Note: There's been a change to the broadcasting schedule. We're having a pitstop with Brian this chapter, and back to Dexter in the next.
Chapter Eight:
What Are Brother's For?
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
Brian Moser is twenty-one when he's finally released from the psychiatric hospital. Certainly, it's a short leash they let him out with to begin, and only granted on the tail end of years of 'most excellent behaviour'.
He has daily visits to the apartment they've set him up in from one of the head nurses, the same one who wished him goodnight every time they secured his hospital room. Bi-weekly meetings with a therapist who has long stopped scribbling notes and simply nods his head and hums. A pocket full of pills to swallow 8am and 8pm, blue pills and white pills and pills that keep him numb and dumb, and every evening he has to sign off on a sheet what he's accomplished that day to work towards a 'stable' life.
Brian plays along only for a week more, one more week against twenty-one years' worth of them. By the following Monday, he's gone. The dead nurse is only found three weeks later, bloated in his bathtub with a stethoscope wrapped around her bruised throat, her blood scrawled on tile above her head.
Goodnight.
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong?
The house is scruffier than Brian remembers it to be. The paint is cracking like dried earth, a tile from the roof missing like a gapped tooth, the garden is in shambles with weeds cracking the path, and the old palm he'd spent his childhood chasing siblings around was brown and drooping at the fences edge.
Yet, it's still everything he recalls it to be.
Home.
There's the hole in the side of the decking where their mother had to place a flower pot because Poppy had crawled inside once and got stuck with a racoon. In the kitchen there are still the pencil marks on the wall, a three step raise of children's heights dashed in shade, Brains name all squished up and Dexter's only half wrote, and Poppy's nothing but an X, the only thing she could draw at three.
X marks the spot.
The second stair from the top landing still creaks underneath his much more substantial weight, and on the last door to the left of the two-bedroom house was taped a piece of paper decorated with pirates, poppies and polar bears.
It's this room Brian feels himself drawn towards, finds himself sitting in for who knows how long.
The crib was still pushed up against the corner wall, the yellow blanket inside tangled at the bottom. Dexter's bed was still shoved underneath the window, with his toy cars abandoned at the foot, forgotten in their game of cops and robbers. Brian's own bed sat on the other side of the small bedroom, the best their mother could afford between stints in jail for possession and prostitution, behind the door, books on a shelf where he's head slept.
If Brian closes his eyes, he could almost still hear them, the children of this room, the family scattered in the wind as his mother had been scattered across four corners of a shipping container.
The spring in Poppy's cot is squeaking as she bounces up and down, chanting Bexa!, Bexa!, Bexa! Her first word and the closest she ever got to their brother's name.
Dexter's feet are padding across the floor, scarpering over the carpets as he holds his toy plane up and out, blowing raspberries as he shows Poppy how airplanes can do loop-de-loops in the air.
Little Brian is sitting underneath the covers of his bed, flashlight on, book and brother and sister in lap, reading a story under the soft glow of moonlight. Poppy would try chewing the pages, she tried to gnaw everything his sister, and Dexter would ask him to do the funny voice again, his favourite was Mr. Fox, and their mother, their sweet-strewn mother, would peek her head through their door, rainbow nails glinting in the dark, and say Mummy's going to get you-
Brian's eyes snap open with the hum of a chainsaw, with the scream, and he finds the room empty and silent. Dead.
Brian's always cold. Strapped to the hospital bed. Locked in the isolation ward. Pinned to the electric shock therapy chair. C.O.L.D.
Not here though. Not in this house, with these memories. Here little Poppy is still chasing butterflies through the shrubbery out back. Here Dexter is learning to count with Cheerio's at the kitchen counter. Here little Brian is-
Here he is warm.
Here Brian feels.
Three months later, Rudy Cooper's dead, killed in New Jersey, his name is in Brian's wallet and driver's licence, and his social security buys a mortgage on old Laura Moser's house. The house even the bank didn't want anymore. The house where a family was torn asunder.
Brian begins restoring the home right away.
The truth about broken things is they can be fixed.
You know it's gonna make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together
The next ten years are demanding for the man now known as Rudy Cooper. He spends it fixing his childhood home, working as a prosthetic surgeon under fake licencing, building funds and dreaming schemes, and searching for his siblings.
Funnily enough, Dexter's easiest to find.
Brian's brother has stayed in Miami, never left from what he can tell, almost like he wants to be found, wants his brother and sister back, is waiting right where it all began because of course they'd all be drawn back one way or another.
It's destiny, Brian thinks.
It's prophecy.
Brian sees Dexter's face for the first time in nearly two decades in an article while he's at a computer café sipping expresso. He was searching for Harry Morgan, the name of the policeman on the crime scene of their mother's death, the one who had snatched away Brian's world and left him sitting in blood and the dark-
He's looking for Harry, and instead finds a Dexter.
The photo is taken outside a courthouse, his brother's in an ill-fitting suit, his testimony for the Metro having sealed the case for a slasher to go behind bars.
They praise him, Dexter Morgan, in the editorial. They call him Miami's best blood splatter analyst, and when Rudy reads that line he laughs. He laughs so hard the man in glasses beside him reading up on the best fishing spots in West Side Mariner gives a cautious glance his way.
Perhaps Brian had seen it from that moment.
Known.
He traces Dexter to 8420 Palm Terrace, apartment number 10b. He waits in the car park, sees a man slip from the door at 7am sharp. He's tall but not as tall as Brian, broader undoubtedly, dressed in a button up and beige slacks and loafers of all things, ginger hair messy as if he'd spent the night tossing and turning in bed.
He looks good.
He looks like their father, as somehow Brian knew he would. Squared out and checkered in, a mundane joe on a mundane stroll.
Dexter looks good, but not as good as the blood slides Brian finds in his aircon unit, or the carry-on of duct tape and plastic bags and cellophane slung in his bedroom cupboard.
Oh Dexter.
It's a hard feeling to explain, this beat that Brian heart takes, the slick of his palm as he cradles the wooden box full of thirty-six dead.
Baby brother is a killer.
Like him.
It feels a little like sanctification. As if their mother's blood was so sacred that bathed in it they were resurrected. An unholy trinity. The Father. The Son. The Holy fucking Ghost. The latter might be missing currently, but not for long.
No, perhaps not resurrected, but born.
Born free.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new?
The first time Brian sees Poppy was at her Federal Academy Graduation. He's sitting at the back of the bleachers, sunglass high on his nose. He'd snuck in with the catering staff, stole the suit he now wore from the unlucky fellow who had used the bathroom stall next to his own, and swiped a key card from a ladies unwatched handbag just to get this close.
It had taken him three years to find her. Three years of scouring and searching and seeking, and Brian shouldn't have been surprised. Poppy had always been the best of them at hide and seek. Appearing and disappearing seemingly at whim. He'd paid private investigators, hacked himself into DMV database, poured over adoption archives and records, and everything had come up naught.
Yet if Brian didn't think it destiny already, he would have then.
He'd been driving down the road flicking through the radio when the report came on. A bomber in Arkansas had been caught by an FBI agent in training. She would be graduating that year in honours for her duty, specializing in behavioural analysis.
He doesn't get a name, but he gets a feeling.
A flush of warmth.
He goes to the graduation, gets himself in any way he can, and he spots Poppy right away. She's dressed in a black suit like all her crow-like colleagues, and her hair is piled on top of her thin neck and head, curls wrangled in as much as they could be, sticking every which way but down as they had when she'd wake up and bounce in her crib for Bexa!, and she's tiny up on the podium waiting to be called.
She has their mother's eyes.
Green.
Too green.
Brian stays in the shadows, and he stays until the very end, watches as she comes and collects her diploma, shakes hands with a man called Lundy, watches as she settles back in her seat, a part of the whole and yet separated.
Poppy Moser.
She has no family with her, no aunt or uncle or long-time friend. He watches her through the after mixer, back in his catering staff apron handing out aperitifs, and he notices how her smile falls every time the person who came to congratulate her turns their back.
She's not as good with her mask as Dexter or himself is.
It's okay.
They can teach her.
And after having spent the day together
Hold each other close the whole night through
Unlike Dexter, who Brian spends a year trailing before finding Poppy, he doesn't see her kill. Dexter uses kill rooms, steel knives and clear plastic and things that keep everything clean. Poppy's more spontaneous, she uses houses and fields and factories and, one time, an ice cream truck, and Brian only ever sees the aftermath.
Three.
She kills in three, and like their brother, only those she thinks deserve it, typically those that have hurt or killed a child. She takes her time tracking them down, picking her prey, mapping out where they'll be so she can get a good hop between targets, too long sometimes Brian thinks. She'll follow and follow and follow and-
Leap.
Brian never gets to see that last part, is always just a bit too slow.
Always the same too.
Two men and one woman. Same order. Man. Woman. Man.
Brian wonders if she remembers them, him and Dexter, if she's playing out the shipping container or something else entirely. It doesn't matter in the end.
He feels contrarily warm as he lifts the back refrigerator of the ice cream truck and sees the body of the last man in her cycle crammed between sandwich bars and mango lollies, neck twisted so far his head lays flat on his shoulder the wrong way. His wrist is slit and his blood is drained, and in Poppy's apartment a lollipop would be added to her little stash she thought no one saw underneath her bed.
Atta girl.
Next time though, she'd need better clean up. Perhaps a power saw to dismember with for easier throw-out. He'd leave a magazine for power tools in with her post.
It had worked with the refrigeration.
Happy times together we've been spending
I wish that every kiss was never ending
Brian knows he needs to be careful, but he also needs to be bold. He needs to draw Poppy to Miami, can't draw Dexter to her, and so he begins work on his first. He gets a custom refrigeration unit built in his apartment, lures his first to his bed, and spends the night hanging her upside down on an electric-powered table where he slits her throat and lets her heart do all the hard work. He collects the blood in a bucket, a surprise for later, and dismembered the limbs in pretty little packages of paper and twine to leave at the bottom of a drained swimming pool.
Dexter's hooked straight away, but Poppy doesn't come, it's not enough, not enough.
Sheri Taylor is.
He's there when Poppy lands, there to see where she takes a room in a hotel and there to slip in when she leaves. He's there when Dexter's father dies, and he's left to clean the wreckage of a drunk and an addict, wrapping up records like he did the bodies he dumped in the ocean.
Brian's there.
But they get their wires mixed, his siblings. Poppy finds her lollipops as Dexter should have, and Dexter understands the method of killing, much like his own, when Poppy should have seen it.
Brothers and sisters… They simply can't play along, can they?
It doesn't matter, nevertheless. A note in Poppy's jar of not-so-sugary treats and a small, by chance, talk with Dexter in his office sets them both on the right path, sends them careening at one another, and soon, to the old Moser house and himself.
They still don't see, however. They don't remember.
Poppy doesn't see the diner he takes her too, although she still orders something with ice cream and bananas in it. Dexter doesn't listen to his warning on Harry Morgan, but the rose-tinted glasses are slipping. They're both impulsive, their sights too constrained, locked on to the small rather than the big-
Poppy's not as good at hiding as she thinks she is, Brian's cleaned up a few of her messes she's left behind to know that, and Dexter's still hampered by the idea that he needs to blend more, have his Rita's and his Debs, and his donut runs.
But that's alright, Brian thinks.
He's there to lead them home.
What else are big brothers for?
Oh, wouldn't it be nice?
Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray
It might come true
He's in Debs apartment when the calls comes at half six. She jumps from the couch and scrambles for her phone, and Brian tries not to look at the framed photograph of the Morgan family she has on the mantel, mocking him.
Fake.
It's all fake.
Fake father, fake mother, fake sister, fake life-
Debs is the last piece linking Dexter to Harry, horrible Harry who stole everything dear to Brian, Harry who left him in the cold and the blood, who looked at Brian and could only see a fucked-up kid.
It makes his skin crawl, makes Brain glance to the cleavers on Debs kitchen counter a shade too long, makes him imagine her with her wrists bound and gagged and fucking silent for once-
Like all good things, the time will come.
"Oh shit! Really?"
She's already trying to shirk on her trousers, hopping on her left foot to get the limb through the leg, soon she wouldn't have to worry about that either, and she has the phone pressed to her ear by her shoulder as she pulls up the zip.
She hangs up and tries to find her keys-
Keys Brian's stashed in his pocket.
"I need to go to the station. Fuck, where are my keys?"
He makes a show of helping her, half-heartedly turning over couch cushions. Terribly thoughtless, this one.
"Is everything alright? No one's hurt are they?"
Deborah curses again and bends down low on the ground, pressing cheek against carpet to pat under sofa.
"Fuck no. Poppy's gone and blown the case wide open."
"Oh?"
He asks calmly, and Debs shoots up, grinning from ear to ear, head perched over the arm rest. She looks headless here. Tolerable.
"Don't know how yet, but she's found the Ice Truck Killer's trophies. We have a complete list of victims being worked up at Metro."
Huh.
That is very strange, wasn't it? Because Brain didn't keep trophies-
"Fifty-seven, Rudy. There's fifty-seven of them. We're going to be up all-night running blood samples. Dexter's most likely to be called in. This serial killer might just be the worst in American history."
For a moment Brain merely blinks, blinks once more, and-
Ah.
He grins brightly.
"Do you want me to give you a lift?"
Debs, of course, says yes.
Baby, then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
Oh, we could be married (oh, we could be married)
And then we'd be happy (and then we'd be happy)
Oh, wouldn't it be nice?
They're the last to arrive at the metro, and after some cajoling and coaxing Debs agrees for Brain to come up, to see her to her desk, and they find Dexter at the entrance of the ball pit, near one of the back rooms where the whiteboards laid, stock still and pale and laptop bag in hand.
Deborah slaps him up the back.
"Fucking insane, right? Whoever catches this bastard now will go down in the records. Might even get a promotion."
Brain comes to a halt on his other side, and peers into the room. The whiteboards are slowly being taken up with photos and names, faces Dexter likely never thought he would see again, and on a desk in front, in an evidence bag, rested an open wooden box empty of its slides.
Brain whistles long and low.
"Someone's been very busy."
It was enough to get Dexter to snap back to himself, to realize he's in a crowd, and he shuffles where he stood, coughing lightly.
"You could say that… How did… How were these found?"
The irritating small man, who Brain can't summon the energy or will to remember the name of, pops his bald head around a corner, printed photo in hand to be pinned to board.
"Poppy found them hidden in the abandoned hospital where Tucci was. We really must have interrupted his kill if he left his trophies behind."
Clever girl.
"That doesn't make sense-"
Dexter goes to argue, even though its against his better judgement to discredit this, caught up in the fever of having all his darkest secrets being illuminated on a police districts wall, all those dark deeds brought into the light, shined upon, lit up like July 4th fireworks.
Brian sees it then. Knows what his clever girl is doing. Knows what she's scheming. She realizes the Ice Truck killer is talking to Dexter and herself, and though she can't remember why he would be talking to her, why he's goading her, why she can't remember, if she figured out why he was talking to Dexter, why his killings mattered, she'd be able to extrapolate her own part in their play.
It also wiped Dexter's plate clean, vegetables and all. His kills pinned to another killer, though neither knew who that was yet.
"Doesn't it? Why would that be, Dexter Morgan? You got intel the rest of us don't?"
The voice comes from the hall, and the trio swivel to find Poppy underneath the fluorescent lighting, hands in pockets. From the corner of his eye, he sees Dexter's jaw jump and clamp, a muscle leaping with restrained words.
"Can't say I do. I just thought the Metro would have cleaned the place out long ago. How can we be sure this belongs to the Ice Truck Killer and not someone else?"
Poppy begins strolling closer, gait loose and comfortable, and she pulls something out her pocket-
A candy apple red striped lollipop.
She rips the wrapper off with her teeth, and sinks the lot in her mouth as she dumps the plastic in the bin she passes.
Dexter watches, and a beat, a break, his gaze widens-
Yeah, he knows what those lollipops are as Poppy walks on by, patting him on the arm, speaking through the stick hanging on her lower lip.
"What are the chances more than one serial killer would be operating in not only the same state, but the same place? Two of them? Three?"
The irony in her voice clinks against her teeth like the lollipop does as she chuckles and walks on by, nodding over.
"Come along, Dexter. Into my office. We have work to do."
Dexter follows, pulled along, and Debs scoffs and nearly stomps her foot.
"Why does he get to go into your office? What about us? What are we meant to do?"
Poppy shoves Dexter in through the last step, and spares Debs only a passing glance.
"Get pinning. There's plenty of photo's to go up. And Dexter here is a blood specialist. We have blood slides… Plus-"
She winks with a grin, slipping one boot over the threshold, palm over handle.
"He's my brother."
Poppy slams the door shut behind her. Brain counts to three before Deborah loses it.
"What the fuck does she mean he's her brother? Rudy?!"
You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But let's talk about it
Oh, wouldn't it be nice?
Goodnight, my baby
Thoughts?
A.N: Still on holiday until the 20th, but I had a little time today to finish this chapter up. Only a little peak at Brian, but I wanted to try dipping my toes into his P.O.V just to see how it goes so please let me know what you think?
Thank you to everyone who has followed, favourited and reviewed! I hope you all liked this chapter, and if you could, don't forget to drop a review. They keep the muses singing.
