the ocean and forgotten?
Maybe.
Maybe.
He's in little pieces.
Discomfort, endlessly has pulled itself upon me
Distracting, reacting
Dexter doesn't rightly know how he got outside the door he was standing before, where exactly he had taken the turn after stumbling from the police precinct. He doesn't remember driving, and he doesn't remember parking, and he doesn't remember the walk up to the hospital entrance, through the narrow halls, but he remembers stopping here, before this door, with his fist raised to knock.
After his biological father had died, after Dexter had discovered he had a biological father who had lived long enough to die only a while ago, leaving him that will and that house and the rabbit hole of discovering Harry had lied to him, there was one person who had been there to help sort the mess in his head, place the pieces where they needed to go, to pick him up after his half-brained scheme to break into the morgue to see if his biological father was murdered when the toxicology report of a heart attack didn't sit right in his gut.
One person that had drove him home and back to sanity.
Some sanity.
The door to the office opened before he could knock, and Rudy Cooper blinked at him from the other side.
"Dexter, I wasn't expecting to see you here."
Dexter, so unlike his meticulously made self, broke into the room without invite, shouldering passed a bewildered Rudy, without social convention, to the office of the Prosthetist.
The room was sparse, all tools and technicality, a big, white chair in the very centre, likely used for patients getting fitted with new limbs, a shelf of shiny steel instruments above a desk-
A desk littered with shaped and shaded hands, feet, arms and legs.
They don't help. Those plastic extremities lined up in a queue, order made from cruelty and harm.
They really don't help.
Dexter ran a hand down his face, palm catching stubble, if only to give him a way out of seeing-
Those.
An excuse to turn away, and to never turn back again.
"Is everything alright? Is Deb-"
Rudy's supple voice was punctuated by the snap of a door closing, and-
Right.
Dexter shook his head.
"Debs is fine."
Rudy, in his pristine white coat and his buttoned-up shirt, the only thing messy about him were the black curls on his head-
Poppy had black curls. Did her mother-
Rudy smiled kindly to Dexter.
"Clearly you aren't. Want to tell me what had you waiting outside my door in the middle of the day during work hours?"
No.
Yes.
Not really.
Absolutely.
Maybe-
Dexter… Dexter was unexpectedly tongue-tied, unsure of what he wanted or didn't want, unsure what he was doing here or what it could possibly accomplish, what he should do when he inevitably left this office and went back to the precinct, back to Poppy-
It came without warning, a last, final acknowledgement he couldn't drive his car halfway across the city to escape.
"I think I have a sister."
Rudy, smiling, silly Rudy, of course, laughed.
"I should hope so. I'm dating her-"
Dexter violently shook his head.
"Not Debs. Another. A… Biological one."
Dexter could feel the heat of Rudy's dark gaze scan him up and down deliberately, a germane sort of perusal, before he sat down on the edge of his desk, kicking back, whistling low and long.
"That's… Rough. How do you know?"
Dexter, for the first time since… Since Harry died so many years ago, talks, and he talks truthfully.
He tells Rudy of the spry BAU agent who had docked in at Metro to help with the Ice Truck Killer case. He told him about Poppy being in his office. The talk of childhood camaraderie over adoption. The mention of a cop. The lynch pin of Harry Morgan. The recollection of Lily and James Potter. The recognition of those names in Poppy's pale face.
Dexter talks, he tells it all, and by the time he was finished he was breathless and panting and a little bit… Full.
Something heavy that settles in his blood, anger too, at Harry, at a ghost, at a dead man who couldn't answer his questions, so many questions these days, so many lies, something else that tickles in his fingertips and toes and-
So many emotions.
Dexter was full of so many emotions, most he did not know the name of, anything and everything all at once. He was used to empty, and now-
Now he feels like he was going to explode.
For a long while Rudy was quiet, until he wasn't.
"I would say it's a coincidence. There are a lot of people with the last name Morgan… But Harry Morgan? A cop? A cop from Miami who just so happened to do the same to you? I mean, what's the age difference between you and this Poppy?"
"Three years."
"And you were adopted around…"
Dexter's tongue feels fatty and useless. A lump of meat sitting in the bottom of his dry mouth.
"Five. She's twenty-seven. I'm thirty-one this year."
Rudy winces, and was polite enough to try and hide it.
"The dates add up."
Dexter nodded.
"That's what I thought."
Rudy kicked off from the table, scanning his desk, idly looking at his prosthetics in varying degrees of progress.
"Would Harry lie about something like this to you?"
Dexter didn't want to have an answer to that question, but he did.
"He lied about my father, didn't he? What's a sister compared to that?"
Rudy laxed low, reaching out to turn a forearm and hand forty-five degrees to the right.
"What's a sister, indeed. Harry sounds as if he was just full of surprises, doesn't he? Makes you wonder what else he could have taken with him to the grave."
Yes, but Dexter wouldn't call them surprises. He'd call them betrayals.
Why would Harry keep this secret? Why would he-
Dexter doesn't remember a time before his sixth birthday. Before Harry Morgan. It was all... Empty.
He had thought he had preferred it that way.
Had.
Rudy perked up in the wake of Dexter's reticence, rolled away from his semi constructed limbs, and Dexter turned too, putting his back to them like Poppy had his blood splatters, sitting on the edge of the large white chair as if his strings had been cut and all he could do was slump.
"And you just left her standing there?"
Dexter snorted.
"What was I supposed to say?"
Rudy worked himself around the chair to face Dexter head on, grinning.
"Maybe what you just told me."
Dexter shook his head at that, but did not reply. Rudy read the room.
He was good at that, Dexter had found.
Especially good.
"You're not sure you want her to know."
It was a statement, not a question, and Dexter didn't really fight against it. He can't.
Dexter is-
Dexter.
He is what he is, he does what he does, and he has long since come to accept that, and until the Ice Truck Killer had come barrelling into Miami Metro's sight, his world had been tidy and uncluttered and methodical and-
Drowning.
But it had been safe.
Harry had taught him that was the most important thing of all. To stay safe, to stay protected, to-
Harry had lied.
Debs was the closest Dexter had to a personal relationship, to family, since Harry's passing, and as bad as it sounded, as cold as it too, she was easy to fool. Her love for him blinded her to the mask he wore, the big-brother put-on he danced to.
Poppy, however, was a behaviour analyst, one of the top in the country-
"You're not sure you wanted to know."
Again, not a question. Again, Dexter does not answer. Again, Rudy goes in for one last nudge.
"You're not sure you want family."
No.
Dexter's not sure family should want him, and there was a big difference there. What he is-
Dexter was not an idiot, and neither was Harry Morgan. As safe as Dexter played it, as close to the Code as he stuck, as many criminals as he worked through under his knife and bone saw, Dexter Morgan was a blaring risk.
One day the axe may fall, he might get caught, and that would be the day that those standing closest to him would be caught in the blast radius-
Instead of saying any of this, Dexter falls back on defence and familiarity.
"Debs' is family."
Rudy grimaced, and he didn't try to hide it this time.
"Not the same, though, is it?
Wasn't it?
Not really.
Debs had always felt… Secure to Dexter. A life raft out in the ocean. Dexter knows who she is, what she likes, how to be around her to divert attention and suspicion. They've grown up together, joined the police together, and Dexter knew their years spent playing games in the backyard to carting around textbooks in backpacks had made her forgiving to his mistakes, his slips, as few as they were.
Poppy-
Poppy was less life-raft and more oncoming storm. A dark cloud on Dexter's horizon, an unsure thunder smack he didn't know wouldn't accompany acid rain. When she was around things were strange, puzzling, sharp and detailed and contrarily hazy, as if he can't help himself from cataloguing it all. The errant freckle she had by the corner of her eye, tawny coloured, and the way she rolled her R's with a particular Celtic twist, and everything was not so-
Empty.
He's not so empty.
Dexter doesn't know whether he likes that or not.
Harry sure wouldn't. Harry would tell him it was dangerous, a risk, those pesky things he shouldn't take despite the pervasive urge to do so, he would sit him down and put a hand on his shoulder and look into his empty eyes and say son, don't do this. Don't open a door that can't be closed. Stay on track. Stay safe. Stay away-
And Harry Morgan had lied to him.
Again.
Dexter watched Rudy shrug from the corner of his eye.
"Maybe she doesn't have to know yet. Maybe you can get a DNA match done, you work in a forensics lab after all, and then cross that bridge when it comes. If it comes to it."
Dexter can't help but chuckle.
"I think she would notice me coming at her with a syringe or a swab. She is a high-level BAU agent after all."
And she somehow, someway, keeps sneaking up on him, not the other way around.
Dexter.
Serial killer extraordinaire getting crept up on by a five-foot nothing slip of a girl.
It was almost funny, truly.
Rudy laughed, thick and sweet, as if he saw the funny image in Dexter's head.
"I suppose so, but that's not the only way to get blood, right? We're going out for drinks tonight at Nancy's. I heard their beer caps nick fingers all the time."
Dexter finally levelled the lab-coat man with a raise of his brows.
"Are you suggesting I steal an FBI agents' blood?"
Rudy's answering grin was as sharp as the hacksaw dangling on the rack behind his head. Glinted like it too.
"You stole your father's ashes from that morgue. What's one step further?"
However, Rudy shrugged before Dexter could answer.
"Or you could… You know, talk to Poppy like a well-adjusted adult."
Dexter gets it. It was clear Rudy was angling for this all along. Jumping to an extreme, stealing blood, to make the 'adult' response less monumental. Normal. Easier to swallow.
But that was not how Dexter Morgan's mind worked. The idea was already in his head, growing roots and bear branches and tricky thorns.
People did get nicks and nabs at bars all the time. If Dexter were to get just one drop of blood, maybe two-
Spit would work as well, but blood was more reliable, solid-
"You're right. I should go. I shouldn't have come here when you were working."
Rudy shuffled where he stood, standing tall.
"Really? Don't you want to sit and relax for a moment? Catch your breath-"
But Dexter was already heading for the door.
"I'll see you tonight."
Rudy's laughter follows him out.
"I'll tell Deb you're going to make it to happy hour. For once."
The door clicked shut, and by the time Dexter made it back to the precinct, Poppy Moser was already gone.
Dexter doesn't know if he was happy or sad about it, and was surprised that he was feeling something at all.
Against my will I stand beside my own reflection
It's haunting
When Dexter slid into the booth of the bar Debs, Angel and Rudy had cornered off as their own as night began to settle around Miami's golden crown, he was calmer. In control. He knew what he was doing, what he needs, and how to get it.
He greeted Deb first with a wave and a kiss to the cheek, Rudy second, who went in for a hug, something Dexter was slowly getting used to from the wiry man, nodded to Angel, and slipped in on leather and wood and stale peanuts.
He also gets to the barman first. Orders what the other's wanted, and two beers, bottled, capped and chilled-
Slippery to hold.
He takes napkins from the dispenser, a few in a little pile of white squares, and carts it all back to the table with cheers from Angel. He laid the napkins on the table, right in the heart of it, and he found the bottle opener laying in wait, and before anyone else could notice, uses placing the napkins to hide the transaction.
The bottle cap opener goes straight into his pocket below the table.
He had just gotten the stage set when Poppy Moser came trundling into the bar, smiling and waving at the group waiting for her, all dimple and dint and daring eye.
Poppy, after greeting everyone jovially, pleasantly, if a bit detachedly, gaining a hug from Rudy Cooper too, a good sign that it wasn't only Dexter to garner those, she sat down besides Dexter, the only room left.
Debs was already talking a mile-a-minute before her backside could meet cushion.
Perfect distraction. Cheers, sis.
"As I was saying earlier before you had to go, I have this theory that the Ice Truck Killer targets prostitutes because, maybe, his mother was one? You know… That octopus complex shit?"
Dexter takes the two bottles of beer below the edge of the table, slipping out the surprise he had stashed in his pocket beside the beer opener.
A pen knife.
It silently clicks as it extends-
"Oedipus complex."
Poppy corrected before Dexter could, throwing her green gaze out across the table, as if she had heard the click of Dexter's knife, but, seeing no glint, she half-heartedly continued.
Keen ears.
"I mean, possibly. Is he alright hearing this?"
She pointedly glanced to Rudy, as Dexter slipped the tip of the knife under the edge of one of the beer bottle caps.
Rudy grinned.
"I've already been sworn to secrecy."
And Debs shrugged, waving Poppy's concern off.
"Rudy's fine. He wouldn't tell anyone."
Dexter twisted the knife, felt the give of metal, a nick in the cap in the right place. Debs pushes Poppy further, giving Dexter cover to replace the beers on the table.
"Well, don't you know who the Ice Truck Killer is, anyway? You get all up in their heads and shit, right?"
Poppy shook her head, and Dexter pocketed his knife, reaching for the beers on the table, offering one out to Poppy, the only other, apart from him, person at the table without a drink.
"I map behaviour, and I've been here less than forty-eight hours. I don't magically know the guys family history or whether he wanted to fuck his mother, if that's what you're asking."
Poppy spotted the beer offered her way, smiled, and took it silently.
Dexter waits with his own in hand.
Debs leans over the table, whispering.
"So what's this guy's behaviour say then?"
Poppy looks for the beer opener on the table. Of course, she doesn't find it.
"He's precise. Calculated and cold to his victims. Medical professional I would say with his anatomical knowledge. Surgeon… Something dealing with heavy body trauma on the daily. That's his tastes. Psychopathy likely presented early on in age, but I doubt he still hangs around anyone who knew him from childhood. He wants his cover kept tight and clean but…"
"But?"
Debs blisters with bright eyed wonder.
Poppy gave up looking for the opener.
Nearly there.
"He definitely has some record hidden away somewhere. Criminal or medical. He would have been volatile when younger as most people with severe Antisocial Personality Disorder are. Not so good at hiding in plain sight, still practicing his craft at playing human. That said, it would be useless to go down that road. He's a smart cookie. I suspect he's killed and assumed someone's identity by now. He's what I call a ghost. No history. We're going to have to catch him in the now or not at all."
Deb's eyebrows shoot up, and Dexter, wordlessly, in full view, picks up his own capped bottle on the table, the movement catching Poppy's gaze, and uses the nail of his thumb to pop the cap clean off with a tink tink as it bounced off the table.
She seemingly goes to mimic him.
Just what he wanted-
"You don't fucking say? A doctor? Really?"
Poppy nodded as Angel whistled low, her short thumb nail fastening underneath the bottle of the beer, a moment, a break point.
"He likes seeing broken pieces of people. A real humpty-dumpty bastard, he likes it when he can't put them back together again. His job would simulate-… Ah, fuck!"
Her finger flicks over the ragged small slice in the cap, and Poppy Moser bleeds.
Crawling in my skin
These wounds they will not heal
Dexter observes as Poppy dashed the bottle back onto the table, spilling beer and bubbles along the tarnished wood, forcing Angel to jolt back into the booth seat to miss the spray, hand coming up to whip in the air, beating off the sting. Dexter made sure to 'splutter' on his sip of beer before putting it down too, reaching for the pile of clean white napkins he had placed on hand.
"Ouch, that looks pretty deep. Let me help you with that-"
But Poppy had stopped shaking her hand in the air. She had it in front of her now, open palmed and eye level, staring at her thumb.
She was still.
She was silent.
She watched the blood roll down the pale flesh, and it was quite a lot of blood, too much blood, why was she bleeding so heavily-
The wound was deeper than Dexter had expected it to be, perhaps in need of a few stitches and not a band aid. Poppy had really gotten her thumb hooked on in the cap, the cut.
Dexter would get more than a few drops that night.
Napkin in hand, Dexter's fingers made contact with her wrist, planning to press the tissue into the red-
Poppy was not so silent then.
She was not so still.
Swiftly, there was an arm rearing back with a snarl and a flash of white, rocking forward, elbow connecting to the soft muscle of his neck, his air way, and then Dexter was spluttering for real, falling out the booth and onto the tiles below with a thwack to the back of his head, to the gasp of surrounding spectators-
Poppy was on him immediately, bloody, bleeding hands around his neck, beer-stained thighs braced over his chest, and she was squeezing vehemently, suffocating, and Dexter couldn't breathe-
He catches her gaze from above in his hasty surprise from one moment being up and the other being down. Her face is defiantly calm, all apart from her mouth, a slash of white teeth ground together, pupils blown so far they nearly engulfed the green, big fat, black moons-
Her cheeks were flushed, curls slopping out of a top-knotted bun, framing her face like a blackened halo, like tendrils of twisted smoke and shadow-
And Dexter has never seen anything quite so lovely before… Because he knows what it is, what and who he is looking at. Finally, he sees it.
Poppy isn't really there. She's taken a back seat. Someone else is at the wheel-
Something else is at the wheel.
A Dark Passenger.
A shadowy friend.
It's magnificent.
It's beautiful.
And it's killing him, and in spite of not being able to breathe, gasp, wheeze, Dexter astonishingly tries to speak, a cheep, a burbled strangled Hello there.
Worst of all, best of all, Dexter was sure she saw his own Dark Passenger too, staring back from hazel eyes by the way her frown crinkled in confusion, a momentary lax of her fingers, a give in the take, a hesitating huh-
It was just the wane Rudy needed, and it was over before it truly began, before the asphyxiation could leave him too dizzy and dazed, as a tanned arm, Rudy's, emerges behind Poppy's head, coming around, wrapping over her own neck and heaving her off with a wrenching heave, cooing as he hauled her off Dexter.
"Hey! Hey, it's alright! Calm down! It's fine!"
She thrashes in Rudy's hold as he lurches them further away, but the Doctor holds tight, Dexter thinks she might bite into the arm around her neck at one point, sink in teeth and nails just to get back to him, to finish the job, a deflected buffet-
Dexter sprawls across the sticky tile, wheezing. Perhaps he had lost more air than he thought after all, because his head is spinning, rolling, and there was a foamy feeling in his belly, low in his belly, as if the empty spaces in his bowels were suddenly lit on fire.
Debs crashed into his side, Angel standing above, wide-eyed.
"Fucking hell! That crazy bitch-"
Rudy was still dragging said crazy bitch away, fussing, just as Dexter finally found a rhythm for his breathing again.
"It's fine. It's good. I've got you."
That outwardly did the trick as Poppy's flailing sputtered to a strop, flashing, baffled, taking in the scene before her as if she was amazed by what she had done, as Dexter was helped by Deb into a sit.
"Uh-… I-… Sorry. Hemophobia, and you touched me and-… I-…"
Poppy reeled away from Rudy and his hold, shirking off the arm around her neck like an ill-fitting leash, and Rudy let her go, as the BAU agent scrambled backwards, eyes locked on Dexter, mirroring, perhaps, how he was early, back in his lab.
"I need to go-"
She spun and stumbled away, bumping into a waitress carrying a tray, giving a hasty sorry as glass bottles and cups spilled and fell and shattered, knocking into patrons as she shakily rushed for the bar door.
Rudy was quick to follow her path of automatic demolition.
"I should go see if she's okay. She was bleeding pretty bad-"
Rudy didn't wait for an answer as he too got lost in the crowd, and Dexter thinks, above the hum and the chatter and the music in his ears, he might hear the click of a door opening and closing twice in quick succession.
Debs ran a hand down his shoulder, over his back, helping him up, and Dexter came hurtling back into himself.
"You okay, Dex? Shit, your neck's already bruising. You took a mean hook there, bro."
Angel placatingly smiled at him.
"My niece has Hemophobia-… She normally passes out though-"
Dexter recalled Poppy in his office. The way she had baulked at his blood splatter wall. The way she had determinedly turned her back to it and not glanced that way again.
Not fear.
Poppy Moser wasn't scared of blood.
She was something much, much worse.
Something like Dexter.
Dexter gingerly waved Debs and Angel off, voice croaky and guttural and burning.
"It's fine. I shouldn't have grabbed her. Might have activated her fight or flight instinct and-"
Dexter winced as he rubbed his neck, the tingle of pain zapping down his spine and back up again in a short fire circuit, making sure to play the injury up for the crowd.
He's merely a forensic scientist here, with Angel and Deb. He shouldn't be used to pain or getting hit or being able to bounce back so quickly from it.
Keep the mask on.
Dexter made sure to grimace hard.
"Unfortunately it landed on fight."
Debs didn't look convinced, not an inch of her, glancing towards the way her boyfriend and Poppy had vaporised from view.
"Still… Crazier than a bag of cats, that one… She can move though, I'll give her that. One second she was at the table and the next she had you pinned to the floor-… You sure you're alright Dexter? You're looking a little flushed."
Flushed? Is he?
Yes, he can feel the heat tingle in his cheeks, as he could feel the snug, striking feeling from below his ribs to the tops of his thighs quiver and quake.
Dexter nodded, and glanced down.
A smudge of blood was scarlet red on his collar, a smear across the lope.
It looked like he got his drop after all.
Dexter peeked back up, gathers Debs concerned gaze in his own, and beamed a true, genuine smile.
"Never better."
Yay or Nay?
Next Chapter Preview:
Poppy bumped into people, shouldered passed other's, mumbling nonsense as she went, stumbled off the fuckin' curb and nearly headfirst into traffic, the sound of someone following, steps pounding, voice nearly drowned out by the honk of the startled driver in the car that had nearly T-boned her.
"Hey! Wait! Wait up!"
xXx
"Haemophiliac?"
Poppy swallowed deeply, the lump of a dry mouth leading to a parched, constricting throat.
Thirsty.
Always so thirsty! Never get us enough to drink! Just a little, I swear! Just take a little-
Morgana, she was thirsty, and not for water.
"Moderate case, yeah."
Rudy tutted and she heard from behind her the pop of a plastic latch unlocking.
"Haemophilia, a blood disorder that makes the bearer bleed a whole lot even from a nick, and hemophobia, a fear of blood… what a combination."
xXx
"You've lost quite a bit of blood. It's best you eat after having the octocog alfa to keep your sugar levels from crashing and instigating hypoglycemia. Don't worry, I know a place not far from here. A short drive will get us there."
It was the us Poppy was having trouble getting over, not the drive time.
"I can order in my hotel room-"
Rudy waved her off flippantly.
"Don't be silly. Do you really want to risk a sugar shock on the back of a Bonneville going seventy in a crowded Miami street? What will your police friends think?"
xXx
"What?"
Poppy snapped as she shook the chocolate sauce bottle and-
And went back to squeezing it over her not-quite-breakfast-not-quite-dessert.
"You're the one who told me I needed to replenish my blood sugar."
Rudy cocked a brow as he lifted his mug to blow at the coffee inside.
She hoped it was exceedingly bitter, just in spite.
"Yes, replenish, not send yourself nose-diving into a diabetic coma."
xXx
"Truth is, before the accident… My mother used to take me here all the time. Every Sunday morning for breakfast."
He glanced down at his coffee, must have seen something nice in the reflection by the way he smiled softly into the dark.
"My siblings loved it. Especially my sister. She used to cry until she got her banana split, and then would spend half the time here flinging it at our brother, who would retaliate with his fries. Mom would moan, but she would-… She would be smiling. This place brings back… Fond memories."
Poppy doesn't quite understand that. Wanting to remember. Smiling at ghosts. Looking back and not-
Not shutting her eyes tightly.
It must have been… Nice.
Nice and meaningless.
"Didn't know you had siblings."
Rudy shrugged and sipped sincerely at his coffee.
"We drifted apart. I'm trying to reconnect. Family is important."
Poppy doesn't get that either.
A.N: Dexter Morgan: I think I might have a sister.
Rudy Cooper with a surprised Pikachu face: No, really?! You don't say?
As always, Brian's up to gory games only he can see, Dexter's having an existential crisis of epic proportions, and Poppy's putting her foot in it without much provocation. Disasters. All of them... And I love them all the more for it lol. Let me know if you prefer the previews for next chapter or rather a short hook-line like the last chapters.
The part of this chapter about drowning was inspired by Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. It's an awesome book and I recommend reading it if one has a love for the ocean, and have a healthy dose of fear for it too lol.
P.S: The lyrics from this chapter are from Crawling In My Skin by Linkin Park.
THANK YOU all for the follows, favourites, and lovely reviews. If you're up to it, don't forget to let me know your thoughts/theories in the review box over there, and I will hopefully see you all again next week with a brand new chapter!
