In the Aftermath

by Solia

A sequel to 'Break Me Every Time' from a surviving Dexter's perspective, including a retell of Ch53 and the events that follow in the aftermath of Deb's desperate crime. Read the original fic for context. Rated M for coarse language typical of the show and some explicit content. Written for Writingisfunlol and PrestoManifesto.

1. Chapter 1

Title: For Writingisfunlol and PrestoManifesto

Fandom: Dexter

Rating: M for language and explicit content

Disclaimer: I do not own Dexter or any of its characters. I don't own EpiPen or accept any responsibility for the effects of their misuse. Please use according to the instructions provided on the packaging.

Author's notes: This fic is written in thanks for Writingisfunlol, who generously wrote countless in-depth reviews for Break Me and has supported my progress with my original novel, and PrestoManifesto, who also found himself aboard the Break Me bus and very kindly went on to read and review my novel. They both asked for a follow-up chapter for Break Me Every Time in a possible universe in which Dexter has survived the epilogue. This is not a confirmation of that theory; this is just a fanfiction of that fanfiction, because nobody knows, least of all me, but after six months of wondering how he might have pulled it off (because I killed him pretty dead and didn't leave myself much room to play with) this is what I've come up with. Read all 53 chapters of Break Me Every Time if you want context.

Because this fic is dedicated to two people, I have written two chapters. Thankyou both so very much for your support and warm encouragement. I appreciate it and hope to death that you – and everyone else reading! – enjoy this.

Chapter one

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Years pass and my body heals. But the scars remain. The aftermath of my ordeals.

I read about the people I left behind, and know their scars run as deep as mine, even if those scars aren't visible to anyone else. I know my son is haunted by what he saw the last time we were together. I know my sister is plagued with survivor's guilt and the weight of the darkness I left behind in her. I would have taken it with me if I could.

The intel is infrequent, sparse, objective – a school report; a one-line comment in an email from an anonymous source to say they've changed address; a chart stolen from the hospital; a memo from within Miami Metro Homicide, obtained who-knows-how, indicating that Angel Batista is retiring – but it's more than I deserve, and it's what I agreed to. I was dying and my future was empty. I took the deal.

I've kept up my end, mostly. I've stayed away. Mostly. I've stayed underground, gone where they told me to go, provided the information they wanted, lived the lives they wanted me to live and played the roles they require. Five years of service and eighteen new kills to my name, all of them sanctioned and all but offered up in a silver platter. It's easy to be quick about it when someone else is doing the vetting for you.

It's not the F.B.I., though they would like to me to think that's who they are. They're higher than that, with the ingenuity to follow the Bureau's cases closely, the foresight to recognise an asset when they see one and the power to make said asset disappear without a whisper of suspicion.

They keep me comfortable but they keep me on my toes. More than ever, I can't afford to be caught. If I am, it's entirely on me: the world will ask how this could possibly could have happened, but they won't take responsibility for me and there's no shred of proof that they have any connection with my survival. They won't save me a second time, and they have the ultimate double-edged leverage. The deal was easy to take – die, start over somewhere else, commit to their service, and the case against my sister fell away, right out from Agent Reid's hands. They say it was believable, the way the case crumbled and the way her name came out clean, that she'll never suspect a thing. The price of fucking up is she goes back under the bus they wrenched her out from.

Needless to say, I'm as meticulous as ever, though now I'm without need, and now that I don't have a family to lie to, I make fewer mistakes. I can take my time. I make my own deadlines. I am an even more efficient killer than ever before.

Now I'm treading a very fine line, and I know the risk I'm taking. I'm back in Miami, the last place on Earth I should be. My minders don't know I'm here. They keep me apprised of my sister and children's notable movements to assure me they're still safe but they don't know there's someone else I monitor.

My brother was murdered.

The email comes through to the address I had Lumen Pierce create before she left me. She never changed the password, and until now she's never used it, and neither have I, except to set up a forwarding system in case she ever logs into it. I get a notification to my own inbox that this account has a new message, and my breath catches as I read it. I don't know how my sister came to know the address but the four simple words she sent concern me more.

I immediately stand, ready to fly straight to her, and have to force myself to take stock on the situation and sit back down. I can't simply fly to her. I'm dead to her. I can never see her again, and she can never see me. All I can do is worry, which I do, extensively.

How can she possibly have come to that conclusion, years after my departure from her life? It was so delicately staged. The right coroner was paid off to declare me dead and sign off on false reports; the investigative team that flew in to support Reid was carefully selected to feed him misinformation as all trace of a conspiracy was carefully cleaned up. Even Quinn was manipulated into playing his part in maintaining the illusion. All for the good of everybody I ever knew.

I stew on it for days. It throws me off my game and twice I miss opportunities to take down my latest government-sanctioned target. I stay clear, maintaining my cover, knowing that closeness with Debra Morgan – even thinking about her – dulls my other senses and leads inevitably to making mistakes.

I've almost convinced myself that the message is harmless, just an expression of Deb's healing process, and that my initial panic was mislaid, when, after three days, a reply sends me reeling back into my state of apprehension.

Can you wait for the weekend?

Lumen. Who else could it be? Responding to Deb. Going to Deb. And I can only imagine what my two former loves think they're going to get up to together with fresh new beliefs of my murder boiling away between them.

It escalates. Deb sends an address; Lumen asks to meet at my grave on Saturday. My grave. Because I'm dead. I can't sleep. My skin crawls and my stomach twists with the idea that Lumen and Deb are in contact, sharing in a belief that wrong befell me. Which it did, and the man who would have been my killer remains in my sister and son's lives, and I think on that every day, but Deb wasn't ever meant to know. Thomas Matthews' involvement was a puzzle piece best left out of the jigsaw. He's a dangerous player in the game of my existence, but he's one that serves a better purpose alive, protecting my family, than he does dead or incarcerated with the F.B.I. digging into why.

He tried to kill me but he'd never hurt my sister, I tell myself every day. She's Harry's little girl. The good one. He tried to kill me for her, to protect her from me. His method sucked but his intentions weren't to be sneezed at.

I consider tipping Tom off that two vengeful women are after him, but beyond preventing Deb from committing a terrible crime and possibly saving his life I can't see what good that would do. It could get Deb in trouble. It could turn him against her. It could undo everything I have died for.

Lumen will ring her, I tell myself, and cancel, but she doesn't. She flies to Miami. One of the contacts my employers gave me for use on my projects readily provides me with a flight manifest from Minneapolis Airport, and I sit in anxious silence in my dark little house on Saturday night, just staring at the document. Lumen Pierce. Miami to Minneapolis. She's already returned.

What business did Deb and Lumen have that could be wrapped up in less than five hours? They can't, they can't have gotten together to kill Matthews, could they? I love her, but I can't pretend to know Deb anymore. Or Lumen, for that matter. It's been so long since I saw either of them, and both were highly intelligent, highly motivated killers last I checked. Now they're mothers, fierce protectors of little lives, and I cannot fathom what new extents they would go to in their new incarnations.

I search the internet for news about Thomas Matthews. I prepare myself for the worst. A disappearance. A grisly murder scene. The arrest of an honoured detective. But there's nothing of the like. There's a statement about a case, made by Deputy Chief Matthews, posted by the media three hours ago. He appeared for this press opportunity while Deb met Lumen. He's not dead.

Then what in hell were those two up to?

The curiosity burns inside me. The realisation that Deb has grown so much without me that I cannot predict her movements is frustrating and unsettling. I haven't experienced need, the way I used to need to kill, since she cured me of that illusion, but now I feel it again. I need to know what she's up to. I need to assure myself she's safe and staying out of the dark.

I tell myself it'll be alright. I won't let her see me. I won't let anyone see me. I'll drop in, check things out, and be out of there before anyone can know I'm there. I won't interfere. This will all turn out to be an overreaction.

I'm not allowed to fly. I have to stay away from airports, train stations and government buildings, lest my appearance is caught on camera. I drive. It takes me the whole of Sunday and most of the night, and I arrive on the outskirts of my home city early Monday morning.

I died on a Monday. I kissed Deb for the first time on a Monday.

I don't dare move out in broad daylight. I wait until the cover of darkness, and even then I wait for the evening traffic to die down. I wait for midnight. Then I drive to Elk Street to scope out the address Deb sent Lumen.

It's a shithole of a neighbourhood. The whole block is in a shambles, and a heavily-graffitied public notice hanging from one of the flimsy temporary fences declares that the street is condemned, scheduled for demolition in ten days' time. Like the rest of the houses, number 133 is a box, small and single-storey, with dark windows and dusty dead front lawns. No one lives here, at least not legally, and I can't help reflecting that it would be a perfect kill spot.

But that's what I would use it for. What in hell would Deb and Lumen want with this place?

I park my car a street over, like I did the day I stormed Vogel's house – also a Monday – and head out to investigate. I check the neighbouring buildings first but find them in even worse disrepair than 133, and empty, as I expected.

I hear the slightest noise while I am poking about in the collapsed garden shed of 131 and freeze in the shadows. My excellent eyesight catches the motion of a figure stealing between the houses. I can't tell who it is in the dark, but he seems not to see me because he picks up his pace and strides towards the front porch of 133. I slide out of the shed's unstable skeleton and move to the fence line between the homes, where I remain sheltered by shadow.

An indistinct female voice utters an uncertain syllable somewhere nearby, and I duck deeper behind the rotting palings of the fence. I cannot be caught.

"Debra."

I choke on my next breath and reflexively my hands tighten into fists around the stringy overgrown weeds that flourish against the fence I'm using as cover. Both the name and the voice echo out of a past I've tried to leave behind me. Debra. Tom.

What are they doing meeting out here in the dead of night? My heart thunders in my chest so loud I'm surprised they don't hear it, because I can't think of any good answer to my question.

"Fuck, Tom. You scared the fuck out of me."

The red queen in the perilous game of my life; my co-player and sometimes opponent, never more than a single square away on the same board. I'd know that voice anywhere, and the sound of it, even at this distance, even in these circumstances, brings an uncontrolled, shaky smile to my face. Nothing sounds more natural coming out my sister's mouth than 'fuck'. God, I've missed her.

"I didn't mean to frighten you," Matthews apologises. I shift slowly, trying to see them through the fence. Thomas Matthews comes into focus between two palings. It's dark but now I recognise his silhouette, tall and elegant with his excellent posture, and the moonlit glow of his white hair. "I thought about calling you but I think it's better we talk face-to-face, don't you?"

He's standing on the steps of 133, addressing someone standing on the porch, out of my line of sight. My heart leaps with equal parts anxiety and excitement at the knowledge that this must be Deb. A strong desire to leap from my hiding place and run to a better vantage point, to just see her, is hard to ignore, but I manage. I have no right to look at her. I have no right to let her look at me. If she sees me, it'll all have been for nothing.

Now more than ever before, I cannot be caught. Like when I was growing up, getting caught is a big no-no, but nothing can be worse than being caught by her.

"I don't want to talk to you. I can't believe you, Tom." It's Deb, alright, the very same stubborn, defiant Deb Morgan I disentangled from my life five years ago. I hear her in every word, the way pride and anger fuels the overconfidence she needs to speak to people the way she does. "Dexter? He was my brother, and you killed him. How can I even look at you?"

Her voice fades to a crackly expression of hurt and grief and I thread my fingers more tightly into the grass to anchor me still. There's the proof I've been wanting all these years – she really does believe I'm dead, exactly as I was promised. But there's also the truth I had feared. She's worked out Tom's involvement.

She was always too smart for her own good. And now she's, what? Drawn him out here for a confrontation? I'm scared to realise I can't fathom her motives.

Matthews takes the gentle approach. "I know you're upset. I know you feel betrayed and you have every right, but I can explain everything." I'm listening closely and I'm sure I hear Deb scoff with disbelief. "Dexter was on a self-destructive path. He was going to destroy everything and everyone around him before long, including you. I did what I did to save you."

My hatred for Tom Matthews and what he did to me has long burned itself out, so I can begrudgingly see the sense in his words, and I accept that he honestly believes that this was what he was doing. Regardless of his intentions, though, it was his attack that enabled me to 'die' and therefore it is to him that I owe thanks for making this path I'm now on possible. In more ways than one, for me, he exists to protect Debra. Not that he knows that. I think any guilt he feels for his betrayal of me is adequate punishment; I certainly wouldn't want him to ever learn that he helped me by putting my knife in my gut.

"No," Deb responds stubbornly. "No, you're lying. You've lied to me for so fucking long, Tom. You wanted to save yourself. Reid's on his way, and I'm going to tell him what you told me."

I tear my attention from Tom's silhouette to look self-consciously about. Agent Reid? Deb's pissed off, obviously, but she's got as much, if not more, to lose as Matthews does. She wouldn't really call the feds in to take care of this, would she?

Scarily, no, I'm quite sure she wouldn't. Which begs the question: what the fuck is she doing out here with Matthews?

"It's time to take some fucking responsibility for what you and Dad and Vogel did to my brother."

There's a long pause, and I squint at my father's old friend. I see the sharp edges of his shoulders lower in apparent defeat. "You're right. You're right," he says. He moves slightly, shuffles his foot about on the step. "I hurt you in doing this and I'm sorry for that. I should accept the consequences. I guess there's no getting around it now that you've told Agent Reid, anyway."

"I haven't told him yet. I just told him I have information, and he said for me to meet him here."

There's a silence and Matthews goes momentarily still, and I get a nasty chill. Why would Deb say that? She had all the power of the exchange and now she's gone ahead and shown him all her cards? She was smarter than that when I knew her.

Matthews looks at his watch and his voice drifts through the night to me. "He won't be far away, then. I'll cooperate. I owe you that much. Come on; let's wait by the car so he can see us when he arrives."

I have to watch for several seconds of silence before I see movement. Another tall figure, thinner again but this time intimately familiar, moves into view, takes the steps down past him. I don't even have a full second to acknowledge the flood of relieved contentment that fills me – the last time I saw my sister she was in critical condition in hospital, so to see her walking, straight and tall, is indescribable – before an indistinct motion of Tom's fires off alarm bells in my brain. He's going for a gun!

But Deb must notice, too. She's younger, sharper, too quick for him. She pivots on her feet towards him, grabs the gun with both hands and twists it upwards and then down. He loses balance and she takes him down with a swift and sharp uppercut with her elbow to his jaw.

In a panic I've jumped to my feet but I'm still hidden by the tall fence, which I press myself against, barely breathing as I look with one eye through my gap. I can't believe what I just witnessed. Deb is impressive in action, as always, but that's not what surprises me. Tom Matthews, our family's friend since before my memories start, pulled a gun on my sister. Harry's daughter. And she had to defend herself.

He was going to hurt her. He was willing to hurt her.

Matthews was meant to be one of the people looking after her.

Deb doesn't behave like someone who was jumped. She doesn't run away or dial for help. She doesn't even pause to recover from her shock or check on her attacker. Instead she shoves the gun into the back of her jeans and grabs Tom under his arms. She drags him quickly back up the steps and into the house. Frowning, I move a few paces along the fence, closer to the gap Matthews used to get to her. The door of the house closes and I think I hear locks. A soft yellow light leaps to life in the windows.

I abandon my cover and run to number 133. I take the steps in two big strides and race across the porch to the big window. I'm horrified to find my vision of the indoors obscured by plastic sheeting. Plastic. Set out by whom? Deb, and probably Lumen, as a kill room for Matthews? Or by Matthews, as part of a plan for silencing Debra? I don't know which possibility scares me more.

This is not what I came back here to see.

Desperately I try to make out what's happening. Through the plastic, silhouetted by the artificial yellow light, I see my sister's figure pull Tom Matthews into the room. She stands over him and leans down; a spark is visible even through the plastic and the shape on the floor goes rigid like a plank. She's got a taser. She withdraws it only after a considerable shock has been delivered, and with effort lifts her victim onto a table in the centre of the room.

It's with shock that I realise I just mentally acknowledged Tom Matthews as Deb's victim, and it's with renewed desperation that I urgently look about for some way out of this. The window is one of the few in this street unbroken, and is freshly boarded up with large, wide planks of diagonally-placed wood to keep it that way. I yank on one to test it and find it firm. There's no getting in this way.

The glass and plastic muffle sound and I distinguish little of what is said. I think Matthews moans and begs; I think Deb responds without pity. It appears, from what vague motion I can make out, that she's started to wrap him in shrink wrap. I hurry to the door and try it, but it's locked, as expected. Not that I can do anything even if it's open, I remind myself with effort as I return helplessly to the window. Deb's alone in this, whatever fucked-up plan she's acting out. She can never know I was here.

She just has to race down this ill-advised path on her own and I can do nothing to prevent it.

That's so fucking frustrating, and I angrily bang a fist on one of the window boards. The boards are strong but the windowsill and walls are not, and the force reverberates through. Inside, a piece of tape that had been peeling, struggling to uphold its weight of plastic sheeting, takes this opportunity to come unstuck, and a portion of the plastic censoring my view falls away like a curtain. My vision of the horror within is immediately clear.

The deputy chief is lying on the table, shrink wrap over his lap, Deb leaning over him; one of his hands is in his jacket where his gun came from and his other hand is closing around her throat. My heart leaps into mine. She takes out his grip with a sharp knock his forearm, but I think she's underestimated the human will to survive. His hidden hand reappears and goes for her neck while the first retakes control of her by grasping the front of her shirt, twisting to keep her still.

He doesn't have a gun but the look of shocked pain that registers on my sister's face alerts me that it's hurting her. I immediately think M99, but that's what I would think to use in this case. Deb tries to back away, but Matthews' grip on her is enough that she only succeeds in pulling him upright. The shift in position allows me to see what he's holding to her neck.

"Jesus," I breathe. I try again to wrench the planks from the window, to no avail, and I smack both of my hands on the wood, then between the boards to bang on the glass, helpless and terrified, just trying to create a distraction, anything to redirect the series of events occurring inside. Matthews has used an adrenaline auto-injector on my epileptic sister.

And he knows what effect that will have, which tells me he brought it here for this exact purpose.

Deb is struggling for her freedom but Tom won't allow it. I see the moment when she accepts she has no other choice, but outside, watching, I can't accept it. She draws a knife from a makeshift holster at her thigh.

She thrusts it forwards. And twists.

"Deb!" I shout in horror, clinging to the boards, all memory of the reasons for my previous silent distance long evaporated. "Don't!"

I watch through the dirty glass as they disengage. Tom's limbs lose their strength as his shocked attention moves to his critical stomach wound, and the injector tears downward and drops. Deb cries out and shoves him away, ripping the knife free of him and brandishing it before her. Her free hand is over the injection point. Bright red blood runs over and between her fingers. He put it in the carotid artery, I realise as the blood maintains its flow, and that wasn't a slim little needle.

Horrific memories, still too fresh, too vivid, drive me from the window back to the door. I can't let this happen to her again. Already her face was draining of blood. If the adrenaline brings on a seizure and she loses consciousness, Matthews will have his opportunity to kill her. If she's lucky and he just walks away, she's sure to bleed out. I know what I promised myself, what I promised her without her ever even knowing, but I can't not go to her. I can't leave her to this fate she created for herself.

I stupidly try the door again, yank on the handle, knock urgently, for all the good it will do.

"Fuck, fuck," I mutter desperately, knocking as hard as I can. "Fucking open the door!"

The people inside are indisposed, injured. They're not coming to let me in. I slam my body against the door a few times to test its strength but it's pretty solid. Deb chose her kill spot well. It's a fucking fortress.

I hear the voices inside. Deb curses. Tom yells, "Reid! We're in here! Morgan's the one, it's her!" Motherfucker, getting his word in first, still more worried about how all this will reflect on the people involved than he is about my family and our wellbeing. I dig in my pockets for my new lock pick kit and struggle with this annoying task in the dark. I'm quick when I can see what I'm doing and when my sister isn't in imminent mortal peril. Tonight every second drags agonisingly, and I hear snippets of angry conversation inside.

Fate must pity me because the lock suddenly and unexpectedly clicks, and I turn the handle at the same moment as I hear a shout of pain from within. I shove forwards, needing to be inside; the door only gives so far. Fucking chain lock. I chance a quick look in before my next move and almost wish I hadn't. Deb is on the floor, blood all down her neck, shoulder and arm, face deathly white, with her knife freshly pulled free of Tom's calf. Unsteady on his injured leg and dripping blood from his torn midsection, he furiously strikes her across the face with such force that she goes down and hits her head on the floor. I hear the crack from where I am, but the sound that resonates in my ears is the sound of her short incoherent scream, which sounds like a cry for me. Sick, I move away and throw my entire weight at the door once more. The chain snaps and the door slams back against the inner wall. I could faint with relief at being able to step inside, where I can actually do something.

But then it's even worse inside. Blood, plastic… More blood… More plastic. Deb, unconscious and twitching on the floor, dark hair sprawled around her head and blood pooling at her side. There's a moment of adjustment as I acknowledge that this is my fucking life and I am not, in fact, dreaming this.

Tom Matthews is halfway to the door, right between me and my sister. He's standing, if you can call his awkward posture that, cradling his gutted stomach. He looks at me with the same look of shock I am sure I wear.

He's older than when I last saw him, but mostly looks the same as ever. Of us two, I'm the one who looks the most different. He takes in the changes. The beard. The scars. The longer hair. But I have lost interest in him.

My sister gasps for breaths between convulsions and one uncontrolled motion tosses her head back. I lean slightly aside to better see her, hyperaware of how broken and helpless she is in this moment. Is she dying? I've long forgotten that I am not meant to be near her; that I didn't come here to let her see me. She draws a gasping breath and her eyelids flutter beneath the messy, bloody strands of hair that lie across her face. Hope and fear leap inside me. "Deb…?" Because God knows I can't watch this again.

I hope I'm not imagining the slow relaxation I'm sure I see across her body, or the relative evenness of her next breaths or the smaller twitches. It's been only ninety seconds since the adrenaline was administered and this fit seems to be almost over.

I realise that my little sister is bleeding from an arterial wound and is experiencing a seizure right in front of me and I'm just standing here in the doorway in dumb useless shock. I start forwards.

"You…" Matthews stutters as I approach. "You can't…" He's directly in the way and the blank dislike I've felt for him for years has been replaced with cold fury in these last few minutes, so it's nothing to knock him bodily aside. He lands with a loud crash on the plastic-covered floor. He's too amazed to protest. In disbelief he demands, "Dexter?" as he starts to right himself. Over my shoulder I point at him threateningly.

"Don't you fucking move," I snarl. I'm angrier with myself than I am with him, though. Haven't I learnt my lesson by now about leaving dangerous people around my family? "Don't think I didn't just see what you did to my sister."

I go to Deb's floppy, twitchy form and crouch before her, terrified of what I'll find. Five years ago she took a bullet to the brain and I'm aware from medical files provided to me by my new employer that this has left her with minor brain damage, and more specifically, epilepsy. I saw her first seizure. It killed her. I remember with nightmarish clarity the strain in my muscles as I pumped on her chest to restart her heart, the warmth of the air I exhaled into her mouth to inflate her lungs, the brightness of the blood that ran out her nose from her injured brain.

That seizure was my fault, and it was only thanks to a miracle that she was brought back. I repaid Fate for that miracle by getting the fuck out of Debra's life. Is this fit any less my fault? She wouldn't be here tonight if she didn't believe me dead.

Well, she's not dead this time. I grasp Deb's upper arms and pull her into a sitting position against the wall. It's the first time I've touched her since I stole into her recovery room after her traumatic labour on my birthday four years ago. Her muscles, still toned and defined, are loose and soft under her clammy skin, and her head tips to the side, unable to support its own weight in this moment of weakness and, apparently, trying to look around for Matthews.

"Deb?" I try to shift into her range of vision to see her eyes. I have to brush her hair back off her face. It's damp with sweat at the roots and tacky with blood at the ends. I press my hand onto the wound on her neck automatically. I can feel the outward pressure of her pulse pumping it out against my skin but I still withdraw it to look at how much has left her. It's enough to be worried, so I put my hand back. I see her eyes, usually hazel but tonight black with oversized pupils, attempt to focus on my face. She's in a rough sort of way but maybe she's coming around. "Jesus, Deb. Are you alright? Can you hear me?"

I can't tell if she does. She stares at me with a gaze that struggles to focus. Her eyes rove very slowly across me, taking in my hair, my eyebrows, my eyes, my mouth, my short beard, even what I'm wearing. I get the distinct impression that she doesn't quite know what she's looking at. Her blank expression scares me almost as much as the seizure itself. Was she really robbed of so much oxygen just in that short fit that she's now left impaired and unable to recognise me? Have I come so far after so long only to find her two minutes too late?

"Can you hear me?" I demand, overriding the impulse to shake her only with difficulty. She blinks.

"I… I hear you," she manages eventually. Her speech is slurred, slow, an aftereffect of the chemical overload in her brain. I exhale heavily, relieved. She's still in there. We might still be able to salvage this night; if her injuries aren't so serious I can't have her on her way without the assistance of 911, that is. She's strong enough now to sit up unaided, so, keeping one hand on her bleeding neck I use the other to quickly assess the rest of her body. Her torso seems fine. There's no blood, no tear in her black clothing and when I gently probe her ribs for breaks she doesn't wince. Her limp arms lie awkwardly in her lap and I feel along them for broken bones. At her left wrist I pause as I recognise my watch strapped on. She's wearing the watch I gave Harrison in the days before I left them. I delicately drop her hand back onto her lap, further unsettled to realise she's wearing my gloves. I don't know what to make of that.

I think it upsets me more than anything else. That she still misses me so much; that she's wearing me here, tonight, and how that reinforces the concept that she came here with dark purpose.

I move my attention to her legs, recalling that she was down when I got in here – did Matthews injure her the way she then injured him? – and thinking I'm less likely to cause myself any further upset, but it's when my hand is on her knee that she freaks out. Muscles that were loose and limp moments before suddenly go taut and she recoils with a weak but unexpected burst of energy.

"Get away from me!" she shrieks, shoving at my chest. I back off and raise my hands helplessly, unsure. Did I hurt her? From the way she slides her legs closer to herself I can't determine any pain or injury there. She stares at me with wild eyes, all the sharpness and depth I am used to seeing there a distant shade in this moment. Blood runs again from her wound and she slaps a hand over it, pointing at me accusingly with the other. "Don't touch me! Stay away!" She stares at my hand, and down at the floor where her blood drips from my fingers. Her stricken expression tears at my heart. "What the fuck?" she demands, and I realise she's confused. Her overloaded brain mightn't recall the minutes leading up to the fit; maybe she just awoke to find herself bleeding on the floor of a kill room with no concept of how she got here. Her breathing comes faster. She's panicking. "What the fuck?!"

I want to calm her down so I explain clearly, "You had a seizure."

I was worried about my Deb's clarity but her next words are so her. "I know I had a fucking seizure, you moron," she snaps at me, control of her mouth back. She remembers. She knows what she's doing here. She knows that a sentence isn't complete without 'fuck'. "I'm talking about you. What the fuck?"

Her aggression sparks annoyance in me, the way it always did before.

"I could ask you the same," I retort. I look around and actually look this time. If it wasn't so devastating it would be impressive. Deb has dotted every 'i', crossed every 't' of preparing for this kill. The room is perfect. The location is ideal. The takedown was beautifully executed. But this is Deb. The blood on the floor is half hers, and the victim is Tom Matthews. The knife – fuck me – it's mine, the one I used to torture and murder Evelyn Vogel and which Tom used to gut me in front of my son. Where the fuck did Deb get that?! I gesture uselessly at our horror-film surroundings. "What is this? What were you thinking?"

My sister stares back at me with the same degree of incredulity that I offer her. Behind me I'm vaguely aware of Matthews watching us, but he's not moving so I can ignore him for now.

"What was I thinking?" Deb repeats, disbelieving. "This was your idea!"

I had hope for her mental state but now my blood runs cold. "My idea?" How could she interpret this as my idea? I haven't seen her in more than four fucking years! She hasn't seen me in five! She thought I was dead!

But I'm made forcibly aware by my sense of memory that when I killed Vogel, my traumatised mind let me put responsibility for those decisions onto the ghost of Debra, and I wonder fleetingly whether Deb's mind has done the same for her.

No. I won't believe that. This has all been a mistake, all of it. She's not haunted. She must just mean this is what I would have done.

And she'd be right.

"I never wanted this for you. I left you so you could escape all this." I gesture again at the room. I can't believe she'd create this; I can't believe she would believe I would have encouraged this. "I told you to let it all go. You were never meant to know. You can't kill someone."

"You told me to kill him," she snaps back at me with conviction, and I see it in her eyes. Her pupils have shrunk down to a controlled size and she's regained her focus, and I see him slinking in their depths.

He won her. I left and the darkness seduced her.

She's gone.

"You came here with me," Deb reminds me irritably, confirming the fear. She's host to a dark passenger so powerful her mind gives it form. My form. Her darkness manifested itself as hallucinations of me and she allowed it to convince her to carry out this terrible plan. It must have been as believable as Deb's ghost was for me in the hours I thought I'd lost her. The disbelief in her expression betrays that even now, she's utterly taken with her mind's cruel illusions. She thinks I am one of them. How fully it has seduced her. I wonder if she at least struggled with it; I wonder if she fought it for control and tried to fend it off with morality and reason.

I don't suppose it matters. Whatever weapons of light she wielded she lost, and she's here regardless.

And so am I. Maybe I can drag her back.

"I came here to stop you," I say firmly, trying to win her back with facts. "I saw him pull his gun on you and I saw you take him down." There's a smear of her blood on her forehead and automatically I reach out to rub it away, but she shies away and I pull back to avoid scaring her. "I tried to get in here in time to stop you but you'd already started reacting to the adrenaline."

My version of events conflicts with what she believed and she frowns. I become aware of just how long it's been since I last saw her. She's older. There are faint lines around the edges of her eyes that I know weren't there before, but five years and two unexpected children will do that to you. In her hairline I can see the whitish blemish that is her bullet scar from Vogel's unlucky shot. I'm sure that under her clothes she is different again, scarred from the events of that last fortnight we spent together, when years of mistakes and horrors fell upon us and she took the brunt of it all for me and nearly paid with her life.

"What are you?" she asks me, curiously. In my head I hear the echo of her words. What are you, Deb? In my last hours as Dexter Morgan I accepted a truth I'd been avoiding – that Deb was a killer, too – but in my memories of her, in my every daily thought of her, I've managed to omit that fact. I resumed picturing her the way I wanted to see her. This harsh reminder is a slap in the face.

"How?" Matthews asks, panting beside the table. "How did you survive?" I look to him but won't answer that. Our father's friend pulls himself up using the plastic-coated table that was meant to be the place he died. "How are you here?"

Deb's frown deepens and she demands of him, "You can see him?" Then she demands of me, "How can he see you?" There's a pause, and then her breath catches in realisation and tears spring to her eyes. Is she coming out of her delirium? Is that entirely positive? "Are you real? You can't be real."

I don't know what to say. I shouldn't even be in here. I shouldn't have interfered. But if I'd stayed outside, I'd now be watching Matthews shuffling awkwardly out the door with his phone connected to the station, and Deb would be dead. No course of action that allowed my sister to die could possibly have been the right one. But now I'm faced with a difficult situation. If Deb accepts I'm real then she also accepts I've lied to her and hidden from her all this time, and I break her heart for the umpteenth time. If she doesn't accept it, she remains in her hallucination and her darkness wins another round. Can I send her home to her family like this?

Tom Matthews is uncomfortably pulling himself upright with the help of the table.

"We can discuss it at the station," he says. He looks god-awful, pale and spilling blood everywhere. He'll bleed out before Deb does.

When he gets into an independent standing position Deb panics. She lurches clumsily forward and grasps for the knife beside us. I quickly stop her, pulling it away, and she whips her hand away from me, apparently still confronted by physical contact. Matthews notices and limps hurriedly for the front door, spotting his opportunity for escape. Deb struggles to get to her feet, to go after him. Many of her muscles won't respond in coordinated efforts but she comes close. Terrified of her making good on her plan, I reach across her and pin her to the wall by her shoulders. She strains against me.

"I can't let him get away," she pleads. "He'll report me. I'll be arrested!" She looks directly into my eyes, into my soul, and the urgency of her appeal is communicated in the unrestrained dread I see in her. A sob hitches in her throat and for the first time she touches me. Her hands wrap around my forearms desperately. "Stop looking at me like I'm such a fucking disappointment and help me!"

I can't refuse her. How can she still play me so well, years out of practice as she should be? How does she still know that word would win me over? Of course I can't let Matthews report this; of course I can't let Deb go to prison. Reluctantly I release her and go after Matthews. He's at the door but he's slow with injury and I'm there in only a few steps. I sling an arm over his shoulder and across his chest and yank him backwards. I kick the door shut to keep the noise in and throw Matthews back towards my sister. He lands heavily on the floor and rolls through the blood. Now I have to think what we'll do with him to keep this under wraps.

Deb doesn't think. She snatches up the knife and I'm not fast enough to stop her.

"Deb, no!" I exclaim, launching myself at her. She brings it down at Tom's chest. My hands close over her wrists and I mean to pull upwards, to stop this before she finishes her most epic mistake, but either I don't or I don't pull hard enough because then the blade sinks deep between the deputy chief's ribs and blood spurts over Deb's hands and mine.

It's hot and sticky. Fresh. Messy.

Didn't I dream of this for weeks? Didn't I desire this with a dark passion that was almost sexual? Wasn't it sexy and satisfying when I killed Vogel just like this with Deb's ghost?

In life, in this moment of ultra-realism, of desperation and horrific reunion, it is neither.

I have pulled on Deb's hands and now the knife, my knife, comes sliding out of Matthews' chest with a sickening sucking sound. Deb releases it immediately and it clatters to the floor. I let her go; who the fuck is she?! My handprints are on her wrists, and I know it's symbolic. This is as much my responsibility as hers. My prints are on every terrible thing she does.

What did I create?

What did I break?

Thomas Matthews can't draw a full breath. His eyes are wide with shock and death starts to draw him away.

"I should've… should've known…" he stutters. "Morgans… You're… you're as… bad as… each other…"

He was our dad's best friend. He was the one who called me at school when Harry died. He was the one who hugged Deb and I when we arrived at the house that night, me in my sleeping shorts and she in a slinky sparkly party dress with glitter paint all up her arms. And he dies. At my sister's hand. We look up at each other and I can see in her face that she's having as much trouble recognising me as I'm having in recognising her.

There's no glitter this time. I wonder if she'd be easier to recognise if she was wearing glitter.

"What have you done?" I whisper. It's rhetorical – I saw what she did, but I'm unable to reconcile the facts with what I thought I knew. Isn't she my baby sister? Isn't she the cleanest cop in Miami? Isn't she Harrison's idol? Isn't she Quinn's love, and a little girl's doting mother? But I can't ignore that she planned this. She was the game master here, not one of the pieces. She had Lumen help her set this room up. She lured Thomas Matthews out here in the middle of the night and she came here prepared with a taser and my knife. She wore my gloves and my watch. This was all painfully deliberate.

I don't know whether there's any going back from this.

"I had to, Dex," Deb tries to explain, beginning to calm down just as I start to fall victim to panic. "He was going to ruin everything-"

"What, and you didn't just do that yourself?" I demand, voice and temper rising. "This isn't you. Look at what you just did! I saw what he just did to you but you're the one who drew him out here in the first place. What the hell for, Deb?"

She returns to the defensive Debra I grew up knowing how to argue with. "For your kid, Dexter." I blink; no one's addressed me by that name since I left Miami. "For our kids. Matthews was meddling, trying to create another you in Harrison." She shakes head, appealing to me to understand. "I couldn't let that go. I had to stop him."

I feel like she's punched me in the stomach. Harrison? I thought he was safe with her, safe with Quinn. I didn't count on Matthews' insidiousness poisoning my son's existence.

I hang my head, ashamed with myself. I left my family with wolves. I left Deb alone to defend them, armed only with knowledge she couldn't share and weapons I now berate her for using. This wasn't just about mislaid revenge. This was about family. What does Deb know about protecting her family but what she learned from me?

I now understand the desperation I felt in her as I held her down and Tom made his attempted escape. I understand the premeditation. I understand the reckless swiftness with which she went for the knife and brought it down on our old friend.

My son's future was on the line. I draw a slow breath. Isn't this why I left my child with her? Didn't I always know there was no length my sister would not go to for my son? Isn't that why I refused to let Hannah take him, even when she had Deb at knifepoint?

"I didn't know," I tell her honestly. "I thought you were all safe."

"Are you real?" Deb asks softly, her delirium cracking. She clings to what shreds of sanity she can find in herself; she claws at reason and logic wherever she finds it. "Who are you?"

"Who are you?" is all I can ask in reply. Who are we, that after five years of painful separation this is our reunion? Blood, death and plastic? We both look around us and take in what we've done. Rather, what she's done, but what I've inspired in her.

"That's my third," she murmurs. Her third murder. My little sister the murderer. This isn't where she should be. This isn't the scene I should have found her in.

"You should go," I mutter, trying to shift my frame of mind from 'panicked big brother' to 'professional assassin' and thinking through how best to manage this catastrophe. She's set the room up well. I can clean this place up easily enough. The body… I suppose I can deal with that, too. "Get your neck looked at. I'll take care of all this."

Her eyes widen in anxiousness. "No, I'm staying. I started this and I'm going to finish it."

Stubborn to the fucking last. I sigh. "Deb-"

"This is my fucking mess."

"And you can't clean it up on your own."

"So are you going to help me?"

She's quick as ever and she knows exactly where my heart is, so no strike ever goes awry. I offer her a helpless look. I can't help her. I wasn't meant to come here at all! I squeeze my eyes shut against the impossibility of my predicament. Deb is a killer and she wants my help covering up a brutal murder. This is not like La Guerta's death, which was a split-second choice that could then not be taken back. This is bad. Matthews' death will be thoroughly investigated and I'm not around to deflect the line of fire like I was last time. I'm dead. I'm not meant to be here. I wish I wasn't here. Even more I wish she wasn't here, and that the events of the last ten minutes had never happened.

But they did, and we're here, in the aftermath, and she's still my sister and the love of my life.

"Of course I'll fucking help you," I murmur finally. "I'd never let anything happen to you; you know that." I open my eyes and I'm looking straight into hers. She's older and so am I and she's changed and so have I, but now that I look I recognise her as completely as I would have five years ago when I left her life. She's my sister. Chubby-cheeked babbling baby Debra with my hand in her mouth. Pigtailed stubborn little Deb in the back of her mom's car on the first day of school. Angry angsty teen Deb locking herself in my car with me. Shattered and shocked Lieutenant Debra Morgan lowering her gun in the church when I asked her to, when she should have arrested me. Whatever she does, whatever she becomes, however long I turn away, when I turn back this one fact won't have changed, and neither will the fact that I love her like the Earth loves the sun. "Do you still have my boat?"

"I still have a key."

"Does anyone know you're here? Did anyone see you?" I press. This has to be perfect. I did not live five years without her and my children so I could read about her jail sentence in the paper.

"No. I covered my tracks."

"Jesus, Debra." I have to look away from her, recognising as much of myself in her as I see of her. Have we traded bodies? Is she me now, as I have struggled against my nature to become her? "Alright. We've got to do this fast." I stand and offer her my hand. "Come on. I'll show you."

She looks at my hand for so long. I see the hesitation in her face, and I watch as sanity and Brian Moser chase each other behind her eyes. It was a slippery slope for her before and now with the brain injury I see it's even worse. She's delicate, shaky, but not in the way people may expect. She's not sure she wants to touch me. She's afraid of confirming to herself that I'm really here – that I've hidden from her and left her alone in this world willingly, which I suspect I won't be readily forgiven for – and equally afraid of finding me to be another shade of her hallucinations. Deb likes control. That she might have lost her mind must be as frightening for her as it is for me.

She makes her decision and firmly accepts my hand. I see realisation fill her eyes and I know our problems have just started.

"Tonight's the night, Debra."