Chapter Text
I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth.
- Wishbone, Richard Siken
Dexter looks different from the last time Brian saw him.
Not as if that’s a surprise. It’s been nearly a decade; they’ve all changed. Age has caught up to them both. In Oregon, Brian found him living in a hovel in the woods, far out from society, in a self-imposed, self-indulgent exile. His hair had run wild on him, beard grown to cover half his face, turning his appearance from deceptively boyish to something rugged, harsher. He traded Miami prints for flannel, palm trees for loggers and woodcutters and the constant sound of whirring chainsaws.
Dexter stands on his doorstep now, trading Oregon for New Hampshire. His beard is gone, save for a day’s old stubble, lining his jaw and chin, the coarse ginger hairs now gray with age. His hair has turned a muted shade of brown, rather than the feathery reddish sheen it used to have. Brian wonders if it’s a dye or a simple trick of nature, his brother no longer a red head. There are dark circles under his eyes, red-rimmed and pale-faced, like he hadn’t gotten much sleep. He’s stockier now, more ragged around the edges, his body type changing with age as he filled out.
Brian expected to never see him again. He disappeared into the vast swath of the country shortly after Brian found him, determined to lose sight of all that was Dexter Morgan, if he couldn’t melt into the sea.
“Dexter,” Brian breathes. The sight of Dexter cracks him open, like lightning striking, and for a moment, he cannot think of what to do, or say, the thoughts disappearing from his head, his vision narrowing down to his brother under the porch light, casting him aglow as if he’s a bonafide angel; he’s seized by the urge to reach for him and grab him before he disappears into gossamer mist—to hug him, touch him, kiss him—
The last time he saw him, it’d ended in a fight; it always does. He said the wrong thing to a grieving Dexter, and blew up his chances yet again, a lesson he just won’t learn—but if Dexter is thinking of their last fight, it doesn’t show on his face. A ghost of a smile tilts his lips up, a warm light flickering across his baby brother’s face.
“Brian,” Dexter says. He’s vibrating with anxious energy, shivering with the New England winter descending upon them. Invite him in, Brian tells himself but motion at the edges of his vision catches his eye, and a head pokes his way into the doorframe, next to his brother, as if he were hiding out of sight while Dexter rang the doorbell, like a kid playing ding dong ditch. The head gradually steps out from the unseen corners of his porch and slips alongside Dexter, a smaller, more slender figure standing just a step behind his shoulder, as if using Dexter for a shield—and Brian realizes it’s a boy. He can’t tell his age beyond adolescence, at that stage where he could be anywhere between fourteen and twenty-one, stuck in the liminal space of youth. His slim body disappeared inside a puffy winter jacket, his cheeks and nose are ruddy red with the cold, while the rest of his face has turned a far more sallow shade of pale, color drained out of him.
He should ask who this kid is—a new apprentice? An offering? A kill, perhaps? He should ask. But he looks back at his brother’s gaze, his gaze softer than Brian ever expected to see again, and fuck it.
Brian reaches forward and wraps his arms around his little brother, clinging on to him tightly, burying his face in his shoulder. His brother smells starkly of day-old sweat, and the faint hint of blood clinging to him. As always, Dexter freezes up at the contact, as if he doesn’t know what a hug is and needs to take a moment to remember it. But he returns the gesture all the same after a few seconds, wrapping his arms gingerly around Brian as if he’s afraid he’ll hurt him.
The boy stands behind them both; his shoulders are hunched, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides, not quite able to figure out what to do with them. He's gazing directly at Brian, over Dexter’s shoulders, his eyebrows drawn, frown lines pulling at his face. Something calculating in those green eyes, hawk-like, more than the dull stare of an average teenager.
It makes him want to claw his fingers into Dexter’s back even deeper, but he forces himself to pull away and tears his stare off the teenage boy, leaving his hands on Dexter’s shoulders as they lock eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. “Thought you were...” He trails off, letting the silence speak for itself. Thought you didn’t want me around. Thought I was a bad influence? Thought you didn’t want to kill anymore.
“We need a place to lie low for a bit,” Dexter says. He does this funny little thing, bouncing on the balls of his feet, as if he can’t be still, and Brian realizes he’s excited—to see him, perhaps?
Nah. That can’t be it.
Before Brian can ask, Dexter finally acknowledges the extra human being at his back, stepping to the side just enough so the boy fills up Brian’s vision. Dexter places his palms on the boy’s shoulders, squeezing lightly, as he comes to slip behind him, and gives him a little nudge forward on the steps, and like he’s presenting the boy to him.
“This is my son, Harrison,” he says, a lightness in his voice and a grin splitting his face, as if he's absolutely delighted to be here, a sight so incongruent with what Brian knows to be true that it knocks the breath out of him. “You remember Harrison, right?”
“I don’t,” the kid mutters, not-so-under his breath, hands shoved in his jacket pockets.
Dexter laughs, as if the kid’s rudeness is funny to him. “Harrison, this is your uncle,” he says, brimming with renewed energy, a giddiness to his tone. As if Harrison is still a small child being introduced to a new distant relative and not a whole teenager. As if Brian is even remotely prepared for this.
Brian can’t say anything, words freezing before they leave his mouth. Didn’t you leave that kid in Argentina? Didn’t you say that you couldn’t raise him and be a serial killer at the same time? That he was better off without you?
Memories of their last fight spark in his brain, moments he worked to forget—his brother retreating into himself, and Brian trying so hard to tell him that it didn’t matter his fake sister was dead and son was gone, he’s still here. I’m here. I was here first.
Now Dexter’s practically glowing, a stark contrast to the kid’s sheer unhappiness—eyes narrowed, guarded stance. Unimpressed, the way most teenagers are. Brian wonders what he’s told him about him.
“Harrison,” Brian says slowly, drawing out his name as if it's unfamiliar in his mouth. Harrison, named for Harry Morgan; it felt like a slap in the face at the time. It still feels a little like being slapped in the face.
The boy cocks his head, head inclined up, eyes raking over Brian. He has Brian’s cold gaze, the look he gets when he’s trying to figure out just how to pull something apart. “I don’t remember ever meeting you,” he says.
“You were very young,” Brian says, running off half-remembered moments with his brother—precious and few and far in between. “A baby.”
A baby he wanted nothing to do with. He finds himself wondering if Dexter has given the kid an explanation for why he was never in his life? Has Daddy told you Uncle Brian kills people? Has Daddy told you he kills people?
He locks eyes with the kid, trying to figure him out. His green eyes are a shade off from Dexter’s, more like his mother than his father. He can’t tell how much the kid knows, all he gets off him is sullenness.
He glances back at Dexter, eyebrow arching, waiting for him to take the lead.
“Can we come in?” Dexter asks instead. “I need...we need to lie low.”
As if Brian would tell him no. As if Brian would ever tell him no. That’s why they’re here in the first place.
*
Brian traded condos and apartments for a mobile home, the sort of place he used to look down on back when he lived in Miami, but now found suited his needs just fine. It’s a large, open space, a double-wide that gave him just enough room to be comfortable in, instead of a long, claustrophobic hallway. He has a porch large enough to sit on, to set a table down if he so wished to, covered with an awning to protect him from the New Hampshire snowstorms. He has a living space that opens into a small kitchen, and a hall that leads into a bedroom and the private bathroom. Brian keeps everything very neat. He had no personal pictures to put up, so he opted to put art on the wall—he always did appreciate other people’s attempts to capture the human form, even if his brother didn’t.
He had opted out of living in a co-op, choosing a secluded piece of land instead of a park surrounded by neighbors. He was never much of a joiner. The mobile home sits in a patch of woods, accessible by long winding backroads. Any neighbors nearby were far enough away that no one would hear any screams coming from his home.
Not that screams happened often. Unlike Dexter, he didn’t choose boring, listless retirement, but he does have to space out a kill when the urge rises—whet his appetite in slow, careful bites.
“So what brings you to New Hampshire?” Brian asks, sitting across from his brother at his tiny kitchenette table. He slides over a coffee cup to Dexter, who takes it gratefully even though it’s nearly midnight. “Last I checked, you were in upstate New York, living the quiet life.”
Brian swears he didn’t add any extra sarcasm to quiet life, but Harrison makes a low sound in his throat like a scoff as Dexter winces. Brian turns to glance at him—the boy did not find it fit to join them, choosing to stand in his living room instead, eyes roving over his furniture, his coffee table, his television system. He kept his puffer jacket on, like he might still leave, not deigning to glance at either of them.
Brian turns back to his brother, eyebrows arched. Why is he here? Brian mouths at him. It’s a question he knows he can’t get a good answer to, not as long as Harrison is in ear shot—see, what he really wants to know is how much he can say in front of the kid. He isn’t sure how he, Dear Uncle Brian, fits into this picture.
“It’s a long story,” Dexter says, eyes glancing over to his son, the expression on his face oddly sheepish, as if he were embarrassed.
“So tell it,” he says. “I got time. You’re the one who came here.” There’s a bite to his voice that he doesn’t intend—or maybe he does, maybe he can’t resist a little—the last fight’s bruises still feel just as fresh, nearly a decade later.
“It’s...complicated—”
“Dad,” the boy interrupts, who finally glances at them from his living room. His voice is strong and firm, cutting through their whispers. “Just tell him.”
And Dexter does, as if he needed Harrison’s permission more than he needed his brother’s approval; Brian’s not sure how he feels about that.
Dexter explains in short, clipped phrases, a cliff’s notes version of events—the serial killer in Iron Lake, Harrison finding him in an impressive cross country hike, the girlfriend who finally learned the truth, him and the boy on the run from the cops.
“Can’t be much of a manhunt, if I haven’t heard anything yet,” Brian says. He always thought if his brother was truly well caught and discovered, The Bay Harbor Butcher would be front page news, pictures plastered everywhere, a great white whale for the FBI; it came close in Miami once Dexter’s underwater graveyard was discovered, something Brian himself toyed with but decided he didn’t want his brother to be in anyone’s crosshairs but his own—and even then, tales of the Bay Harbor Butcher only rocked the state; the rest of the country had wrote it off as Florida Man. Brian makes a mental note to look into it tomorrow, see if anyone’s talking about the Bay Harbor Butcher yet again.
Dexter shrugs, hand wrapped the coffee cup. “I don’t know what Angela told everyone. She didn’t have much evidence. Maybe I’m just a suspect in a couple of murders, officially...”
He trails off, eyes flickering over to his son on officially, as if waiting for a reaction.
Brian also has half his gaze on the boy, keeping him in the corner of his eye—just out of the edges of his vision, scuttling around like a scavenger.
Harrison spent the conversation silent, but touching his things— running his hands over the TV, tracing the patterns of picture frames, picking up a book off the coffee table, a book that held no meaning, that he’d just as soon replace with a sudoku puzzle. He didn’t react to Dexter’s story—implying, at the very least, that he’s aware of who his father is, that Dexter either told him or he figured it out himself—but he’s restless, as if he’s ready to bolt at any moment, hand reaching back to touch the straps of his backpack every now and then.
Brian can’t help but keep him in his periphery. As if he could sense it, the boy’s gaze slides over to him, and their eyes briefly lock for a moment, before slipping back studying his surroundings. Dark, assessing eyes, even at a distance.
Dexter’s son. Dexter’s kid. Little Dexter Jr. He’d been a boring baby, and Dexter was even more boring about him, fully determined to never let Dexter-the-serial-killer and Dexter-the-father mix up. It’d always been weird to watch his brother with the kid—like watching a domesticated animal in the zoo, not sure what to do if the bars ever went back down.
He had no idea what to make of him now.
“Can we stay here?” Dexter asks, interrupting his thoughts. He leans in closer, as if this question is a secret, even though it’s why they both came here. “Just until we get some fake passports sorted out. It won’t be long, I promise.”
It won’t be long. As if that’s what he wants, to rush him out of here.
“Of course you can stay,” he says, turning back to face his brother. Dexter has a spot of blood on his head, just under his hairline; you'd think he would have washed off by now. Stopped at some gas station and cleaned up. Brian reaches up, unknowingly, unthinkingly, to place his thumb on his brother’s forehead, trying to swipe the blood away, but Dexter’s eyes flicker, and Brian can see the note of panic flash across his face.
He stops himself. He doesn’t touch his brother—not here, anyway, not where the kid can see. Still, it stings—Brian isn’t an animal, he has a strong sense of self-preservation. He isn’t going to launch himself at his brother with his son two steps away.
“You should shower,” he tells him.
Behind him, the kid makes a noise, somewhere low in his throat, almost like a scoff, a sound that burrows its way under Brian’s skin.
Brian has not seen his brother in years. He does not want to keep one eye on a potentially unruly, disdainful teenager or hear comments from the peanut gallery.
He wants his brother all to himself.
“Is something funny?” He asks, standing up. Immediately, he feels Dexter stand up as well, a looming shadow beside him, lingering at his back.
The kid is leaning over his coffee table, examining the books Brian left there—one science journal he swiped from work, one Rothko art book that came with the house, one Gray’s Anatomy textbook—before turning back to the modestly sized television sitting on the TV stand.
“You have an actual TV,” he says, walking around the coffee table. “Dad didn’t have one in his cabin.”
It’s the most he’s spoken to Brian, and his voice is different than he had imagined—stronger, surer of himself, than the shyness he showed outside.
“Well, your dad doesn’t like watching anything besides nature documentaries,” he says, sparing a look back at his brother. Dexter’s face crumples into a displaced frown, but he doesn’t protest the description. “But I like to keep up with pop culture.”
Harrison hums, turns back to staring at the adjacent bookshelf, running his fingers over dusty shelves.
“See, that’s not so bad,” Dexter pipes in, entirely too cheerful for 2:14 in the morning. “You’ll have a TV to watch now. I bet Brian has Netflix.”
Dexter sounds like a facsimile of a sitcom Dad, awkwardly fitting, and Brian can tell Harrison sees right through it. The look Harrison shoots his father is withering. Brian almost feels defensive on his behalf.
“Yeah, because that makes up for being on the run and leaving behind all my friends and girlfriend and not having a place to live.”
Dexter winces.
“I have HBO,” Brian adds, trying to redirect. He doesn’t particularly want to deal with an angry, bratty teenager right now. “You’re lucky you caught me. Most days I’m doing overnights at the hospital.”
“Oh,” Harrison says, picking up a paperweight from the bookshelf—a solid glass ball, heavy in hand, could make a useful blunt instrument if you tried hard enough—and turning back to face him. “You work at a hospital? Dad said you were a serial killer.”
Brian blinks. The kid does not blink back. There is something hard in his stare—a wall, the vaguest sneer of contempt. Brian looks back towards Dexter, who is avoiding his gaze like a misbehaving kid, eyes going back and forth between Harrison and the floor.
Brian feels like he missed a step somewhere. He makes a noise like a bird chirp, strange and caught in his throat.
“You told him?” He asks his brother. Just how much does he know? He needs to get Dexter alone; he can’t talk like this with this unknown variable.
Dexter’s shrug is criminally casual. “We have an open-honest policy,” he says carefully.
The kid snorts, with all the derision a teenager can muster. When Brian looks back at him again, he meets his stare head on—unflinching, not looking away, eyes roving over Brian’s body like he’s studying him for weak points.
Brian notices it then, the familiar look in his eye—the dark passenger looking out—or at least, that’s what Dexter would call it. Brian called it being fucked up, but it’s all the same in the end—that thread of darkness that ran through them both.
He mentioned that to Dexter, that time before they took off to Nebraska together, driving down a dark highway and leaving the boy behind.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Brian asks carefully.
“We talked about it in the car,” Dexter interjects before Harrison can answer—long-suffering, the heels of a never-ending conversation, speaking over him. “He said he’d be fine with it, as long as we get to Canada soon, right?” Dexter says, his gaze pointed as he steps closer.
As long as we get to Canada. Oh.
It’s not surprising; Brian has gotten used to the disappointment his brother causes, the way he never stays, slipping out of reach—but it always stings, leaving his heart burning in his chest.
“I said that it’s fine. I already know Dad’s code is bullshit,” Harrison snipes, his teeth clinking loud in the quiet room. That makes two of them, Brian thinks.
“So the fact that Dad hasn’t killed you or taken you out is just...” Harrison angrily swipes through the air with his hand. “Whatever. It’s not like I expected better.”
“Harrison—” Dexter steps forward, past Brian, so he can see the back of his head, the slope and stance of his body. “It’ll be different this time, it’s not like—”
Harrison cuts him off, clearly not wanting to have this argument here. “Where’s the bathroom?”
Brian points him down the hall, and Harrison darts away from them. He half wonders if he’s planning on jumping out the window. With him gone, Brian feels like the air is clearing up again, and he steps over to his brother until he’s close enough to breathe him in.
“You told him,” he hisses under his breath, keeping his voice low, low enough to stay aware of the sound of running water and listen for the sound of the toilet flushing. “What were you thinking? You’re just going around confessing everything? No wonder your girlfriend caught you.”
How could you expose me like this?
It’s not horror he feels—Brian lacks the ability to process horror in the same way as most people do; it's hard to feel horrified by most things after watching your mother get sawed into pieces—but there’s a growing sense of dread in his belly, unable to account for all the new variables. Harrison’s eyes on him felt like his skin being slowly, laboriously peeled off.
Dexter shrugs, as if this is a casual thing. It’s awkward on his body, and has him leaning back away from Brian. “I was thinking of trying to be honest with my son,” Dexter says.
Brian doesn’t get it. “Trying to?”
“He’s my son,” he says, hands in his pockets, withholding something back, even as he professes honesty. “I don’t want to lie to him anymore.”
*
His brother hands him a pile of blankets, made of soft breathable cotton, heat-trapping. Beige and soft whites, warm to the touch. Brian’s fingers linger as he hands them over, thumb over the back of his hand, and Dexter tries to not let that affect him—Brian touching him for the first time in nearly a decade. Instead, he breathes him in, sharp and sweet, like an animal, sniffing his brother’s scent in the air (pinewood and something muskier), sucking it into his lungs like it could be a part of him.
“You don’t have to do that,” Dexter says. Under his hand, his brother traces the lines of his finger, looking for the ridges in his knuckles. He does it just out of reach, away from both their eyes. Plausible deniability.
Brian grins, blindingly white.
“I assume you don’t have any sleepwear?” he says. He turns back around to head to the dark brown wooden bureau, opening the bottom drawer. He leaves Dexter standing over the bed, leaves him staring at the smooth lines of Brian’s back. His brother looked good, slender, a pale pallor over his skin, but it's fitting, given the season. There's more gray in his hair than last time—he stopped dying it completely dark at some point—and there are more lines around his eyes now, his temples, but the years have been kinder to him. He could have stepped out of yesterday.
“I’m not sure if my size fits you. You’re a little long in the tooth there—but we’ll make do, won’t we?”
There’s a playful cadence to his brother’s voice, which isn’t at all what Dexter was expecting when he dropped in here, not after the last words they traded.
“Had to pack light,” he offers, by way of explanation. With the cabin burning down, and his sudden exit from the police station—there wasn’t much either of them could carry, or even go back for. “I can sleep in my clothes.”
His brother’s head turns back to look at him. “You don’t have to,” Brian says, plainly and simply, his expression softening. He lets those words hang in the air, filling the room with a strange charge. “I can take care of you, while you’re here.”
Take care of me. It’s always startling to remember that Brian does in fact have some big brother instinct, that as a child he did take care of Dexter. It’s...surreal, being face to face with him. Almost like it’s not really happening. Almost like he’s not really here.
“Okay,” Dexter agrees, and his brother smiles.
“The both of you need new clothes,” Brian says, head cocked. “I’m going to have to take you both shopping.”
“I appreciate that. And this,” Dexter says, holding up the pile of blankets in his hands. Harry taught him the code, but Doris taught him to be polite. Even to serial killer brothers. “I can sleep on the floor, if that’s easier for you,” he adds. He almost wishes he could take the couch—but he imagines Harrison will glare daggers into his back all night, and Dexter wanted a break from his son’s bitter disappointment.
How to win back his son? Some may say he’s well on his way—he came with him, didn’t he? Dropped his gun, however unhappy he seemed about it—but the thought of his son angry at him, with no resolution in sight, makes the ground feel vaguely unsettled beneath him.
Maybe , Debra says, appearing behind Dexter, arms folded across her chest, eyes narrowed in irritation. She pointedly doesn’t look at Brian. You shouldn’t have killed someone he actually liked. Kinda fucked up there.
“You can take the bed, Dexter,” Brian interrupts her, giving Dexter no room to argue with Deb, and she’s gone, just like that, from the moment his brother spoke. “It’s big enough for two, we’ll just use separate blankets—”
“I don’t want to put you out.”
“You’re on the run from the law, and you’ve told your son all about me, it seems,” Brian laughs, a sharp tinge to his voice, irritation creeping in. “You’re already putting me out.”
“Brian—”
“Relax,” his brother says, taking a slow step closer. “I’m happy to see you. Fugitive and all. We can share a bed.” He arches an eyebrow. “Or do you think I’m going to molest you in your sleep?”
A pause. Dexter’s mind flashes back to brief stolen moments, a kiss here and there, that time they finally crossed a line and consummated the red lines of destiny that tied them together, before Dexter ran back to his new family. For a moment, he can’t say anything—the desired effect, he’s sure, rendering him speechless.
They were young men then—well, younger than now, at least—but it feels far too long ago. Impossible to recapture. Unthinkable. He’s not a young man anymore.
“No, Brian,” he says softly. “I don’t think you would do that.”
Brian walks closer, until he’s standing before him, close enough to lean in and smell him, sniff out any weakness. Dexter doesn’t step back, because prey animals do that—back away from advancing predators—but he and Brian have always been toe-to-toe.
“You don’t have to leave so soon,” Brian says. There’s a plea in his voice when he speaks, and Dexter wants to answer it. “You can stay here. As long as you want. You and your boy.”
Oh, isn’t that a nice fantasy? Living with his brother, Harrison between them, sharing a life together. In some distant, dark, previously buried corner of his mind, Dexter daydreamed about that, back when Harrison was a baby. Brian showed up after Rita’s death, for “moral support”; the irony being he was supportive. He was a perfect big brother. Dexter was tempted to run off with him, raise Harrison, just the two of them—a crazy, deranged fantasy.
He didn’t run off with him. He stayed behind for Deb. He stayed behind for Astor and Cody. Now one is dead and the other two are better off without him.
Dexter’s eyes roam over his brother, landing on the scar he gave him over his throat; it’s healed by now, but it’s always there, a haunting reminder, filling Dexter up with a mixture of guilt and possessiveness and some emotion too grand, too consuming, too intense to give a name to. Dexter bites down on the urge to reach and squeeze, to feel that raised line of tissue under his fingertips—not to hurt, not to kill, but just to feel the fluttering of his brother’s pulse. An urge so long dormant, he almost forgot it existed.
“I really do have to leave soon,” Dexter says. His world contains Harrison now, and Harrison has to come first. “You should check the news.”
Brian chuckles. “What have you done, Dexter?” The smile on his face grows wider: Cheshire cat, amused, teeth bared. “What are you doing now?”
“I killed a cop,” he confesses, far too easily. There’s no point in holding back, in lying—not here, not to Brian, and definitely not after lying backfired so spectacularly with Harrison—but he’s always struck by how easy it comes, how much he wants to spill his guts to someone. Brian has always rendered him entirely too honest, despite his denials and protests. He’s like Harrison that way; both of them able to needle somewhere deep inside of him and peel him apart.
Brian hums, like the whole thing isn’t very interesting, a minute piece of trivia, turning around to grab for his clothes—but of course he’s interested. Dexter knew he’d be, a light dancing in his eyes—hook, line, sinker.
His brother starts to undress in front of him. Shirt first, unbuttoned, pulled off. Slacks sliding down to reveal toned legs, dark coarse hair, knees bending and ankle twitching as he pulls up pajama bottoms.
Not that Dexter is watching. Not that Dexter is staring.
He pulls on Brian’s pajamas with rough, sharp quick gestures. The shirt is a little tight across his shoulders but it fits well enough.
Dexter crawls into bed then, keeping silent. He’s getting ready to turn around—curling up on his side, trying to put some kind of respectful space and distance between them—when Brian crawls over him, a palm on his shoulder pushing him down until he’s flat on his back, his brother’s fingers splayed out open and near his collarbone. Brian’s face hovers above him, filling up his vision, pinning him down with his gaze.
“Did he have it coming?” Brian asks, head cocked like a curious wolf. “What did your police officer do to merit a visit from you? Did your son walk in on you enacting your form of justice? Is that why you had to tell him? Is that why—”
“You ask a lot of questions,” Dexter says blandly.
“You come into my home and you drop all this baggage on me, you tell your son about me, I have no idea how much he knows—”
“Just the basics,” Dexter protests, “I didn’t give him any details—”
“And most importantly, I miss you,” Brian says, voice turning soft. “I want to hear about your life. I want to know what you’ve been up to. I didn’t think you’d ever come back.” There’s a playful lilt in his voice, like this is a game they’re playing, the tip of Brian’s tongue darting out to lick his lips.
Yes. He wants to devour him. He wants to be a Dexter-and-Brian. A Brian-and-Dexter. Merge into one whole.
Dexter sighs, leans back. Shuts his eyes to his brother. Palms his forehead.
“Harrison only knows that you’re a killer,” he reassures him. “I couldn’t pretend you weren’t. He would...figured it out.” And then perhaps try to kill him again for lying once more. “He’s uncanny that way.”
“Is that it?” Brian asks, lingering.
He slides the hand off his face, opening his eyes, Brian still hitting him with a searing gaze.
“He didn’t fit the code,” he confesses to him. It was an accident, he almost says but that’s not quite right. Harrison didn’t accept that—why should he? “I was escaping a jail cell. It was him or me.”
“You sound like you regret that,” Brian points out, which is true and not true—regret isn’t what he’d call it. Regret for hurting his son, yes—he would like to stop doing that—but Dexter’s never been good at feelings. He’s not sure Logan’s death will haunt him like Debra’s. “I’m glad you chose yourself. Anyone would want to be free.”
Brian’s words sink into his skin, and for the first time since Harrison pointed a gun at him—thirty six hours ago—he feels a little sense of relief bursting through him, yes, you understand bubbling in his head. Brian would, of course. Even as he disappoints Harrison.
“I take it that’s why your son said the code is bullshit?” Brian continues, poking and prodding. “He doesn’t approve of your hobby? Any chance he’d go running to tell the police?”
No, Dexter thinks, sure of that, somehow. His son is against the death of an innocent person, but he still has a dark passenger. He’s seen it, multiple times. It’s real.
He meets his brother’s eyes. The palm on his shoulder is heated, hot with warmth, seeping into Dexter.
“No. He asked to watch me kill. He wanted to kill Kurt with me,” he says, the words just rolling out. “I started teaching him the code.”
It grows silent in the room, so quiet, he thinks he could hear the soft exhales and inhales of his son’s breathing just down the hall. Dexter’s mouth goes dry; he waits for someone to tell him to stop, don’t tell his brother all of this, don’t do this to Harrison, but Debra disappeared with Brian’s voice, as if they can’t stand to be in the same room. The air hums between them, thick, charged with electricity.
Dexter doesn’t know if that’ll ever happen again, that brief moment he and his son were truly on the same page—if Logan’s death destroyed his son’s desire to learn at his feet. Some dark magic happened that night, under a blood moon, and the time has already passed. The thought makes him feel emptier than ever.
Brian’s face splits into a grin as he starts to laugh. Dexter isn’t sure what’s funny.
“Dexter,” Brian says, between laughs, rolling over to his side on the bed, propped up on his elbows and giggling at the ceiling. Like this, they could be two kids at a sleepover, a childhood denied. They could be two brothers who actually grew up together. “Do you remember what you said when he was born? That he wasn’t going to be like either of us? That he had a shot at normal, even after Rita died—”
“Brian—” His voice comes out hotter than normal. Who needs Debra when his brother will play the role of his guilty conscience? “It’s not like that, it’s not—”
“No, no, don't stop on my account, don’t get me wrong.” His brother’s teeth flash. “That’s just fascinating. I’m on board, truly.” Before Dexter has a chance to process that— on board? —Brian once more presses a hand on his shoulder, then slides it down his body until Dexter can feel it at the hem of his pajama top, slipping under, crawling up his body. His brother’s hand makes Dexter involuntarily shiver, as if he has some direct line to every nerve ending, as if he can reach inside him and start pulling out his guts, all the things that make Dexter Dexter—
Dexter reaches for him, grabs his brother by the wrist.
“Brian, you can’t.” A sudden panic strikes him, the kind that made him nearly run off the road and tell his son he needed to be careful. “We can’t—not here. Not in front of Harrison, he can’t know—”
If he knows, I’ll lose him for good. I’ll never get him back.
“Shhh,” Brian says. He pulls out of Dexter’s grip, brings one finger to his lips. In the dark, he looks diabolical—two monsters in the dark, talking about Dexter’s little monster in training. Is that he wants? “I know, Dex, I’m not that much of an asshole. I wouldn’t do that to you. It’ll be our secret...isn't it always?”
I shouldn’t have come, Dexter thinks, a fire low in his belly, I shouldn’t have come here and put my son in his line of fire.
The terrible thing about Brian is that Dexter always wants to stay. He wants to be here, with him, something in his foundations longing for his big brother. It’s why he failed at killing him the first time.
*
The thing about going on the run the day after Christmas is that traffic is shitty, and roads take forever and ever. A frustrating experience for Dexter and Harrison, for sure, but the confusion, the crowds, the constant back and forth of angry holiday travelers, and the snow storm that hits two hours in is just as hard on the cops as it is on them. Dad takes backroads, driving over shaky frozen ground, carefully taking alternative routes through mountains and snow. They head north, even further north than New York. They trade cars before they leave the state, and Harrison gets to impress Dad with his hotwiring skills.
They’re not gonna make it to Canada until they get fake passports. Harrison thinks they should go south, into Mexico ( don’t you miss the warmth? ), but Canada is closer. It starts to snow more heavily when they clear Vermont, and they pull over to wait it out, car rumbling, watching the snow fall, until they blanket the windshield. Neither of them say a word, and the cold, wintery silence between them is almost peaceful.
They get McDonalds for dinner. Dad apologizes for the quality of the food. As if that’s the thing Harrison wants an apology for.
“People are looking for us,” Harrison says. His smartphone was left behind in the last state—which means his access to constant news is gone. It’s not as if he was attached to it. Audrey’s number was on it but—well, he’s used to leaving abruptly. Now he has a burner phone, that only connects to the internet when he’s in range of stealable wifi.
“They think we’re going south—”
“We should go south,” Harrison says, flicking a wrapper into the backseat. Maybe they could even go back to Argentina—that's wishful thinking, isn’t it?
Harrison isn’t even sure if he wants to go anywhere with his dad. He leans back, his head on the headrest, tilting it back to stare at his father’s profile—there’s stubble growing along his chin now, dark circles under his eyes. He wiped Logan’s blood off his face a while back. He’s changed out of the bloody clothes, but everything about him looked just a little ragged, loosely fitting around the edges.
“Canada’s not exactly a haven for serial killers,” Harrison sneers.
There’s a twitch in his father’s jaw. He huffs a sigh, as if sick with Harrison’s unrelenting comments, his unforgiving questions. “I know,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
Serial killer, Harrison thinks. Serial killer serial killer serial killer. That’s who you are. That's what it means when someone kills over a hundred people; not some vigilante hero in the darkness, saving lives. A serial killer.
That’s who I am.
That night in Kurt’s lodge feels so far away, out of reach.
Harrison leans back in the seat, looking away from Dad. Stares at the truck roof above him, gray and soft and lined with fuzz and padding, ragged enough that little strings of worn out padding dangle. Like all Harrison has to do is reach up and pull the thread. “I don’t want to live the rest of my life on the run with you,” he tells him plainly.
His father winces. Harrison knows that hurts his feelings. He doesn’t care. “You didn’t have to come—”
“Oh, fuck you,” he says, something hot burning in his belly, clawing up his insides. He pulls his legs up on the seat, chin resting on his knees. His father doesn’t say anything about it.
“You could have shot me,” his father says simply, like that’s the answer. Like it’s that easy. “You still can.” His dad says it plainly, logically, not matching Harrison’s own rage—that’s the thing about Dexter. He’s cold. He’s ice. If Harrison’s rage affects him, he can hardly tell.
Harrison clenches his jaw shut. He shakes his head, clamps down on everything he wants to say— fuck you fuck you fuck you what am I supposed to do you’re my whole world— and shifts in his seat so he all but turns his back to him, staring out the window the whole time, even though there’s nothing to look at. With the snow falling, it feels like it’s only just him and his father. His breath seems to stall out in his chest.
Eventually, Dad gets on the road again.
Hours later, they’re in New Hampshire, passing the blue and green welcome sign, a layer of fresh snow laid on top. Harrison finally asks, “So, where are we going? Who is this guy?”
It takes his father a while to answer. Harrison wonders if it’s his turn for the silent treatment now, but after a few mile markers, Dad gets there.
“My brother,” his father says. “He lives in this state.”
Harrison frowns, trying to wrap his brain around that. The radio buzzes between them, meaningless sounds, one song changing to another. Time tick-tick-ticks away and his father does not elaborate further, forcing Harrison to go fishing.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” he says, puzzling it out, eyebrows narrowing it down as he tries to put the pieces together. “I’m pretty sure no one knows you have a brother. Do you really have a brother?”
“I do,” Dad says. Getting answers out of his father is like pulling teeth. Worse. Harrison thinks that might be easier. “No one knows. No one alive, anyway.”
There’s a buzzing in Harrison’s brain, an itch at the back of his neck, clawing and scratching from under his skin. He finally looks away from the window, trying to find the truth in his father’s face—careful, impassive, expression never breaking as he watches the road. Dad looks normal—like not a serial killer, like the Dad he grew up with, just aged around the edges—but Kurt looked normal too, felt normal to him.
Maybe there’s something wrong with Harrison, that he can’t see a killer when they’re next to him. He’s too used to it.
“He’s like you, isn’t he?” Harrison asks, realization falling over him like a curtain parting. “Dark passenger? Violent urges? Serial killer?”
Like us sits under his tongue, nearly bursting forth—but Harrison isn’t a serial killer. The familiar camaraderie he and his father shared, right up to the moment he killed Logan, feels uneasy now. He can’t put himself in that same category.
“You’re so perceptive,” Dad confirms, a rueful smile curling at his lips.
“Why else would you hide him from people?” From me? “I thought we were going to be honest with each other now,” he spits out without thinking, surprised by the harsh venom in his voice, the burning in his throat.
Dad drives on without answering for a second, and then abruptly swerves, swinging the car over to the shoulder. It’s a sudden, sharp burst of energy, startling him. Harrison half-expects him to lose control of the car and spiral away—but the salted road doesn’t spin them out, and Dad pulls off to the side of the shoulder. He doesn’t cut the engine—lets it idle, puts it in park, turns the white noise of the radio off—but he turns his body fully towards Harrison and leans in, not quite crossing the console.
“Harrison,” he says carefully. His eyes are bright, oddly intense—but everything feels intense in these tight quarters. “My brother is a dangerous man. We’re going to be in and out. We’re not going to spend a lot of time there. We’re going to get what we need and then go. We can’t stick around.”
It’s so easy to fall into his orbit—so easy to let Dad take the lead. To stop constantly looking over his shoulder all the time and let Dad take care of him like he always wanted. But he can’t.
“If he’s so dangerous, why don’t you kill him?” he asks, chin jutting out, barely concealed something bubbling right under his skin. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be teaching me?”
Dad winces, then leans back, as if getting away from Harrison’s striking distance. His father lets out a soft exhale as he runs his hand through his thinning hair. “It’s not that simple—”
“Does he fit the code or not?”
“Yes,” he confesses, eyes falling shut briefly, before snapping open. He doesn’t meet Harrison’s eyes. “He does. But he’s my brother.”
Back in Kurt’s lodge—in the kill room, Dad called it, surrounded by dead women—it all had felt...exciting. Righteous, if terrifying, the thought of killing Kurt, eager to make him dead. Watching the blood crawl to him afterwards made his stomach swim, his head spin like he might pass out, and Harrison hated his own weakness, hoping his father wouldn’t notice that squeamishness—that he might not have what it takes to do this successfully, that he might not be what his father needs him to be.
In the hundreds, Dad had said; Harrison knew that when he watched him stabbed Kurt. He’s done this hundreds of times, watching him do it with no guilt or hesitation, and there was something terrible and amazing about it all at once, and yet—
There is no noise on the radio, no sound at all in this claustrophobic truck, except for the sound of wind passing by, cars going on, as if in a different world. There’s no sound except the echoing hum of his own breathing, droning on and on, the truth of his father’s words slowly sinking in his chest.
Harrison laughs. Disappointment tastes bitter. “You’re so full of shit,” he says. The hurt in his chest is nothing new. It’s the same dull ache.
“The first rule is don’t get caught,” his father reminds him, but Harrison can’t look at him.
Harrison sinks back into his seat. He wants to disappear.
Dad says nothing more. They drive on and on and on and—
*
Brian hands him two blankets, made of comfortable fleece.
“I don’t have a pillow for you,” he says, almost apologetically, perfectly affable. “But the cushions are comfortable enough. You want some help setting it up? It’s a pull out.” He asks, cocking his head in the direction of the couch behind Harrison.
It’s a normal interaction. Harrison can’t get a read on him. He wasn’t sure what to expect from his father’s warning—someone more obviously scary, perhaps. Some gruff and bushy-haired man, grizzly adams style, living in squalor, smelling like a slaughterhouse—the sort of images he thinks of when he thinks of a serial killer in the mountains.
Instead, Brian Moser has dark hair streaked with silver, curling just above the nape of his neck, stylish and neat, even in the dead of night. He’s slender and tall, taller than Dad, long limbs and bony fingers, classically handsome despite his age. The mobile home was well preserved and well-kept, almost welcoming, neatly cleaned up. Harrison isn’t sure what to make of him; all he really knows is that he broke the code long ago and yet he still lives.
He doesn’t look like a serial killer, Harrison thinks, but neither did Kurt Caldwell.
Neither does his father.
“I’m good,” he says, taking the blankets, more curt than he intended, but he can’t bring himself to think of the man as his uncle. “I’ve slept in worse.”
A strange smile pulls on Brian’s lips. “I’m sure you have,” he says. Like he knows something Harrison doesn’t.
Harrison keeps him in the corner of his eye as he pulls out the couch, his presence unwavering, his eyes on him the whole time. He has the unnerving sensation of spiders crawling over his skin, until he hears the door open. It’s almost a relief when Dad turns back up, changed into pajamas that definitely aren’t his own.
“What, I don’t get any?” Harrison says, the words out of his mouth before he can reign them in. He doesn’t want to fight, especially over petty shit, but all his nerve endings are stretched razor thin, exhausted and fraying.
He pulled a rifle on his dad about thirty six hours ago; the thought of it still twists in his insides. Harrison shoves his hands in his jean pockets to keep from shaking.
“They’d be a little big on you,” Brian answers before Dad can, as if Harrison was addressing him, as if he’s invited to this conversation, and this time, Harrison manages to bite down on whatever nasty comment he wants to lash out with. “I figure we’d get you new clothes in the morning.”
“Fine, whatever,” he says, slotting himself over on the right side of the couch, trying to get comfortable.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Dad says softly, turning around to walk away.
Some families say goodnight, or I love you, or any number of normal things before they turn in for the night. Harrison used to have that—little bedtime rituals he desperately missed all those years in Argentina. He doesn’t know what he and Dad do now, except stomp off to their own separate corners of the world.
“Wait, where are you sleeping?” he asks, twisting around on the couch to watch his father trot off in the direction of the sole bedroom. Brian lingers at the edge of the threshold of his room, one foot in, one out, waiting.
“Brian and I are sharing the bed,” Dad says, “so you can have the couch to yourself.”
Like it’s a fucking favor.
Maybe it was—all thirty six hours in a car with his murderous father, Harrison fuming mad and giving him the silent treatment, he should want to be alone, he should want to get away from him—but instead, it leaves him feeling bereft, a cold emptiness inside. Of course, Dad doesn’t want to sleep with him; he’s probably sick of him. He probably would rather be with another serial killer instead of the stupid teenage boy who tried to kill him.
“Fine,” Harrison says, grabbing the blankets and pulling them over himself, as if he could disappear underneath them, simply cease to exist. “Good night.”
He waits—maybe even hopes—for his father to say something else. Something more. Harrison can feel Dexter’s presence, standing in silence, a ghost—but then his footsteps retreat, soft on the ground, and then the door closes shut in the distance.
He’s alone in a darkened living room. He has space to breathe, finally, but there’s a burning tension in his shoulders that makes it hard to get comfortable. Harrison turns around in fits and starts on the pull out, unable to find a good sleeping position, legs askew, arms starfishing, then curling inwards. Somehow, it’s worse than the cot in Dad’s closet back in Iron Lake. Why did he think Dad would want to sleep here with him?
The thought of Dad with Brian left Harrison unsettled—like a whipcord of panic, perched just beneath his ribcage, threatening to burst out.
Harrison manages to fall asleep to the sound of a constant ticking clock. He wakes up to that same clock ticking, almost like he never slept, but time has passed—the sky outside is beginning to lighten, casting the world into pale blues rather than pitch blacks. Morning is coming, but not quite here yet. Dad would have been awake, back in Iron Lake, feeding the animals.
Outside, it could be Iron Lake; swap the trailer for a cabin, and it’s the same woods, snow and isolation.
Harrison swallows around a lump in his throat. You do not miss Iron Lake, he reminds himself, and pulls himself off the couch. It’s quiet, an empty world, almost peaceful, like maybe Harrison really is all alone, and maybe there was never a road trip to New Hampshire, maybe his father was never arrested, maybe Logan never died.
His steps feel loud to him in the silence, even with his bare feet, as he pads down the short, darkened hallway to the room where his father slept. Harrison lifts his gaze to the closed bedroom door: plain wood, simple. Nothing notable about it, but Harrison wants to break through it. Without thinking about it, he presses his ear to the door, searching for—what? He’s not sure.
There’s a pull in his head, something pulsing under his skin—he wonders if this is the dark passenger. The phrase feels alien in his mouth, not used to thinking of his bad ideas that way, but it’s Dad’s wording, and it looks right on paper—even if saying it out loud doesn’t work, the syllables all wrong on him.
Harrison pushes the door open. He’s surprised that there’s no resistance, no lock. Perfectly oiled so that there is no sound.
In the room, his father is on the right side of the bed, asleep on his back, comforter pulled up to his neck, leaving the shape of his face exposed, the lines of his jaw, but not the details—he’s hidden from Harrison’s view almost completely, like he could be a different man entirely. Brian is under the comforter as well—asleep, for all intents and purposes, only the sound of their breathing in the room. He’s next to Dad, but on his front, flat on his belly on the bed, his face nearly buried into the pillow but angled towards Dad, like he fell asleep watching him. His right arm, the one right next to his father, is stretched out, reaching for Dad.
There’s something odd about the gesture—almost sweet, Harrison thinks, with a lump in his throat.
If Harrison thinks about it too hard, he’s going to start to cry.
*
“You know, we don’t have to turn back,” his brother said. The road to Nebraska was long, and the night felt longer still, driving into a dark road with no end in sight, no dawning light or any signs except mile markers. The gun was still in Dexter’s hand, barrel hot, reckless gunpowder smoke lingering in the air. “We can just keep driving.”
Dexter watched the white marks splitting the black asphalt road. They swooped by, in one long, continuous loop, never-ending. Dexter watched the road, waiting for the headlights of another vehicle to pass them, for a white light at the end of the darkness, but it didn’t appear—it was just him and Brian.
Dexter felt...out of sorts. Like his skin was on too tight. A monster about to escape his person-suit.
‘Where would we go?” he asked, instead of telling Brian no. Don’t entertain this, Dexter, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t feel like himself—or he felt more like himself, the most himself, the himself Brian always wanted.
For a brief moment, Brian’s head turned to him, eyes off the road, eyes flickering away from the road in a dangerous glance. The turn revealed the scar on his throat that Dexter left, knotty tissue—a reminder, but of what, it depended on the day. His own weakness, a betrayal, mercy.
“It doesn’t matter,” Brian said, eyes soft, words gentle; that always caught him off guard, how sweet his big brother could be, despite what he was, what they both were. “Wherever we want—there’s always someone to kill, somewhere. Anywhere. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s you and me.”
His eyes went back to the road but one hand left the steering wheel and reached out to Dexter’s, fingers over his knuckles, a facsimile of hand holding. His palm was damp with sweat.
Dexter couldn’t say he wasn't tempted. Brian always held the same appeal as he did the first time he made that offer. It seemed easier now, closer than ever—the appeal of disappearing and merging into a single solitary monster with him.
But the moment he let himself imagine it, his son’s face—small, squished, baleful and innocent—popped up in his mind. The boy that wasn’t here. The boy he left behind, however temporarily. Guilt gnawed at him. Killing never made him feel bad, but disappointing his family made him feel like he was being drawn and quartered.
He pulled his hand away. “I’m not you, you know? I can’t fuck off to another country. I have responsibilities.”
Brian ground his teeth, jaw clenched, his bone structure sharp in the dark. “ Responsibilities ,” Brian hissed out, as if it was an excuse Dexter made up. “I thought you called him Harrison.”
Dexter didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to argue with his brother, so Dexter clammed up and went back to staring at the road, white streaks turning to yellow, the silence filled with static buzzing from the radio.
“Take him with us, then,” Brian said when Dexter refused to answer. Like it was that simple.
Dexter’s laugh was brittle. “You want to travel with a baby?”
“I want to be with you.” The open admission was so sincere, it made something ache in Dexter, something he thought was long dead. “And he’s my nephew, so why not? It’s not like he’ll remember anyone else to miss them.”
He made it sound almost wholesome. An image flared up in Dexter’s head then, plastering itself across his entire limbic system—him and Brian on the road, Harrison in a car seat. Him and his brother killing just to watch the blood flow, and his son splattered in it, the same as the day Rita died (the day he was born in blood).
Could I do that to him? Would I?
He stared out the passenger window and was met with a twinkling black sky, white stars glittering above them—the only thing between them and the void, swallowing the rest of the road up.
Dexter swallowed down the thick lump of horror in his throat.
“Ask me again later,” Dexter said.
*
“Local man was hospitalized today after crashing his car going over the Ossipee River...”
Since waking up, Harrison’s been watching the news, attention zeroing in, hyper focused, looking for signs of a man-hunt. The local channels haven’t said anything about it—today’s reports have focused on a car accident, local government municipal ordinances, new restaurant opening up in downtown, weather reports for Mount Washington...the worst crime was some local teenager charged with driving drunk and crashing into a tree.
No reports of a murder in a small town, two states away.
Maybe that’s a good thing—no news is good news, right? Maybe New York’s small town news hasn't spread to New Hampshire’s small town news, and Dad can disappear into a crowd. But the lack of coverage just spikes his anxiety, making his stomach twist.
“Have you eaten?” Dad says. He’s in the kitchen, in the next room, but the small space and cramped quarters made him feel like he was right next to Harrison, a couple steps away. “I could make you something, I don’t know what food Brian has, but there’s gotta be at least eggs or something.”
The look Harrison shoots him is withering.
Uncle Brian is in the shower; Harrison can hear the spray pour down. They both let him take the first shower, and being alone in his spartan bathroom felt surreal, like it wasn’t really happening, still not used to the thought of Uncle. He only remembered Aunt Deb and this felt like a poor replacement.
“I grabbed a granola bar,” he says plainly. Should he have taken Uncle Brian’s food without permission or acknowledgement? Harrison doesn’t care.
Dad tsks. “That hardly counts as a meal.”
Harrison grits his teeth. “I’m good,” he says, turning his eyes fixed back to the news station—but there was nothing particularly new to report. Human interest story now, one older, gray-haired news reporter talking about post holiday season blues, that weird section in time after Christmas and before New Years where life seems to freeze in time, nowhere to go.
“Can I see your phone?” Harrison asks suddenly. “I just need to check the internet.”
“It’s a burner, same as yours,” Dad says. “There’s no wifi on it.”
“Do you want to borrow my laptop?”
Uncle Brian emerges from the dark hallway of his bedroom, his hair damp and sticking a little, smelling vaguely of pine, a white undershirt pulled over his head, fresh from the shower. Brian must have wifi. There’s no way he doesn’t, even the shitty rest stops he used to sleep in had wifi.
Harrison doesn’t want to accept, but it’s his only option. “Okay,” he agrees.
He expects to be let into his bedroom, but instead Brian disappears back down the hallway and emerges a few minutes later, one small sleek laptop in hand and no charging cable, handing it over, not a word said. In the corner of Harrison’s eye, he can feel Dad watching them, his eyes flickering between the two of them—tamped down but a clear nervous energy, as if he was a man watching for vipers.
He shouldn’t be surprised to google Iron Lake, and come up with Kurt Caldwell.
GHASTLY DISCOVERY IN IRON LAKE LOCAL LODGE; SUSPECT STILL AT LARGE
Harrison scans the article, feeling the skin of his cheeks go hot the more he reads, looking for Dexter Morgan or Jim Lindsey in the article, but it’s all about Kurt Caldwell, carefully never naming him as a perpetrator—going instead with suspect, person of interest, alleged. No names for the dead girls found except Molly Park, a semi-public figure, an internet community in mourning. Kurt is a suspect and the police are looking for him but he appears to have fled the state—just as Dad said they would assume. There’s a photo—large, glossy, full resolution—of him in the article. There’s a manhunt for him.
It takes Harrison a moment to remember that Kurt’s body was all burnt up, so he’ll never be found. Always a missing person, the killer of girls like Molly Park will remain a question mark. That seemed sad, on some level.
He goes for a few more clicks, trying to dig up more. Dad and Brian hover behind him on the couch, not quite over his shoulders, but they’re quiet. Their silence says everything. It’s as if they’re all holding their breath.
Another article, smaller, no frills, a few paragraphs and a picture: authorities are investigating the death of slain police officer, Sergeant Logan Miller.
Ah. There we go.
The photo of Logan under the headline was a workplace one, a broad smile on his face against a dark blue background, his sergeant star prominently displayed. The sight makes something angry and hot clench in his chest, like a monster living in his ribcage, as he thinks, fuck I should have shot Dad. Isn’t that the code? Isn’t that the whole point?
There is a mention of Jim Lindsey as a suspect, now missing, last seen heading south towards New York City, and a small, wallet sized photo of his Dad that he recognized from his ID badge at Fred’s . Which is really not good, but there’s also a lot less traffic on this article. There is no mention of him either—no Harrison Morgan, Harrison Lindsey or even that Jim has a son. No mention of The Bay Harbor Butcher. The slightest throwaway mention of Chief Angela Bishop, no quotes from her.
He supposes this should be a relief—Dad’s crimes are a footnote in a bigger story, Kurt Caldwell’s fucked up doll collection buried his father’s other kill in the news, and Dad’s feint in misleading the police worked.
Harrison feels sick to his stomach. Like there’s a blade above his neck, hovering, and he doesn’t know when it’ll drop.
“That’s not good,” Brian says, right behind him on the couch, his voice setting Harrison’s neck hairs on edge. He hadn’t realized he was so close, reading over his shoulder. Harrison fights the urge to leap away. “Isn’t the first rule don’t get caught?”
“I...made a mistake,” Dad says, sounding embarrassed. Harrison can hear the rustle of feet. “I got rusty.”
Brian tsks. “You’ve been a naughty boy,” he says, voice lilting.
Hearing his uncle say that to his own father was disconcerting, making his hair stand on end—the playful almost childlike way he said it, like there was some joke Harrison wasn’t in on. He couldn’t parse it and he couldn’t quite stomach it.
“Is that what you’re calling it? When the cops are looking for you because you killed your friend? Rusty?” Harrison snaps out. He slams the laptop shut and gets up, trying to get some space from them both. He doesn’t want to look at them, but they’re right behind him, surrounding him, locking him into the living room space. The two of them are staring at him—Brian like he’s an alien doing something curiously interesting but a little revolting, his hand on his chin, and Dad taking a step back like Harrison might blow, face twisted into some facsimile of concern.
“Harrison,” Dad starts. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No you’re not,” Harrison spits out—acutely, keenly aware that Brian is watching them both like a scientist, that he has an audience, and yet he can’t stop. “I think you’re just sorry we had to leave town like that and go into hiding like fugitives—”
Harrison runs out of words—snapping his jaw shut and inhaling deep. Count to ten. Calm down. It’s hard to do so, when Brian keeps staring at him, eyes all over him like roving insects.
“I’m just worried,” Harrison says, trying to stay calm. Two days ago, he was having the best Christmas ever.
“Hey,” Dad says, taking a step closer, hand held out like Harrison was a bomb to diffuse. “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it,” he tells him. All meaningless platitudes. “That’s my job.”
“Your job? What is your job?” Harrison juts out his chin. “To what, protect me? You’re not doing a really good job of that, so excuse me for worrying about it.”
Something flickers in his father’s eyes. “I just—”
“I’m not a kid,” Harrison grits out between his teeth. “I’m supposed to be one, I wish I was, but I’m not some little kid that you can hide all the bad things from, you brought me into this, so I have to fucking worry about it.”
He can’t stare at either of them anymore. Harrison storms off, pushing past both of them, heading towards the sliding back door.
“Where are you—”
“Out!” He shouts, looking back. “I can go outside, right? It’s not my picture the cops have up. Or am I locked up in this place too?”
Dad says nothing, like usual, like he forgot all about how to be a father after ten years of pretending he wasn’t one. He can see the clench in his jaw, a tightening of skin, map out the words he’s holding back; it just makes the anger burning in Harrison flame harder. Uncle Brian says nothing either but Harrison doesn’t want to hear from him, so he’s thankful.
He slips out, closing the door shut behind him, thankful that no one runs after him. He thankfully has his boots on, making it easier to traverse the snow-covered back deck, but Harrison did not bother to put on his winter jacket going outside, which seemed like an important statement on how pissed off he was, that he'd rather be out freezing and endure the weather than stay in the room with Dad and Uncle Brian (but mostly Dad)—but now that he’s out here, the cold air hits his lungs, biting against his skin, and he wonders how long he can wait out here before he needs to go back in.
He wraps his arms around himself, shoving his hands under his arm pits, not sure if that would help conserve his body heat or not. He’s not sure how long he can take it out here, but he walks until he hits the end of the property line—or what he thinks is the property line. There’s no other house for a couple miles at least, and Uncle Brian’s mobile home is surrounded by trees that disappear under the snow fall, creating a wall of white. In the dark when they arrived last night, the trees looked more like a void, swallowing up the background, but now there was something almost idyllic to it—Dad had woods in his backyard too. Harrison thought that was cool, that he could leave the house and run into a bobcat or fox or whatever they have in New England.
There’s a shed near the edge of the property—rickety, blue paint peeling off, snow-covered rooftop, not quite as put together as the interior of Brian’s home. Harrison wonders what’s in it. What does a retiring serial killer need to have?
He thinks, briefly, of breaking in, for no good reason other than curiosity and spite—he has all sorts of bad ideas, like he told Dad. He thinks for a moment, of grabbing his backpack and taking off down the road—the knowledge that he could just pack up and leave, no matter how shitty his situation was, always gave him some comfort. He doesn’t have to be a fugitive with his serial killer father, living with a serial killer uncle.
So why don’t you ?
Maybe for the same reason Harrison didn’t shoot his father back in Iron Lake.
(He should have)
Harrison lets out an exhale of air, as if he could purge the regret from his body, then sucks in the frozen air, the cold burning his lungs, like icicles stabbing into his insides. Brutal northern winters are a new thing for him, and he can feel it sink into his body, into his tendons and nerve endings, almost like a live wire flickering, reminding him he’s alive and real.
Slowly, gingerly, he lets himself sink into the ground. The snow feels hard packed under his knees, and with careful deliberation, he shoves his bare hands into the snow—Harrison gasps as the cold hits his bare skin, but he claws his fingers into it, as if he could dig down into it, forcing himself to feel it—the biting cold snapping at his fingers, his skin tingling.
He takes another deep breath with his hands freezing, forcing himself to calm down, to stop thinking of murder, breathing in and out as the pain dulled into a cool numbness.
He told Dad that after Kurt, the dark passenger was quiet—and maybe it was true then, he still wasn’t sure how to listen to it the way Dad did, but it didn’t feel true now. Not after Logan. Felt like something was pulsing under his skin, like something rising.
The sounds of morning echo behind him. He can hear the door opening and sliding shut, soft crunchy footsteps of boots in the snow behind him—his Dad or Brian approaching him. Just the thought, the impending dread of facing either of them made his face heat up. He quickly shoves his hands out of the cold and stands up, spinning around, trying hard not to wrap his arms around himself. He was at least twenty degrees cooler on the inside but he’s not going to show that.
They’re both heading over, with strange looks on their faces, Dad glancing back between him and Brian—it makes Harrison feel...left out. Like those two had a secret he wasn’t let in on. He thinks back to what he saw in the early hours of the morning, sun not even fully up yet, the two of them in bed together, reaching for each other. How oddly intimate it had seemed to him, a different side of his father he doesn’t get to have.
The two of them together makes his hackles go up, back muscles tensing at the sight of them.
“Harrison,” Dad says softly as he approaches carefully, like Harrison might bolt if he came too close, like he’s some sort of deranged deer; he stops inches from him, and Brian hovers behind him like a dark shadow. Dad’s eyes drift over to his hands—red knuckles, pale pallor, snowy covered—before snapping back to face Harrison. He doesn’t say anything about Harrison’s need to reconnect with the ground.
“What?” Harrison says. There’s a shiver in his voice he can’t help, that makes him sound too young, the cold starting to seep into his bones. “I’m fine,” he says.
Dad nods. “Okay,” he agrees placidly. “We’re going to go to the store, get some extra food, some clothes for us. Do you want to come?”
Harrison’s gaze darts between Brian and Dad. “I thought we were keeping a low profile,” he says carefully, cocking his head in Brian’s direction. “Maybe he should go for us?”
Brian arches an eyebrow, his mouth closed but jaw twitching, like he was holding back a laugh at whatever Harrison said.
Harrison didn’t like it—his gaze made him feel like he was being studied, picked apart, like some kind of bug under a microscope. There was nothing particularly uncle-esque about it, not a fond look but a cold stare—not that Harrison would know anything about having an uncle. He could barely recall having an aunt, and all memories of his extended family were faint in his head, like looking through an opaque glass window.
Dad crosses his arms over his chest, shifting from foot to foot. “I thought it’d be good for us to go together. The three of us.”
“The three of us?” Harrison repeats, his voice going dry as it flattens out.
It bothers him more than he thought it would.
Brian grins behind Dexter, teeth white and gleaming and a little too broad; the sight strikes him as unnatural, overly familiar with him. ‘You know, like a family. It’ll be a good bonding experience. I’ll get you sunglasses, a baseball cap, it’ll be fine.”
“I don’t think of you as family, ” Harrison snaps out. “I met you just yesterday. You don’t get to slap a label on something and say it means something when it doesn’t.” He tilts his head in his father’s direction. “Until yesterday, my only living family has spent his entire life lying to me, so you can’t just say that and expect it to mean anything.”
Dad steps forward. ‘Harrison,” he says, in a conciliatory tone, and Harrison takes another step back in the snow. The last thing he wants is any kind of false comfort; he cannot think of anything his father could say to make this better, short of suddenly turning around and killing Brian where he stood.
It’s a dark thought, so sharp and vivid that it catches Harrison by surprise; he’s no stranger to violent thoughts—but after Kurt, after Ethan, those violent thoughts feel more and more real all the time.
Something ugly and formless is taking shape inside Harrison whenever he looks at Brian. Something wrong with him, living in between the empty spaces—and Dad can’t put those pieces back together anymore than he can, and—
Brian bursts out laughing. It crackles in the air, sharp in Harrison’s ears, startling him. “You’re right. It’s just a word. But we’re blood. That’s not a word. That’s real. ”
A silence falls over the three of them, early winter morning with no birdsong or wind in the distance. The word blood rings around in Harrison’s head, gets stuck at the back of his throat.
“Fine, I’ll go,” Harrison agrees, opting not to argue. He points at Dad. “But you gotta like...hide your face or something.”
Dad smiles at him. “I can do that,” he says, and that smile feels genuine to Harrison, his chest getting lighter. Harrison smiles too, despite himself.
Dad runs inside to get their coats and gloves for Harrison, while the two of them load into the car, Harrison settling into a neat backseat, just scattered bits of clothing items and a car blanket he shoves aside. Brian turns around from the driver’s seat to face him, as Harrison realizes he’s alone with him for once.
“Don’t worry, kid,” he says, fixing Harrison with a steady, fixed gaze, his cool eyes zeroing in on him. The memory of being held at gun point, red laser light dancing across his chest, rushes to the forefront of Harrison’s mind, and his hand curls into a fist on his knee, pulling his nails tight to his palms.
Brian’s mouth curves into a waiting smile. “It took your father some growing pains to get used to me too.”
There’s a faint hint of slime in his voice, like being pawed at by greasy hands. Harrison decides that he doesn’t like Uncle Brian.
*
“You gotta stay in the car,” Brian tells Dad when they pull into a grocery store parking lot. Town was at least a thirty minutes drive, and Harrison didn’t know where this hospital that Bran worked at was—he took careful stock of the turns and roads they drove by as they pulled out the plot of land Brian’s mobile trailer sat on—Oak Lane, Meadow Hill, Mill Road, driving down small roads surrounded by trees, before ending up on a long stretch of back road, the sides of the road adorned by car repair shops, gas stations, fast food joints and one lonely diner, before coming across a collection of buildings known as town . It wasn’t that different from Iron Lake, except there was no lake here. Just stretches of trees enclosing them in. The Hannaford sign was bright red against beige, the grocery store thirty minutes from where Brian lived—seemed like a shitty drive time for groceries.
A long time to be in the car with his father and supposed uncle without saying anything. The ride had been quiet. Dad and Brian didn’t make small talk. In the backseat, Harrison felt a bit like being trapped in the back of a police car, helplessly looking in behind a plexiglass barrier.
Dad raises an eyebrow. “I’m not staying in the car,” he says. From the backseat vantage point, Harrison can’t really see his expression, but he can hear the bite in his voice.
“You saw what Harrison found this morning,” Brian counters. “What if someone recognizes you?” Despite the valid concern, there’s not an ounce of worry in Brian’s voice, just cajoling amusement, like Dad on the run was funny to him.
“No one is going to recognize me,” Dad says.
“I’m not sure about that,” Harrison says under his breath. “I found you.”
Brian nods, head swiveling around to flash a smile at him and now it’s like they’re in this together, two against one. “See, the kid could track you down, you can’t just be walking around.”
“I’m not staying in the car,” Dad insists.
“Okay,” Brian says, sounding out the words a little too thickly, and then turns to Harrison, that over-familiar look in his eyes. “There should be a trapper hat under the seat. Can you find it?”
Harrison finds it easily, digging it out and tossing it to Brian.
Brian then slips the hat on Dad’s head, covering his hair entirely, the sides of the trapper hat obscuring his face at most angles. The hat was heavily fur-lined, with a dark red exterior, like something out of Fred’s . It made Dad’s head shape look awkward, too small.
“Just don’t take that off,” Brian says.
Dad sighs, but doesn’t argue. Harrison takes a look at his father and starts laughing.
They gather enough food and supplies to fill a cart. Brian attempts to bribe him by offering to buy him whatever he wants to eat, which Harrison takes full advantage of, grabbing all the snack food he can get, ignoring his father’s raised eyebrows. He still does not like Brian.
“What color do you want?” Dad asks. They’re in the hair dye aisle. Maybe we should change what we look like, Harrison thought, and Brian thought it was a great idea.
It’s too risky to go to a salon, Dad said. Better to do it yourself, Brian finished for him.
Harrison reaches forward to touch the boxes, trailing his fingers over the faces. The pictures on the boxes are all women, so it's hard to figure out what color would look right on him; it’s not something he’s ever thought. He eyes a row of smiling women with various shades of blond, and the thought of mom pops into his head—a woman he doesn’t remember at all, wouldn’t even know what color her hair was if it weren’t for crime scene photos, the tasteful images on a podcast episode cover, the late night wiki searches as he went on a web spiral of the Trinity Killer...
“I don’t really want to be a blonde,” he says. He grabs a black hair box—dark and lovely, permanent color— and tosses it in the cart.
“Perfect,” Brian says, and turns to Dad. “What about you? Do you wanna match, or go red?” He reaches out to pat Dad’s head, as if he were trying to ruffle his hair through the trapper hat hiding it all. Dad takes a step back, dodging it with effortless, quick steps.
“Go with brown,” he tells him. “There’s no point in getting flashy.”
“Your hair used to be such a lovely shade of red.”
“C’mon,” Dad says, adjusting the hat. “It was auburn at best.”
“It was fucking red,” Brian says, laughing. Harrison feels left out of a joke.
They throw copper red and chestnut brown into the cart and go to check out.
The cart has enough food for a couple of weeks, even between three people, which seems like far too long of a time for Harrison. In and out, right?
He wonders if he’s been tricked.
Harrison trails behind them, keeping a distance of a few feet away. They don’t ask him to catch up. Dad pushes the cart forward and they lean into each other as they walk shoulder to shoulder, heads tilted like sharing a secret, one Harrison isn’t a part of—despite the years, and despite whatever monstrous acts Brian had committed, they are easily comfortable with each other, whispering when they think Harrison is far away enough.
He’s not. Oh, he can’t make out their conversation, but he knows what they’re doing.
They wanna ditch me. The thought bubbles unkindly within him like a striking viper. That can’t be true , but he’s not sure how else to read it. Everything in Iron Lake had been a struggle—Ethan, the overdose, Kurt—he thought he finally unlocked it, cracked the code to Dad on Christmas, and then everything went wrong.
Christmas Eve was a few days ago. It’s drifting away from him, spinning out.
Uncle Brian has a black Oldsmobile, both extravagant and nondescript at the same time, scrubbed free of any details, meticulously clean of all the snow and frost. It blended in well enough, and it had a large trunk space. Harrison supposes that could come in handy for corpse disposal; he doesn’t really want to think about it.
“So what’s the plan?” Harrison asks, as Brian turns the car on, and Dad reaches to fumble for the radio. “I thought we were supposed to be getting new IDs.”
“New passports too,” Dad says, with an anxious glance at his brother. Not at Harrison, even though he’s the one talking. Dad looks at Brian all the time, now that he’s here—like he’s waiting to see what he’d do. Dangerous rolls around in the back of his head, getting lodged there like a bad penny.
“I’ll take the photos back at my place after we change your look a bit,” Brian says. He pulls out of the parking lot. The world around them is ugly, the gray slush of snow too cold to melt, plowed many times over, sky devoid of color. “Then I’ll get them to my guy. Then it’s just a waiting game.”
From his vantage point in the back seat, Harrison sees the back of two heads—one a bit taller in height, black salt and pepper-hair, curling at the nape, juxtaposed against Dad’s duller brown, the strands thinner.
“How long?” Harrison asks, firmer this time.
Brian’s dark eyes in the rear view mirror meet his own, his eyebrows arched. “I’m not sure. Forgery isn’t an easy crime. Could be weeks. You’re that eager to go to Canada?”
Dad provides no answer.
My brother is a dangerous man. We’re going to get what we need and then go. We can’t stick around.
It sure looks like Dad wants to stick around.
“He said we were going to be in and out,” Harrison says, hating how he sounds like a sullen teenager, like he’s some kid having a tantrum. He is all too aware of what he sounds like, what he looks like, how adults take it when he opens his mouth and voices his complaints. He flips his gaze to Dad, who is now at least looking at him in the rear view window, dark green eyes wide as Harrison edges close to something he shouldn’t say.
Got your attention now.
“You said we were going to be in and out,” he accuses.
“Hey,” Dad says, softly, like soothing a wild animal. “We will be, I promise. We just need to make sure we can make our getaway.”
Harrison clenches his jaw, then scoots over on the backseat to be a little closer to his uncle, his mouth behind his ear. “Did he tell you that? How long are we supposed to stay?”
Brian chuckles, but Harrison watches his hand tighten on the steering wheel, a certain ugly satisfaction bubbling up in him. “Not long, he said.”
“He said we were going to leave as soon as possible—”
“Harrison—” Dad interjects.
“What? Am I not supposed to tell him that?” he snaps. He can’t help the contempt in his voice. It just comes through. He can feel his temperature hitting a boiling point. He can feel his eyes, his jaw, his face begin to ache with the strength of holding everything back. “Are there things I’m not supposed to say? Do I need permission to talk to him? I thought we were supposed to bond ?”
“Yeah, actually, I wanna hear this,” Brian says. Harrison can’t see him clearly from this angle, but he catches a half-glimpse of face in the rear view mirror, mouth curved upwards in an upturned smirk. “What else did he say, Harrison?”
“He said you were dangerous,” Harrison spits.
“So is your father,” Brian says. “Are you?”
The question catches Harrison off-guard. He's not sure how to answer it; no one has ever asked him directly. All they’ve done is told him who or what he was. Instinctively, he reaches for his back pocket—the hot flush of being cornered in a truck stop, or gas station, by some stranger eying him for too long, burns in his face, inflaming him, the alarm bells ringing out—before he forces himself to stay in place.
“I’ve never killed anyone.”
The way Harrison says it sounds like a confession, a shameful admittance, like he doesn’t belong in this car. Dad’s gaze flicks back and forth between them both. Harrison finds no comfort in it, alone in this backseat.
(you couldn’t shoot him when it mattered; maybe you’re not good enough to be what he wants you to be)
Brian laughs. His eyes are dark and flinty, sharpened like knife points. “That’s not what I asked, kiddo.”
“Brian,” Dad whispers, his face turned, side profile to Harrison. “Stop needling—”
Brian abruptly turns off the road, driving the car into the shoulder, letting the other cars pass them by with loud whooshing sounds until the traffic dies off. There’s a brief screech of tires and Harrison can feel the resistance of the slush beneath him as Brian kills the engine.
“Brian—”
“Answer the question,” Brian says, ignoring his father. He turns around in his seat, so they’re looking at each other directly, hand around the back of the headrest. He’s close enough for Harrison to really examine now, make out every small feature. There’s a brief, slight dusting of hair on the back of his knuckles, and a smattering of moles across his skin, face, throat. “We’re bonding, right?” A seemingly friendly smile spreads across his face.
Dad actually growls, grabbing Brian’s wrist. Brian doesn’t react, but his grip looks tight. “Leave him alone, Brian.”
“I’m talking to him,” Brian hisses out through his teeth. “If you didn’t want me to talk to your son, why did you bring him here—”
“Brian—”
“Dex,” Brian’s teeth clink sharply together, as he turns to glare at Dad. The way they look at each other makes Harrison feel like he’s intruding on something private, not for his eyes. His insides squirm, twisting up, like worms in his belly.
“Yes,” he answers, chin out, a confidence he doesn’t actually feel thrumming through his words. “I’m dangerous. I can be dangerous.”
Brian grins at him, but Harrison doesn’t care about that—it’s Dad’s reaction that gets him fluttery, a small smile on his face, as his eyes soften for him.
Harrison tries not to let it show how much he likes it.
“You’re in good company, then,” Brian says with a slight smile, like he knows exactly what Harrison is thinking.
He leans back in his seat, away from his gaze. Silence falls over them, but it doesn’t feel comfortable. It’s too heavy, thick and unmoving, a thousand questions, everything he doesn’t know, churning in his belly and in his head.
“How did this happen?” Harrison asks, eyes roving over the two men—looking for the similarities, for signs of brotherhood, physical resemblance. “How did you two get this way?”
They exchange glances, as Dad’s expression tightens, a crease between his eyebrows, a downturn to his lips. A question I shouldn’t ask, I see.
“What do you mean?” Dad asks slowly, treading carefully.
“Why do you both kill people?” Harrison asks. He doesn’t put the name to it, serial killer at the edge of his tongue, but it’s what he means, and he can see it in Dad’s shoulders, going rigid. “Something in the water? Something in the blood? Something that makes us—” He cuts himself off, unable to finish that sentence, words trapped in his throat.
His father and uncle trade glances, silently debating how to answer, and oh— yeah . Harrison sees it now. It’s not exactly a physical resemblance, they have different eyes—but there’s a look they share, a darkening in their gaze, that makes them look the same. Uncomfortable, rotting familiarity.
No answer.
“Oh, I forgot, you hate telling me shit—”
Dad reaches out to him. He grabs his hand, snatching it from his lap and wrapping his fingers around the delicate bones of his wrist, rubbing his fingertips around Harrison’s pulse point as it starts to speed up. Dad’s eyes are bright points of light, looking at him like he can see right through Harrison, poke around his insides, his full attention on him. Harrison’s breath gets caught, trapped in his throat, unable to escape.
“Harrison,” he says, in this shaky, pleading voice. “I want to tell you everything.”
His hand is a tie to him, joined together as if by a red string, and Harrison can’t move, can’t even speak. He feels...crazy. No other word for it, buzzing at the edge of his mind. He can feel the whole world start to blur around the edge, vision tunneling around his father, until they’re back in that truck in Iron Lake on Christmas Eve night, and Dad is telling him he’s going to tell him everything, his arms wrapped around him. Harrison is still waiting for that, of knowing everything, but he wants to believe him so badly.
Harrison nods mutely, forgetting what he was trying to say. Dad’s hand is warm on his, heat radiating through.
“I just need...” Dad trails off.
Brian sighs. “We both watched our mother get torn apart with a chainsaw,” he answers. “That’s why.”
Harrison flinches, ripping himself away out of his father’s grip. “Jesus,” he gasps.
Brian shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, even as Dad’s jaw clenches, his shoulders locking up.
It’s not like he didn’t know that—we both watched our mother murdered— but now he can picture it, the amount of blood, the body parts in pieces, like some horror movie. He can hear the chainsaw whirr in his head..
“You watched your mom die too,” Brian says, interrupting the visuals. “I know that much about you, at least. We’re all in a Dead Moms Club here.”
Harrison’s mouth goes dry. “Together?”
There’s something at the edge of his vision, behind his eyes, creeping closer and closer.
“He calls it being born in blood,” Brian says, talking about Dexter, but his gaze is on Harrison like a knife and he can’t move. He can’t look at Dad, trapped in Brian’s stare. He swallows hard, at a loss for words. “I call it being fucked up. How about you, kiddo?”
“How about me, what?”
“What do you call it?”
There’s a pool of blood coming closer and closer, and a monster’s face in front of him, dark and naked and horrible, an awful being that sucks up the light in the room like a black hole. Daddy will be home soon.
Harrison doesn’t know how he remembers that.
“Do you remember?” Brian asks, zeroing in on him. His face consumes Harrison’s vision, and the sides of this car shrink, constricting Harrison within. “How your mother died?”
“Brian, for fuck’s sake—”
“All the time,” Harrison swallows, forcing it out. “Bits and pieces at first. I thought it was a nightmare. Took a while to realize it really happened.” He swallows compulsively, trying to hold back, but he can’t—it just spills out. “He talked to me before he left. Trinity. I don’t know what he said, but he said something. I remember the blood. I don’t remember what she looked like, but I remember all the blood.”
Dad’s staring at him like he’s never seen him before. “Harrison, I didn’t—I’m sorry—”
“Is that—did that fuck us up? Is that why?” he asks instead. “I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to remember that, I was, like, a year old. Do we have some super memory freaky brains or something?”
“It’s how we were born,” Brian says somberly. We . All three of them, wired wrong. We we we repeats in his head as he’s seized by an unknown terror, an existential horror that chokes him from the inside out.
There’s no we, Harrison wants to argue. There’s just me, and Dad, and you’re on the outside. Whatever problems he and Dad have—Logan, serial killing, dark passengers—he wanted to have them with Dad. Not Brian.
“Harrison—”
“Can we go back now?” Harrison asks, cutting through whatever Dad was going to say.
Brian nods, turning the car on and with it the radio, fiddling with the dial until it lands on some old classic rock station. Harrison doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive.
*
That was a disaster.
Dexter gets out of the car a little too quickly, feeling as confined in that tight of a space as an animal in a cage, overheating in his winter clothes. Harrison sat in numb silence for the rest of the ride, and Dexter knows he should comfort him, say something to make him feel better, but it feels impossible now, with Brian here, watching them both.
It feels as if something has come unglued.
You should have never come here, Debra says, just out of reach, half a step behind him. He barrels past them all, grabbing the groceries and heading inside.
He’s going to ruin everything. He’s going to ruin Harrison, if you don’t ruin him first.
He does not tell her to shut up, because he’s not sure he can handle Brian asking who he’s talking to.
“It’s like you already live here,” Brian says dryly behind him, catching Dexter mid-unbagging. Dexter tries not to let that bother him. It’s a domestic scene, the two of them bringing groceries in, something the two of them have never done together. It didn’t seem to fit. Dexter can’t shake the anxiety that hums through him; the feeling of being exposed, dragged out into the light. It’s one thing to sit Harrison down and tell him truths, facts, backstory—tell him a story, and let him fill in the gaps—another thing for Brian to just hit him over the head with it like a cudgel.
“Dad,” Harrison asks behind him, a few steps behind him. His son has startled him, but he doesn’t let it show. Some part of him—a rather large part of him—is proud at how quietly he made his approach.
“Yes?” He asks, turning around.
“Can you change my bandages?” His son’s voice is plaintive, almost childish. His expression is wide and open.
Right. From Ethan’s “attack.” It’s been a while. They’re overdue. Dexter nods.
Brian’s brows are twisted up in interest. Down, boy.
“First aid kit is in my bathroom,” he tells them. He doesn’t follow them, except with his eyes, laser-focused on them both as Dexter shuts the door between them.
He pulls out the first kit from under the sink while Harrison undresses swiftly, pulling off all of his top layers: winter coat coming down, hoodie off, and finally tugging his shirt off. Easier than trying to pull all those layers up.
Dexter blinks, staring at his shirtless son, eyes drawn to his injured side.
“This wasn’t as bad before,” he says, as a dark pit begins to percolate in his belly. Dark bruises adorn the left side of Harrison’s body, spreading out from under the bandages, almost as if blooming from the gauze. It could be post-injury bruising, something that occurred naturally, but the bruises go up to his ribs, his upper chest, stopping just under his nipple. There’s an intentionality to the pattern, sprackled and uneven—this did not occur with a mere bump or fall. This was human intent. They’re on their way to healing, not the dark purple or black of fresh bruises, but sallow, yellow tint bursting from the edges—which puts the timeframe at a few days before, at least five, back in Iron Lake, and Dexter’s mind is rushing, burning through him—how could this have happened under his nose ?
Another dark thought—who does he need to kill for laying hands on his boy ?
“What happened?” He reaches out, his hands brushing against the edges of the gauze. Harrison winces when he touches him, the skin tender to the touch, and Dexter’s about to pull back, an apology on his lips, but his son reaches for him, grabbing him with a shaking intensity Dexter didn’t expect; he pulls his hand closer, forward, until he makes skin to skin contact. Dexter’s fingers press on the flush-heated expanse of skin, brushing against the scratchy gauze that hides the worst of it.
“It’s okay,” his son reassures him. Dexter drags his eyes from the horrible bruising to meet Harrison’s gaze—his eyes are wide and dark and unblinking, like an owl, even under the flickering fluorescent lights. He lets out a shaky breath. “It’s okay, Dad, just pull it off.”
Dexter’s not sure what possesses him—he is out of body, and it’s Harrison in control, guiding his hand, peeling the bandages off with a soft, sticking sound. Harrison lets out a sigh of relief as cool air hits his healing injury.
Dexter isn’t thinking. There isn’t even the voice of Debra whispering to him—it’s just him, and Harrison, and his fingers inching alongside the stitched up self-inflicted stab wound, letting his nails run against the mark, the place where he’s all sewn up. Harrison lets out a gasp, loud in this small bathroom, echoing and ringing in his ears.
Dexter pulls away, but Harrison grabs him again—two hands now, on his wrist, urging his fingers towards him, as if he's trying to push them inside the wound.
Not possible. The wound is partway healed. He’d rip up stitches if he did that; he’d tear into him, force him open. He can’t just slip in.
Harrison's flesh is raised here, bumpy with new growing scar tissue, and still he cannot pull himself away from his son, like a moth drawn to a light source, his hands drawn to the warmth of his skin. It’s the most he’s touched his son since they left Iron Lake—since Logan. It tastes a little like forgiveness— is that all he had to do? Wait for Harrison to miss him?
That’s presumptuous of him. He won’t forget all the ways Harrison cut into him before he agreed to leave with him.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Harrison says, a soft hitch in his voice. He’s in pain. Dexter is hurting him. He doesn’t want to be the one that hurts his son, but he can’t make himself move.
“Who did this?” Dexter asks, voice in a growl. He very carefully slides his fingers up, away from the stitches, feather-light over the yellowing bruises on his body instead. “Was it Kurt? Those Moose Creek kids?” Harrison’s face flickers, and oh, Dexter should have let him beat those children up. He should have let him slash and stab and rip them apart, just like he wanted to.
“What if it was?” Harrison asks, his breath coming in a soft whisper. “What would you do?”
“I’d kill anyone who hurts you,” he says, his voice dipping low with softly-contained fury. He can feel his own mask slipping, but is this the dark passenger, or just his own fatherhood roaring to the surface? Or are the two indistinguishable?
“Anyone?” Harrison’s breath shakes. His cheeks are slowly turning ruddy red, a whole-body flush overtaking him, spreading throughout his chest. He tilts his head back, exposing his throat, delicate and vulnerable and ripe for the taking. “Anyone, Dad?”
“Anyone,” he says.
Harrison swallows thickly, his tongue curling around the words. “Lots of people have hurt me,” he says with frightening ease. “Foster care was pretty shitty.”
Dexter makes a noise he’s not sure he can classify as human in the back of his throat. It’s completely involuntary, but Harrison’s gaze sharpens, perking up—predator-to-predator communication, the dark passenger in his son coming alive as his own makes itself known.
“I’ll kill them,” he promises. “I’d find them and kill them for hurting you.”
There is no way he should ever go back to Florida, but he didn’t feel like he was just saying it, either. If Harrison asked, he’d go down with him, and have his son pick out whoever hurt him, and he’d take them apart. He should stop thinking about this, but it's far too painful to process the breadth of what his son has been through at a young age—makes him feel painfully helpless—so fury works. Thoughts of violence dancing in his head, of breaking his code to earn his son’s favor—well, he’d do anything.
Harrison laughs; there’s no mistaking the delight on his face. Dexter's fingers shift over him, and he can feel his son’s ribs through skin, feel the bones under the muscle, and wonders if the motion makes his ribs hurt.
He doesn’t let on. “How would you do it?” Harrison asks instead. He straightens up his posture, unfolding his body, leaning back against the sink as he regards Dexter—peering under the mask, asking for violence. “The same way you always do? Stab them in the heart?”
Dexter finds himself nodding slowly. Harrison takes in a careful breath, breathing slowly, in and out. Dexter still can’t let him go, and Harrison won’t let him go either, sharing the same breath, the same space. His own breathing is too loud in the air, as if scratching the insides of his eardrums.
“Not before making them see ,” he says, because the ritual has to be followed. “They have to know what they did wrong, or it’s...”
“Pointless?” Harrison asks.
“Incomplete.”
His son hums, as if he understands. Maybe he does. “Is it always the heart? Do you ever stab them elsewhere?” He lets go of his wrist to mime a stabbing motion downwards.
“You mean, like you did?” Dexter says, feeling a small, grim smile pull up on his lips.
Harrison pulls a face, brows furrowing. “Yeah. Like me.”
Dexter sighs, suppressing a shiver under his skin as he thinks about it. Pleasant memories.
“I’m pretty routine,” he answers like it’s a mundane thing, and not the moment he always looks forward to, waiting for it to happen. “But you could stab wherever you’d like.” He guides his hand over to Harrison’s chest, just above his heart. “Here,” he says, then down to his sternum, then further to his belly. His son shudders, his stomach rippling, his skin bursting into goose pimples, bruise-covered flesh twitching. “Or here.”
He takes a deep breath, reminding himself why he’s here—change the bandages. If he even needs them. Maybe he’s good to go without them. Harrison’s skin is bare and exposed, and Dexter needs to grab the gauze, just behind Harrison on the sink counter. He doesn’t move.
“Have you ever...not done it that way?” Harrison asks tentatively, feeling the words around his throat. His tongue is very pink against his lips. “Not like...how you did it with Kurt?”
Dexter blinks. “I have to follow the code, Harrison.”
“Except for when it comes to Logan,” Harrison says, acid dripping. “So clearly, you don’t have to.”
Ah. Whatever just happened, the moment is over. Dexter reaches around for the new gauze pads in the first aid kit, going through the motions. “Harrison—”
“I’m just pointing it out.”
“I didn’t want to kill Logan,” Dexter says, words bursting forth. His son’s skin feels too warm beneath his fingertips as he's attaching the bandage, grabbing the medical tape. Does Harrison have a fever? Is he sick? Is he all lit up because of him? “I didn’t enjoy it. I took no pleasure in it. Logan was a good man and he didn’t deserve to die.”
The words come out in one great rush. Harrison stares. Dexter finishes up. He is usually immune to the feelings of awkward silences, but right now, he feels it creep and press along his spine—putting himself in his son’s hands.
“So it was an accident?” Harrison asks finally. His eyes are wide, unsure. Boyish. No dark passenger here—just a kid whose father murdered his friend.
“It was a mistake,” he says carefully. Clearly. It turned Harrison against him.
Something deflates in Harrison then, slumping against the sink, no longer up to full height. His hands linger on Dexter’s arms, unable to fully let go.
“Okay,” he says simply. It sounds like acceptance.
“Okay?” Dexter asks.
Harrison nods. “Okay.”
Dexter still can’t tell what he means. He’s found himself in some muggy swamp land, knee-deep in dark water, unable to see where he’s going, what this is leading him to—knowing only that a certain danger lies ahead.
“Aren’t you angry at me? I thought...” Dexter struggles with the words, finding the thought of his son’s rejection of what they are surprisingly painful, getting stuck in his throat on the way out. “I thought you didn’t want to do this anymore.”
“That’s not what I said,” Harrison says, shaky.
“You sorta said that,” Dexter says. “You pointed a rifle at me. You said you wanted to be normal.”
Harrison laughs. It’s a mirthless sound.
“I’m mad at you,” he says. “I’m....furious with you. For so many reasons. All the time. And I don’t know, I thought being a vigilante with you would have been cool, but maybe I don’t want to kill people with you—”
Dexter tries not to wince. Even when the words feel like a knife wound.
“—not like that, not like...you. But I don’t want you gone,” Harrison confesses. “I want to be where you are. Whether that’s Canada or LA.” He shakes his head, looks down. Wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand. “It took me so long to find you.”
Dexter nods. He should put Harrison’s shirt back on. But he likes looking at him; his son, all bare and exposed, unable to hide. It makes him feel less naked.
“Let’s start over,” Dexter says. “I want to start over.”
“Okay,” Harrison says, raising his face to him, all bluster gone out of him. The world narrows down to this little bathroom and it’s like nothing else matters, nothing else in the world, like all their fights. “You and me?”
“Yes. After all of this is over. We leave. We’ll make another home together. We’ll...keep each other honest.”
Harrison snorts, but his lips are turned up, smiling. “Honest, huh?”
Dexter lets himself fantasize, dreaming of a life away from here. A warm sunny day, a cool sea breeze washing over them both. His son in the passenger seat of a car, the light reflecting off his eyes, as they drive down a distant highway to a better land. An endless summer, and a night to hide them both. He even lets himself imagine his brother in this scenario—Brian coming to visit, maybe finally able to smooth things out, reconnect, his whole living family with him, dreaming of an idealized version of his big brother that could follow a code.
“Honest,” Dexter says.
Harrison leans forward until their foreheads bump together, until he’s forced to look into his eyes, let his son’s face take up the whole room. He could study him like this forever.
“Okay,” Harrison agrees. “You and me?”
“You and me,” he nods. “And Brian—”
“No.” Harrison’s objection is immediate. He pulls away. That brief loss feels like a gnawing, aching chasm. “No. You said we would leave. Soon. Together.”
“I know, I agree,” Dexter says. His fantasy had gotten away from him, that’s not what he meant at all. “I just meant, we’re here, together, now , I didn’t mean—”
“You said that,” Harrison reminds him. His words tighten around Dexter’s throat like a choke chain. “You promised.”
“I do,” Dexter says. “I promise.”
*
“I’m thinking...red,” Brian says with a dramatic flourish, twirling his hand in the air.
His brother tosses the box of brown to him instead. “No.” Dexter takes a seat in the kitchen chair he’s pulled into the middle of his kitchen floor, lined with black garbage bags they tossed on the floor to pick up the drips from the dye. The black marks from Harrison’s turn barely show on the garbage bag. “The whole point is to not stand out.”
“I promise, it’ll look drab on you,” Brian says. “It’s not going to be bright red. It’ll fade into a light, plain color. Not Lindsey Lohan.”
Dexter’s brow furrows, because he probably forgot who Lindsey Lohan is. “I want the brown,” he says.
“Look, your hair is already dark. This will barely make a difference. It’ll give you a reddish tinge, at best,” Brian says, staring at the murky brown of the hair dye and looking back at Dexter’s still mostly dark locks. “We’re going with red. Take your shirt off.”
Dexter sighs, then very reluctantly takes off his flannel and t-shirt and undershirt, leaving him bare. Harrison did this wearing one of Brian’s old band tees he had lying around, but his clothes are too tight on his broader brother. Easier to just strip. Dexter should understand, but he huffs a defensive sigh, and Brian knows he’s fighting the urge to cross his arms, not from cold.
“You didn’t used to be so shy,” Brian teases, slapping on the plastic gloves that came with the applicator in the box.
“I’m not shy,” Dexter insists, but even now, there’s something—dare he say it? Bratty—about the way he’s shifty, the way he’s submitting himself to his brother’s touch with great reluctance.
Brian stands behind him. It’s a vulnerable pose, Brian here at his back.
“You look great, by the way,” he says, putting on the gloves, preparing the dye. He doesn’t need a lot. Dexter doesn’t have a lot of hair. He should grow it out again.
Dexter snorts. Ever the self-deprecating one. “I look like any fifty year old man.”
God. When did they both get so old?
Brian squirts the dye out onto his fingers, and slides them into Dexter’s hair. It’s thin enough that he doesn’t need to do much, but he still gets his fingers deep in, pressing them into his scalp before he starts layering the color in. Brian’s no hairdresser, but he’s been other people for most of his life; he knows enough to get the job done.
Dexter sighs, tilts his head back, protests gone. “I don’t know if this will even work,” he says.
“Well, you can always shave your head,” Brian says, but he hopes Dexter doesn’t, even if it would be the practical thing to do. He does like having something to grip.
“I don’t have the head shape for it,” he says, and Brian laughs, because it’s true, and he feels a swell of fondness for his little brother, so wide and big it engulfs everything for a bright, shining moment.
Press in. Press out. Layer the dye in. No need to section. With women, it’s taking locks of hair and coloring them with the dye. With Dexter, it’s just making sure he gets it all in on his hair, no errant strands. Fingers on scalp. Saturate it in. His brother sighs softly, and he stretches out his legs like a contented cat. Even though Brian is behind him, he knows his eyes are closed. He knows his posture is relaxed. He knows these things about his brother.
Harrison had endured the whole ordeal with a straight back, an almost army-worthy posture, tension radiating off his shoulders, as if he was trying to bite down on pain. As if getting his hair colored caused some sort of nail-biting agony. He refused to say anything, though, just got up when Brian was done and announced he was going to shower—to his father. Ignoring him.
With his hands massaging the scalp, he says, “You do know why he’s angry with you, right?”
Dexter lets out a deep sigh, a tiredness that can only come from parenting a teenager, or from days of being on the run. “You’re going to give me parenting advice?”
Brian ignores the jab, pushing his fingers into his brother’s scalp, slow pressure, the color almost covering every strand. He can feel Dexter winces under him. “You’re being Harry,” he tells him.
“I’m—” Dexter starts, defensive, hand reaching up to press under his chin. “I’m not pushing anything on him, I—”
“That’s not what I meant,” Brian says, thinking about the scene back in the car, the way Dexter couldn’t even look at Harrison. “You keep lying to him. Withholding. Refusing to answer his questions.”
“I’m—I’m not trying to be,” he says, shoulders losing their tension in a slump. The movement causes Brian to nearly slip his fingers.
“Easy,” Brian warns him, “I almost got your nape.”
“I told him what I do,” Dexter says. “He watched. He put the pieces together—that’s what you did.”
Brian laughs. Yes, the literal pieces. Good times. “All I’m saying, if you want to connect, you have to give some part of you to him.”
Dexter falls silent, and Brian can tell he doesn’t know what he means. But that’s enough advice for one day. Dexter can ask for it if wants it.
“Alright. Done,” Brian announces, circling Dexter once as he surveils his handiwork. True to his word, the red was bright on his gloved hands but just darkened in Dexter’s hair, turning a deeper shade of burgundy. Not drab but not eye-catching, either. It’ll work.
He stands in front of Dexter, studying his work, and his brother arches an eyebrow, tilts his head back—bares that expanse of a throat, dark stubble growing from being on the run, made Dexter’s nondescript face sharpen into something darkly handsome, hawkish.
Brian reaches and grabs his chin, taking a better, closer look. Manhandling his brother, just a bit. It’s his right. He doesn’t get to be a big brother often.
“Hey,” Dexter protests—the smear of red dye on his chin looked like blood—but he doesn’t pull away.
“You look good,” Brian says softly, and means it—Dexter’s shorter, but broader than he is, and it shows more now that he’s been chopping his own firewood for years. He’s never had a Miami beach bod, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, but his body is easy on the eye, workman muscles in his shoulders and arms, hair running down chest to belly. Everything about Dexter is shaped for labor and murder.
“It’ll wash off,” he tells him, smiling, leaning down to kiss his brother’s forehead, right under the dye, a daring dangerous kiss, flirting with fire.
“Brian,” Dexter breathes, with a hot urgency in his voice, shifting further back, but not out of his grip. Brian has no words, no explanation for what he’s doing, except for I miss you, I missed you my whole life, and you’re only in it once or twice every decade and that’s not nearly enough.
Don’t you get that?
“Dexter,” he answers in kind, drawing out his name, feeling it again in his mouth. He hasn’t uttered it in years, and his tongue missed the shape of those syllables.
“You know well enough that there are things I can’t tell Harrison,” Dexter whispers. “No matter how honest he wants me to be.”
Brian knows. He knows what he means. It’s not enough. It’s like drowning. He wants to put his face on him. Wants to put his mouth on him. He wants the smear of red on his chin to be blood from a fresh kill. He is tired of waiting games, of existing, life among the sheep, with no other wolf at his side.
“Yeah, Dexter,” he says, speaking in a low hum. “I know exactly what you mean.”
They stare at each other, faces too close together, lingering. Dexter’s eyes are dark, sharp like a knife point, aimed at Brian like a weapon, and he knows it then. They both do.
This is going to happen. Will happen. Again and again and again. Brian knows it. It’ll end badly again too. Just like always.
“Hey,” the kid says. His voice startles throughout the air like a siren, despite his low timbre, scratching the sides of Brian's eardrums. He’s done with his shower in Brian’s bedroom, and his hair is wet and plastered to his face or sticking up in haphazard spikes. It’s a pitch-black raven dark now.
Brian doesn’t step away—he’s nearly between Dexter’s legs, and the pose is so very suggestive—but he does take his hand off his chin, letting the smear of red stand out. Maybe it reminds the kid of something.
“Good,” Brian says, keeping at least one eye on his brother. He watches his facial expressions, the shift between his eyes, a cautious hand lifting up to his chin, self conscious of the red, the smear, his brother’s hand and Harrison’s watchful eye. “You can shower next.”
Harrison squints, like he can’t see them clearly, his gaze flickering between the two of them. “You’re supposed to wait fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll manage,” Dexter says, as he gets up. “The entire process of figuring out Brian’s shower might take fifteen minutes—” He stops short when he sees Harrison, eyes narrowing. “Huh.”
“What?” Harrison asks, just a little surly, speaking over Brian.
“Nothing,” Dexter says. “Just…your hair is as dark as his used to be.”
Harrison turns his gaze over to him, one eyebrow up. It’s true—if he grew it out, let it be a little longer rather than mimicking his father’s haircut, he could pass for his own. The thought made a strange sensation run up his spine, like a ghost walked over his grave.
“I bet we’d make a great family picture,” Harrison says, full of disdain, contempt dripping from his voice. The kid does not like him. That much is obvious.
“We could always tell people you’re my son,” Brian says, cracking a grin.
Harrison scoffs. “Sure. You really give off fatherly vibes.”
Dexter goes to his bathroom to shower off, and Brian has the half-second idea of following him, washing his hair himself, the two of them cocooned in a shower. He’s stopped only by Dexter’s kid—Harrison’s eyes follow his father’s back as well, lingering at the door as it closes shut, the same as Brian’s eyes—a hungry, starved out sort of longing.
Brian holds up his hands in a square gesture, miming a camera—centers Harrison right in the center of the frame, his dark hair, his sullen face, his piercing eyes, the shirt plastered to his skin with the slick drops on his forehead. Take a picture. Click.
*
Brian stares down at the new baby, frowning at the small human handed over to him.
The baby—no longer a newborn, but new to him, and still too young to have anything resembling a personality—stares back at him, his face guileless, formless, and a bit wrinkled. Aren’t they supposed to get those later?
The baby frowns at him, adding more wrinkles to his funny little face, as if troubled by his presence—you and me both, kid.
If he starts crying, Brian isn’t sure what he’s going to do. He doesn’t share Dexter’s soft spot for children, probably because Brian grew up in an institution, where all the children he knew were deranged little monsters of various flavors.
Fortunately, Dexter comes over with a change of clothes for the boy, a little day bag packed for him, even though they’re going to be gone longer than a day.
“Is he coming with us?” Brian says, keeping his voice level.
“No,” Dexter says, rolling his eyes. “I got a babysitter coming. He can stay home.”
Brian doesn’t say it, but after Rita—hell, after their childhood—he wouldn’t ever want to leave the kid alone again; he’d strap him to his chest and drag him everywhere. He doesn't voice this; there’s no point. It’s not as if he could care for a child. It’s just strange to watch Dexter with one—he watches his brother change little Harrison (blegh) with no complaint, getting him a clean diaper and bundled up to take a nap, preparing a carrier for him for when the babysitter arrives.
“Good boy,” Dexter tells him as he slips on a new, baby-sized shirt for him to wear, lifting his arms up. Harrison does not cry or wail, pliant for his father. “You’re gonna have so much fun with Jamie, I promise.”
Dexter is completely focused on the boy, briefly tickling his son’s belly, the boy’s gormless face suddenly lighting up, letting out a happy, childish giggle. He doesn’t know his father is a monster. He should, after his mother died, after being found in her blood. He doesn’t know a bigger monster is coming to take him away.
“It’s weird seeing you with a kid,” Brian tells Dexter. He doesn’t recognize his brother, the monster that terrorized the bad men and women of Miami. This Dexter seems to actually enjoy the presence of a kid. Brian doesn’t like seeing it—that kid is gonna hold him back. How can he get Dexter to come away with him further than Nebraska if he’s thinking of a small child?
The child looks back at Brian, eyes half-lidded, barely awake.
Dexter doesn’t answer his question, but he glances up at his brother, head cocked. The boy mirrors the gesture, as if he knows it means something.
“Here,” Dexter says, handing over the child.
“Excuse me?” Brian says, a surge of panic lodging itself in his throat.
“Just hold him,” Dexter says, and he’s maneuvering Brian now, pulling out his arms to place the kid in them. “Support the head,” Dexter tells him, and Brian’s long fingers rest on the back of the child’s skull. It’s soft underneath his touch, covered in downy blond hair just like his mother, and entirely too fragile; all he’d have to do is close is fist and squeeze to pop the boy’s flesh and bones.
Harrison is heavier than he looks, though, like holding a sack of potatoes; are they supposed to be this heavy at this age?
“You’re his uncle. Say hi. My son should know his uncle, shouldn’t he?”
Wait.
That’s not what Dexter said; that’s not what happened. Jamie came and then they left together, and Dexter never wanted him to even touch his son, hoarding him like a greedy dragon, as if contact with Brian would steal him away, never to be seen again.
Why does Brian think it happened any differently? The thought swells up in his mind, growing bigger and bigger, filling him up like warm fresh blood, unable to think of anything else.
Brian rouses from his sleep then—a sudden, sharp alertness fills him up, eyes snapping open to take in the cold bare ceiling above him. He’s been ripped out of his dream, but his body doesn’t rise up like a vampire—just goes from dead asleep one moment to fully awake the next.
There’s a presence in his room, but it’s not Dexter—the space beside him is cold, sheets and blankets askew—Dexter has long left him, woken up to start his day. His vision is filled with the pale beige popcorn ceiling high above, but at the edges of his eyes, at the corners, something dark lurks.
Brian turns his head, raising himself up to the headboard, the sheet and blanket pooling on his lap, leaving him bare-chested.
The child—the once-new baby, now a young man, on the cusp of adulthood in body if not in mind—leans against the open doorway, head cocked, watching him sleep. His arms hang loosely at his side, and he’s wearing one of Brian’s flannels over one of the new t-shirts they got him.
Thief .
He expects a greeting, but Harrison simply keeps staring at him, like he’s studying him—the care and feeding of one Brian Moser, semi-retired serial killer, former ‘mental case’ patient, and current monster. His nephew’s eyes linger over his face, then down his shoulders, his chest. How long has he been standing there?
“Harrison,” Brian says. He and Dexter only slept last night. Nothing to see here. “Staring is rude.”
It’s as if a spell lifts—like Harrison remembered words are a tool he can use.
“Dad's awake,” he says, as if Brian couldn’t tell.
“I can see that.”
“He’s waiting for you,” Harrison states, his voice devoid of warmth and affection, his stare knife-sharp on Brian. “The passport thing is today.”
Ah. Brian almost forgot. Their little errand. They took the passport pictures last night, against a bare patch of wall in Brian’s bedroom. One step closer to his brother leaving him. No wonder he wants to drag his feet.
“You’re wearing my shirt,” he tells him, head cocked. “That’s also rude.”
Harrison shrugs, no remorse. “Dad said I could.”
He doesn’t believe that—but he doesn’t want to argue with him first thing upon waking. Brian waves Harrison off, expecting him to leave as he swings his legs around the edges of the bed, feet down. Harrison does not leave. He keeps staring, as if he can’t quite figure him out, as if he can see all his nerve endings and muscle through the skin, trying to catalog them—it’s starting to get unnerving.
“Are you going to let me get dressed, or do you wanna watch that too?”
Harrison chuckles, but it has the desired effect—he takes one step back out of the bedroom. “I didn’t think you were shy,” he says.
The wording nudges at his brain, pointed and familiar—no way Harrison overheard their conversation, though. The shower had been running.
“Don’t be cute,” Brian hisses, but Harrison is already ducking out.
*
“I’m not sure I trust this guy,” Dexter says to his brother. They are back in the car after Brian’s guy took their photos, idling in the man’s front yard as the car warms up. Harrison opted not to go with them—he’d been busy watching Brian’s television, turned to him and asked you don’t need me, right? I can stay? And Dexter didn’t want to drag Harrison out for any more forced family bonding—every interaction between him and Brian was painful to watch—so he let him stay behind.
“You think he recognized you?” Brian shrugs, all casual, stretching out his long limbs. “He’s been committing small acts of petty crime here for years.”
“That sounds like the definition of trustworthy,” Dexter says, looking around. It’s not much of a yard, a run-down home outside of town, paint peeling off the door. The snow is still lingering, but the grass is beginning to show underneath in patchy spots; dried, dead, brown-green grass, and beneath it, even more dirt.
It’ll be New Year’s soon. New them. New beginning, hopefully.
“He didn’t say anything,” Dexter adds, “but if a serial killer turned up at my door, I wouldn’t either.”
“No, just plot their deaths,” Brian says. He leans forward, arms on the steering wheel, peering inside the tiny house where forgeries happen. “But you’re not really on the news, much less the local news. The cops are keeping their information close to the vest for this one.” Brian glances sidelong at him, mouth twitching upwards. “As far as anyone knows, you’re a cop killer in New York, and a nobody in New Hampshire. Let’s face it—you’re not the Zodiac. The Bay Harbor Butcher isn't that big a deal up north.”
“I’ve killed more people than the Zodiac,” Dexter says. Which is not the point, but he feels like he should state that.
Brian laughs, pointing at the house with his thumb. “Well, five-spot Charlie minds his own business,” he says. He leans back against the headrest, face tilted to stare at Dexter. There’s something soft and indulgent in his brother’s expression, warm in his dark eyes; people don’t look at him like that. Dexter doesn’t want to think too hard about it. “And if you’re worried, we can just go in and kill him.”
“We can’t do that,” Dexter says. “Who is going to make our fake passports then?”
Brian barks out a laugh, and even Dexter can’t help but grin at his brother.
“I’m joking, you know—”
“I know,” Brian says, long-suffering.
“I don’t support killing him—”
“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t.” Brian pouts. He puts the car in gear, starts to pull out, driving carefully over frozen ground. “You’re on the run. There’s no way you should commit another murder less than a week after the last one.”
He doesn’t sound convincing.
“Hey,” Brian says. “I want to show you something. Can I show you something?”
The fact that Brian wants to take him anywhere without telling him where is deeply suspicious. Dexter should protest.
“Sure,” he says.
Brian turns a different way than the way they came. He drives in the opposite direction, out of town—away from his mobile home, towards a different stretch of woods, passing trees with missing leaves and clustered branches, a place that would no doubt be beautiful in the summertime. He turns the car down a back road, then further down a dangerous-looking road, dirt and rumbling beneath him.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s not far,” his brother promises.
“This is a bad idea,” Debra says, from behind him in the backseat. She leans forward, sticking her head between them. She pointedly avoids looking directly at Brian, as if she’s a cloud that will dissipate into emptiness if she’s here for too long. “Do you really think you can trust him?”
That’s the problem. Dexter can’t help but trust him.
Eventually they come upon it: a dead forest, skinny withered trees, surrounding and twisting around a cabin in the woods, not that different from the one he used to live in—smaller than his own. From the outside it seems like just one giant room. He can’t see in through the blacked out windows. A place of—safety, perhaps, a refuge for wayward travelers? Or perhaps a place to die. A place where no one would hear you scream. A place where a monster works.
If Dexter weren’t a serial killer, he’d think he’s in a horror movie, but if he’s the monster, what does he have to fear?
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Hunting cabin.”
“Your hunting cabin?”
“No.” Brian grins. “Not mine.”
“Brian, did you kill the person who owns that hunting cabin?”
Brian answers by getting out of the car. His feet crunch on the snow beneath him, walking gingerly up to the cabin.
Dexter sighs, and follows him in.
Inside, it’s dusty, and nearly too dark to see—creaking floorboards beneath his feet, spiderwebs lining the walls. There’s a kerosene lantern by the door, but neither of them reach for it. There’s one large open room, one wood burning stove tucked in the corner, and another back space hidden by a door—a bedroom, maybe. This place hasn’t seen renovation in some time. No one has been here for a while. Maybe it’s used in the summer, or during hunting season. There’s nothing in the cabin, no personal property, no furniture—if Brian is hiding a body, or evidence, it’s not here—but Dexter smells blood and smoke. Like something burned.
“Brian—”
“Maybe I did,” his brother says, spinning around to face him. There is no light but the faint scraps of it that stream in from the gray winter day from the dirty windows. It casts his brother’s face half in shadow and half lit up, the lights of his eyes shining. “Will you put me on your table again?” He looks around the space. “This is a good place for a kill room, don’t you think?”
Ten years ago, he may have said yes. Five years ago, he may have said yes. Now, he’s not so sure. He should say yes now. Be the kind of man your son wants you to be.
“Brian, I don’t want to kill you,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to kill you.” It sounds like a confession, like he should go to a church and say this—but he doesn’t believe in any god, just Harry, and he’s not even sure he believes in that still.
Brian should know this. He’s alive far past his expiration date, the scar on his throat always reminding them both.
“No,” Brian says, and it’s like the air goes out of him, peeling away the layers. “You just leave.”
You didn’t just make the decision to abandon me once, his son’s voice echoes in his head, you made that decision every day for ten years.
“You’re going to ask me to stay,” Dexter says, and it shouldn’t be a realization, but he feels sick in his gut over it—thinking about what Harrison asked of him, the way he demanded it just be you and him. This always happens. His brother always wants Dexter to go away with him, or in this case, stick around. Brian always feels like a vacation from his life, a tropical island where he can forget everything else and just be for a moment. A stab of guilt hits him, because it’s not as if he wants a vacation from his son—that’s not it.
There are two sides to him, and on either end, he’s being stretched and pulled to the limits.
“I’m not going to ask you to stay,” Brian stresses. He pulls his winter gloves off his hands, exposing his skin, just as cold in here as it is outside. “I said I wouldn’t do that.”
He takes a step closer to Dexter, and closes the front door behind Dexter, so it’s the two of them in the dark again, barely illuminated by winter light. “But I do think it’d be a good idea. You can wait for the heat to die down. You can put Harrison in school, let him live out the second semester of a school year.”
“And I’m what? Boo Radley in your bedroom?”
“You’re my brother, ” Brian says. “You’re always my brother. I’ll tell people your wife died and you moved here with your son. It could work.”
Harrison would kill him—he could see him raise the rifle up again in his mind, in woods not so different from here. Can picture the anger on his face, and worse than that, the hurt. The disappointment. So you lied again? Is that all you do?
Dexter shakes his head.
“It was a no in Nebraska, it’s going to be a no here—”
“This isn’t Nebraska,” Brian says. His voice is getting hotter, thicker. “Harrison isn’t a baby anymore.”
Dexter cocks his head. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s different now,” Brian says. He holds his hands up in the air, like a peace offering. “Look, I get it. I fucked up. I should have never asked you to abandon your kid. I thought Harrison was just...your cover, like Rita. Something that made you look normal. I didn’t know—I didn’t understand that he’s a part of you. I didn’t see that. I see that now.”
“He is a part of me,” Dexter says slowly, more to himself, than to Brian. Harrison is a part of him—his phantom limb, his blood, his bone marrow, his dark passenger—
“He’s yours,” Brian says, and it’s like something just clicks in his head, all the pieces neatly falling together. Yours. That feels right, in some esoteric way. My son. “So that makes him mine too.”
Dexter leans back, raising an eyebrow. He isn’t sure he likes that.
Brian clocks his expression. “I just want to be with my family for a little while, however that works out,” he says. “I haven’t had family in so long, Dexter.”
What he’s done to Brian crashes into him hard, like standing in the middle of a hurricane and being swept away by a wave. What he’s done to his brother and Harrison both. His own isolation was self-imposed, a punishment, years without the touch of someone who knows him, accepting that no one could or should know him—he deserved that.
Harrison didn’t deserve that. Maybe Brian did—but Brian’s a monster because he had no family, and Dexter is tired of being the arbiter of punishment. He’s fifty years old, and he’s killed a cop, and it all feels a little pointless—all this wasted time between them.
Guilt turns his insides to rot. He hates it.
“You shouldn’t have asked me to kill my sister,” Dexter says. His voice is faint, soft-spoken, because he’s not angry at Brian, not anymore. Debra flickers behind Brian, blood pouring out of the bullet wound in her gut. She’s in the same hospital gown she died in, and Dexter knows who killed her.
Brian bites his lip. Unhappy. He hates it when Dexter brings this up.
“I need to hear you say it,” Dexter says. “I’m not asking you to apologize, we both know you wouldn’t mean it. But I need to know you understand that.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to kill your foster sister? I know that.” He reaches up, tugs down his winter scarf and places two fingers to the scar on his neck. Dexter is struck by a violent urge to see what he’s done, trace that scar with his fingers, press his teeth to it. It’s a sharp desire, straight from within, the desire so sudden and intense it felt like a foreign invader. “I’m reminded of that all the goddamn time.”
Dexter nods. His sister is glaring at him from behind his brother.
“I did kill Debra, you know,” Dexter tells him. “Maybe the reason I could not stand to be near you in the aftermath was that I know she’s dead and I know I did it and I couldn’t bear for you to be happy about it.”
“How about now?” his brother asks quietly. “How do you feel about it now?”
Dexter shakes his head. He can never really pick apart what he’s feeling. Harrison is much better at that. “I killed her,” he says. “I threw her in the ocean. End of story.”
“No, it’s not the end of the story. You’re here. I’m here. Your son is here.”
“Brian—”
Brian steps forward, moving in a great rush until he’s colliding with him. Dexter is thrown off course, stiffening up at the sudden contact. His brother is wrapping his arms around him, pressing in tightly, and it takes Dexter a moment to realize this is a hug.
His body relaxes, shoulders slumping, recalling the first time Brian hugged him, when he introduced himself as Rudy—except that wasn’t the first time. The first time Dexter doesn’t remember, because he must have been a baby, and maybe there was an entire toddlerhood of his big brother hugging him whenever he could, clinging to him as they slept together in a shared bed. Dexter finds himself clinging to Brian now, clawing his hands into his back, breathing in the musky-warm familiar smell of him, and finds the thought of letting go unbearable.
Brian being this close always makes him feel like he’s going crazy, like there's something wild and uncontrollable inside him, more than just his dark passenger, a frightening creature he can’t quite master—like every emotion he thought he couldn’t feel, never felt, suddenly begins to drown him.
Brian steps back but Dexter doesn’t let him pull away. He leans in and grabs Brian by the face, pressing a hard kiss to his lips—as if he could crawl inside him like this, driven to be even closer. His brother gasps, then smiles into his mouth, reaching to grab Dexter by the hair and hold him tight as they kiss, mouths moving over each other. Immediately, Dexter knows he’s made a terrible mistake, one he doesn’t know how to untangle himself from—but he can’t stop.
It’s too late to stop now.
*
The padlock on Uncle Brian’s shed taunts Harrison. It hangs there, unbroken, as Harrison struggles with a paperclip, trying to get it open. Usually, he’s good at this. He’s broken and gotten past several locks, doors, windows. If he had bolt cutters, he could brute force this.
But his dad hasn’t shown him how to get past a padlock yet, so he’s a little stuck here.
Harrison sighs, breathing out his frustration. He should have known it wouldn’t have worked, but he stayed behind to look around, get a feel for the location without constant eyes on him. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for—it’s not a clear direction, a solid goal, just a...gut feeling about Uncle Brian.
Killers usually keep some kind of trophy, memento, to remember what they did—that’s what Dad said, back when it was Kurt.
He’ll know it when he sees it.
It’s twenty degrees outside. Harrison can feel the cold air freezing in his chest, his skin twinging at the windchill batters at him. His lungs ache as he breathes, and his gloved hands are tired of being wrapped up. Gingerly, he shakes the padlock on the shed again. The cold makes the thing feel heavier in his palm, like dead weight.
He takes in a breath. His chest burns, the cold creeping up on him the longer he stays out, like an approaching predator, easing him into death. He has only a limited amount of time to look before his father and uncle return—he’s not sure how long the whole thing will take. Could be twenty minutes. Could be hours.
Harrison goes back inside, cleaning up his tracks in the snow, getting rid of his footprints—a pain in the ass, but maybe Dad would be proud. Covering his tracks is important, right? Don’t get caught—though it’s not like he’s planning to kill someone.
Inside, he passes the note he left on the counter—out for a walk, looking around, a contingency plan in case Dad came back before he was done snooping outside, giving himself some wiggle room in case he’s not found where he’s supposed to be. He leaves his coat on, like he might go back outside, and tries to think of a new plan of attack.
They took the photographs against a spot of bare wall along the hallway, clustered far too close to Brian, far too close to his father, like sardines in a can. Click. Now I got you, Brian had said, with a sharp grin that made Harrison think of sharks.
Dad had been really good at acting “normal”—so normal that Harrison had thought he was a bit bland, dull even, with his awkward small talks and corny jokes—but Brian isn’t like that, at least, not around him. Every thing Brian does gives him the creeps, like he’s trying to burrow under his skin. The way he looks at him, the way he looks at Dad, makes his skin crawl.
He can’t explain it. It's just an itch at the back of his head, scratching at his insides. Brian is different from Dad—he never got the creeps from Dad up until he said he wouldn’t cooperate about Coach Logan.
Harrison takes a deep breath. Figure it out.
He’s going to check the bedroom.
Entering Brian’s room feels like a trespass, not that Harrison feels bad about it, not on principle, but it does make him feel like he’s crossing a line, looking at something he isn’t supposed to see—like peering under someone’s skin and staring down into their body cavity. Any minute now, someone is going to spring behind him and take him to jail. Anxiety beats like a drum under his skin, his heart going thud thud thud.
He’s always been hyper aware of his surroundings—in foster care, you learn to read the room.
Harrison works as quickly as he can. He doesn’t find anything but clothes in the drawers, no false bottoms, nothing mixed in with the clean, black boxer-briefs. Harrison knew a kid who used to hide a disposable razor in a bundled sock, but he expects a higher level of weaponry from a serial killer.
It occurs to Harrison that he doesn’t know how Brian killed his victims, or even who they were—all Dad said is he fit the code. He didn’t ask at the time. He should have, but he was already so close to combusting, he couldn’t handle more information. He wants to know now—it’d give him a better idea of what to look for.
Uncle Brian has bits of scattered art throughout the room; a bust of a misshapen head on his desk, next to medical journals and medical papers, another art book on the desk, next to one about New England lakes. Absolutely no photos of anyone, not even himself, no documentation that Brian existed anywhere else but here.
The nightstand is bare. There’s a half full bottle of plain, unscented hand lotion next to a task lamp, a mostly empty hand sized notepad with numbers on it and nothing else. Brian didn’t strike him as the kind of guy to write his thoughts down.
The jacket is almost too heavy on him now, sweat burning under his brow, down his back, but Harrison can’t risk taking it off and accidentally leaving it here.
Under the bed, he finds a storage container—nothing unusual, see-through plastic, gray lid. Harrison opens it and finds...newspaper clippings. A whole stack of them, filling the container to the brim. Some are magazine cutouts, shiny glossy paper rather than rough inky stacks. He picks up one of the newspaper cutouts, finding a missing person report— Mike Donovan, choir master, clergyman, last seen in a choir performance in October, never came home. Alex Timmen’s missing person’s report from Florida-Dade county is just a single line. Former marine sniper, last seen in April 2004. Another cutout from The Miami Tribune, reporting a Warren Grey as a victim of the Bay Harbor Butcher—
Harrison’s heart hammers. Bay Harbor Butcher; he's heard that before, what he's looking for in current headlines, but it's another thing to see this. There’s a photo printed off the internet of odd, misshapen bags of trash on the ocean floor. Black, hefty bags. Bags as far as the eye can see. Kurt’s face flashes in Harrison’s mind, and then his leg, his arm, sawed off, his blood running on the ground, rushing towards him like a great wave—
It's then when it hits him, what he’s looking at—this isn’t Brian’s work. Not his at all. It’s Dad. These are Dad’s.
Harrison sits on his haunches, feeling the breath go out of him, going cross-eyed trying to take everything in. Some of the photos are high resolution—body parts wrapped in black plastic, just like what they wrapped Kurt in. Others are more blurry, printed out from old websites on the internet, depicting bloated, distorted body parts, arms and legs cut in equidistant pieces, so decomposed they didn’t look like a person anymore, tinged yellow and green with algae.
There are missing people’s reports, neatly organized by date. Never resolved, apparently—but Brian knows what happened. Harrison feels his cheeks going hot as he asks himself, did he figure it out or did Dad tell him ?
Something about Dad spilling every single secret corpse to his uncle makes Harrison feel like ripping all these papers up.
He keeps reading. He needs to pack this shit back up but he can’t stop. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, poring through each document, sickly fascinated, like he’s getting under his father’s skin, or maybe Dad’s getting under his—or maybe they're getting under each other's, peeling off layers and trying to find the raw meat underneath.
In the hundreds, Dad told him. Brian knows them all. Brian kept them all, like artwork to hang on a refrigerator—a memory box of Dad’s kills.
He can’t stop reading—some are actual news paper clippings, some print outs, divided up into neat little unlabeled folders. Years, more than a decade of activity. There’s not a lot of photos—of course not. Dad’s code works. No scene of the crime if there’s no crime, just a missing person, except for that underwater graveyard discovered in Miami. But the photos that do exist—bodies reduced to parts reduced to pieces, neatly wrapped up—are haunting.
So clean. So neat. Harrison knows it’s not really neat. It takes so much work, can take all night, there’s always that in-between stage when the body stops shaking and when they’re in pieces—all that sinew, and exposed bone, all that flowing blood—that's the truth. There’s no photos of that stage.
Harrison can’t quantify how he feels. He can taste blood at the back of his throat, like a seizure warning.
Out in the distance, he hears the sound of tires crunching over snow, a rustling noise as Brian’s Oldsmobile pulls in close.
Shit. How long have I been here?
Too long. He wasted too much time. This proves nothing except that his father is a killer, and Harrison knew that already. His hands are trembling as he frantically tries to push all the papers back in. Is this the right photograph in the right folder? Was this newspaper clipping on top? Did he get the names mixed? There’s no time to be sure. “Shit, shit, shit,” he mutters under his breath.
He shoves the storage container under the bed, right as he hears the door open; that creeeeek, the sound of footsteps, so close by.
There’s no time. He needs to think of something, his mind flipping through cover stories. He can hear Dad and Uncle Brian talking, speaking in low, soft voices, but he can’t pay attention to the words, unable to hold on to the shape of them as he tries to find a way out. Bathroom? He could hide in the tub. Or slip out the window.
Harrison’s heart furiously beats against his ribcage as he makes a beeline for the closet. Brian’s closet is very neat, everything in a place, not shoved into stacks and piles of clothes. He’s greeted with a laundry basket that he pushes to the side to take its place, his body sliding down and landing awkwardly on the floor with his legs in front of him. The closet is made up of two doors that open in, leaving a tiny gap for his eyes to see out of when he closes them up again. Harrison has his face pressed against it, Brian’s jacket and shirts tickling the back of his neck, as his father and uncle enter the room together.
“Where’s your kid?” Brian asks. From here, he can see them as oddly shaped figures entering, world narrowed down. He watches Brian dump something on his desk, his father coatless as he walks in, running his fingers alongside the bedpost for a moment, as if he's feeling the type of wood; it’s an oddly intimate gesture.
Harrison squeezes his eyes shut, like he’s a child—if he can’t see them, they can’t see him. If he stays here in this closet and doesn’t move at all, then nothing can come get him—monsters live outside the closet. Or maybe Harrison is the monster inside the closet.
“He said he was going for a walk.” That’s Dad’s voice. Non-committal, almost casual. Harrison texted that a while ago.
Brian scoffs. “Aaaand you’re okay with that? It’s frozen as hell out there. It’s all woods and wild animals.”
“He’s been on his own before...” his father replies back, trailing off, as if even he’s not sure of that answer. “He walked to school on his own. He’s smart. Besides, I don’t keep Harrison on a leash—”
“Maybe you should—”
“—I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
There’s some rustling, like clothes, and the soft timber of Brian’s humorless chuckle. “You should know better,” he says. Something has changed in his voice, pitched lower. “You two are supposed to be laying low.”
“They’re not after him,” Dad responds quickly, rattling words off as if he prepared this in advance. “He hasn’t been in any of the news reports. Just me. He’ll be fine.”
A snort from his uncle, full of derision. “Sure.”
He shouldn’t be here, Harrison thinks. He shouldn’t be listening to this. All he wants to do is lean in closer.
“I thought about it, you know,” Dad says. “If they find him. If they catch him. I’ll tell them I made him help. That I kidnapped him. Make sure the media and the cops and everyone else only sees him as my victim and not my accomplice and—”
Dad’s voice cuts off in a gasp before Harrison has a chance to even process what he said. There’s a faint rushing sound, like a small gust of wind, and then the creak of the bed. He wants to see, but he can’t make himself move and make any noise.
“I’m not letting you go to prison.” Brian’s voice is a low snarl. “Not even for him.”
Another noise, footsteps closing in, coming nearer. A small thump of something forceful. Are they fighting ?
“Brian, you don’t understand—” Dad’s voice is a huff.
“What?” Brian cuts him off. “You think because I don’t have a child, I don’t understand responsibility? I don’t understand caring about something bigger than myself?”
The room goes deathly quiet, Harrison has never heard Brian like this. There’s a wet, thick sound to his voice. He sneaks a peek and only sees his back, blue shirt, blocking his view of Dad. He’s so close that Harrison regrets looking, heart going thump thump thump so loud he thinks Brian must hear it.
“That’s not what I meant.” Dad now, voice low. Apologetic. “You know that’s not what I meant.” There’s motion, Dad stepping towards Brian, closer, and there can’t be much if any space between them, almost seems like Dad is on Brian’s toes. Harrison can barely see him, Brian blocking him like a barrier.
Harrison closes his eyes again.
He’s intruding on something that should remain private. Guilt thrums through him, but a sick kind of excitement as well, the kind he gets whenever he does something he shouldn’t be doing: breaking and entering, cutting class, stabbing a classmate. Something about getting this private slice of both of them, not meant for his eyes, feels exciting. Dad would never talk like this in front of him—would he?
“I know...” Brian trails off, unable to finish the sentence. Harrison waits and waits and waits—there’s the sound of movement again, footsteps the floor, bed dipping and then—
“You said we wouldn’t do this here,” Dad says. “If he finds us...” He takes a breath, the sound sharp enough to cut through the air. Harrison feels that noise in his chest, like he was the one who did it.
“It’s alright, Dexter,” Brian breathes out; Harrison has to strain to hear it. He’s not even sure that’s what he’s saying. “I locked the door. It’s just the two of us here.”
The words make him ache like a knife wound. Just the two of us, as if Harrison is an imposition. He almost wants to leave right then and there.
It’s quiet. He’s not sure what they’re talking about, but soon enough, it’s no longer quiet. There’s a wet sound, like lips smacking. It makes him think of bubblegum smack, or the wet slick noises when he kisses a girl, reverberating in his head.
Fabric rustles around. The ruffle of clothes. A slight gasp—is that his dad? He’s never heard his dad make that noise.
“I missed you,” Brian says in between the wet sounds and then his father moans. It’s a strange, naked sound, and it makes Harrison think of that moment back in Kurt’s bunker—the knife, the spread of blood, his father’s expression of release.
More sounds. Soft exhales. Whispers, something like you don’t, or maybe wait, he’s can’t quite make it out. A soft thud, a zipper noise that’s almost silent under all the other noises, but in the room, in this closet, everything feels thunderously loud.
Harrison’s not a virgin. He knows what he’s hearing. It just seems impossible to put together, like a puzzle with misshapen pieces. The picture doesn’t make any sense.
Harrison’s chest goes tight.
He chances a glance, shifting his head just slightly to the side from the closet, trying to see. Dad sits perched on the edge of the bed, feet flat on the floor. He’s facing the side of the room, so Harrison gets a profile shot of his face, looking down, and his body—shirtless, and surprisingly broad-shouldered, thick muscled thighs, pants pulled down to his feet—and Brian in between his legs, between his knees with his hands planted firmly on his thighs. From this angle, he can’t really see his father’s cock—it’s hidden by his thighs, the placement of them—but he can see Brian’s head in between his legs, his salt and pepper hair bobbing in between, his eyes shut concentration.
Harrison clamps his hand over his mouth, stifling the intake of breath he almost instinctively took. The sight of it hits like a kick in the ribs. His heart hammers painfully in his chest. Heat floods his body, as if he’s been dipped in a hot spring, from his ears to his neck to his guts, twisting and turning. He’s not supposed to be here. He shouldn’t be here. He can’t stop staring. It’s like that moment where Kurt aimed the rifle at his chest, that shock of panic that came out of nowhere, but worse. Could it be worse?
Dad slides his hand into Brian’s hair. His grip tightens—ruddy skin against dark locks, white-knuckled. Hell of a grip. He grabs him like he wants to hurt him—or maybe it’s the opposite. Grabs on that tight because he doesn’t want to let go. Brian doesn’t seem to mind, in either case. Harrison wonders if it hurts. He wonders if his uncle likes that.
Dad. Uncle Brian. Dad and Uncle Brian. Dad and Uncle Brian and Dad and Uncle Brian. His brain isn’t processing it.
There’s words for this, but his mind has gone blank—no, not blank. Focused on the blissed-out look on his father’s face. Expression gone slack, the lines of his face softening, relaxing out into something new entirely.
Watching his face makes his own cock give a traitorous throb.
Dad puts two hands in his uncle’s hair now—he really likes grabbing. Possessive grip. Harrison noticed that, when he kissed him on the forehead back at the bunker, two hands around his head, or when he grabbed him at the hospital and Harrison half out of it, just his father insisting on feeling his heartbeat to know he’s alive—he liked it then. He might still like it.
Uncle Brian glances up at his father with the touch. His gaze is intense, even from this angle, not looking directly at him—Brian has this deeply searching stare, as if he’s looking inside of Dexter, as if he could turn and see inside Harrison and pick out all of his ugly bitten-down thoughts. The soft plop he makes when he takes Dad’s cock out of his mouth echoes in Harrison’s head, unfathomably loud and oh, there it is, just a brief glance of his father’s dick as it falls away lightly, makes his head swim.
He feels dizzy. He can’t stop thinking of blood and his father’s cock. He can’t stop the rush of his mind, his thoughts whirring—so that’s what Dad’s cock looks like. So that’s what he sounds like when he’s getting his cock sucked.
Uncle Brian wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and rises to his feet in a move so graceful you wouldn’t guess he’s in his fifties now. Dad’s hands slip from his hair, and his fingers move to the nape of Brian’s neck, as the two get on the same level.
“What do you want?” Brian asks. For a moment, the two of them just breathe at each other, their heads pulling close and closer until their foreheads touch. It looked like Brian was devouring his father with just his eyes—like they were going to merge and become one—two dark sets of eyes in the bright golden lighting in the room. It’s like they talk without saying a word, staring far too long, obsessed with one another.
Harrison gets it then. It all clicks together, everything he’s been worried about, thinking about—watching them helps him make sense of everything that’s happened since they’ve arrived in New Hampshire, and Harrison hates it. He hates the sight of it—this connection his father has with this brand new uncle he’s never heard of.
He wants to ruin everything right then and there—burst out of this closet, screaming what the fuck are you doing ? He wants to throw himself at them, a shield before his father, hiding his naked body from Brian’s consuming eyes. He wants to get in between and force his uncle away, standing before him like a blockade. My dad. Mine.
The thought is ragged in his head, fraying with the knowledge that he was not, in fact, here first, that perhaps he never stood a chance, that perhaps whatever tenuous connection he built with his father was never his to build.
He’s frozen to the spot—knees pulled up to his chest, hands clasped over his mouth as if he could snuff out his own breathing, and a hyper-awareness of his own cock growing hard between his legs, his body betraying his own thoughts. He’s overheated, suffocatingly hot in the closet with the jacket still on. He can’t take his eyes off his father’s cock—he can only really see the tip, the way it curves, the rest of it tucked in behind skin and flesh and bad angles—but it’s red and plush looking, spit-slick from Brian.
It’s sick, is what it is—he can feel that sickness inside him, as if whatever is going on between his father and uncle is also happening within him, twisting and curdling. Sick—like a flash-pulse of arousal in his guts. Sick.
“Brian.” Dad’s voice trembles in the air, his name an answer—so achingly vulnerable, the way kids aren’t supposed to see their parents.
“I could fuck you, if you’d let me,” Brian says, almost casually. How often have they done this? When was the last time they’ve done this? Did they fuck that first night? Is that why they share a room? Uncle Brian reaches down with one hand to cup his father’s cock, fingers curling in around him. Harrison sees the shudder go up his father’s spine—the skin of his back seems to shimmer, the light dancing across it, shiny and gleaming. “It’s been a while. I’d have to prep you, nice and slow. It’ll take some time. Or have you let anyone else fuck you?”
Dad wordlessly shakes his head. “I only like it when you do it,” he says, voice gravel-rough and low, a freely-given secret.
Something about that wording makes Harrison feel stabbed in the belly, on the verge of collapse. His eyes burn. He can’t reach up to wipe his tears. He just knows if he moves his hands from his mouth, he’s going to make a noise. He’s going to groan out loud. He can feel something perched at the edge of his throat, threatening to come out.
Uncle Brian nods and rises to full height, towering over Dad for a moment as he tugs his own shirt off, exposing pale winter skin, a tattoo on his shoulder, the long lean lines of his torso.
“I’ll let you fuck me, then,” he says. The words, the easygoing speech, make Harrison’s cock twitch with a furious burst of arousal—he has no word for that. He doesn’t even like Brian, but apparently, he likes looking at him—or at least, some part of his body likes looking at him, his lizard brain buzzing with excitement. His cock has no morals, it seems, and his eyes are transfixed by every slice of motion Brian makes.
He’s slimmer than Dad, his body more reedy and slender, closer to Harrison’s body type, but he has more height over them both. Harrison doesn’t even try not to stare, watching him undo the belt and shimmy out of his jeans with rapt attention, the same way his Dad is—Dad rakes his eyes across Brian’s body like he’s a feast being presented to him. There’s a nakedness in his gaze that Harrison recognizes, the way he looked at Kurt that night as he knocked him out, as he spoke to him in the Kill Room—the way he looked at Harrison in his bunker, surrounded by corpses, clinging on to him, a manic eagerness.
The curve of Brian’s mouth twitches up in a nonchalant smirk. “Do you want to fuck me?”
“Yes,” Dad admits right away. Dad looks at Uncle Brian with a familiar hunger; it lights up his eyes, smoothes away his face, turns him into someone a decade younger.
I need to be with you, Dad had said to him, back in Iron Lake, his hands on his arms, the whole weight of their lives together, Dad pleading, Dad begging, Dad—
Brian reaches over to the nightstand and pulls out the hand lotion Harrison found earlier. It takes a moment for him to connect the dots, and then it all clicks with slow-dawning horror—this is going to happen, this is going to happen right now in front of him.
“It’s your move, brother,” Brian says, slipping the container into Dad’s hands, smiling like he knows a joke no one else does.
Dad squeezes it onto his fingers like he’s done this before. “Have you done this recently? Anyone I should know about?”
“What if I said yes?” Brian teases. He steps closer to Dad, until he’s knee to knee with him, placing two hands on his shoulders. “Would you be angry?”
Dad blinks. “Yes,” he says slowly, as if surprised by his own answer. “Yes. I would be.”
Harrison bites down on the meat of his palm. He bites it until the pain overwhelms his urge to cry out, until for a moment, he is blinded by the pain and can’t see or hear or feel anything else but it. He wants to draw blood. He wants to taste blood. He wants to tear something apart.
“That’s very human of you,” Brian muses, reaching forward to let fingertips linger across his father’s chin, not quite stroking, but more than a simple touch, a gesture filled with tenderness. “You know, you don’t have to worry about that? It’s not as if anyone else could ever compete with you. You know that.”
I wish I was dead, Harrison thinks. He would simply like to melt into the floor and cease to exist, because nothing else is going to hurt more than this.
Dad hmms in what could be agreement or simple acknowledgement, and he reaches forward with his lotion-covered fingers, between Brian’s legs, bypassing his cock completely, and heading further back, fingers disappearing between his ass cheeks. Brian gasps, arches up, and slides his legs just a little bit further apart as his father clearly slips a finger inside him. Maybe even two—he can’t actually see the digits going in, can’t get a good view on that from this angle. He can just watch Brian’s reactions, and that feels obscene enough. Brian takes slow, careful breaths, face oddly vulnerable as his mouth parts open. His fingers claw into his father’s shoulder.
“God, yeah,” he says, in a low shuddering moan, voice wet.
Harrison decides he’s had enough. He can’t look at this. He wishes he could fall through the ground into the earth. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to not think, not hear what’s happening—he’d put his fingers in his ears like a child if he wasn’t so scared of making a noise.
But then a cry—a soft, vulnerable moan—makes Harrison open his eyes and Uncle Brian is sitting on Dad now, right in his lap. He can see it, the obscene stretch of his skin as his father’s cock is seated fully inside him—an almost baffling sight, because Harrison didn’t realize skin could stretch in such a way, that an asshole could fit something so thick. He’s moving, they’re both moving together. They’re making soft noises, grunts and bitten-off groans, over the sound of flesh against flesh, slapping and oddly wet. Neither of them are speaking in words anymore, but Brian has his hands gripping Dad’s shoulders tightly, and Dad’s face is tilted up to him, Dad’s hands on his hips, digging in hard enough to turn Brian’s pale skin red. Brian stares him down, eyes on him the entire time, and Dad doesn’t look away from him, mouth open and enraptured with his brother.
They’re a tangle of limbs. They’re all wrapped around each other. They’re closer than Harrison and his father ever will be.
Harrison wants to cry. He’s suffocating inside this closet, and his skin is burning, like something is waiting to burst out from within him. He squeezes his eyes shut again, tries to take the quietest, deepest breath he can, and go elsewhere.
Beneath his father and uncle’s moans, Ethan flashes behind his eyes, unbidden, dug up from his subconscious—stupidly trusting Ethan, whose anger had nothing on Harrison’s own black rage—and he sees Ethan’s face as he slashed at him, just that one split second of action and then—
Harrison opens his eyes, and looks away from the crack in the closet door—he can’t look at what’s happening in front of him, but he can’t trust himself to close his eyes. He tilts his head down so his hair is facing the door and his eyes go to the floor, trying to coat his vision with just the interior fuzzy darkness of the closet. It doesn’t work; red flutters in his head, his vision awash not with rage but horrific arousal, with Ethan’s blood all over and Kurt’s blood dripping down to him. Harrison’s neck goes hot. He tries to think of something else, anything else, but the shimmering, shining blood on his own hands pops up again. He blinks and Kurt’s blood is spreading out over clear plastic, morgue-cold table, and his father’s eyes as he dismembers him, his face free of all constraints, just like right now—the image burned into his brain. He can’t escape.
He looks up to see Brian’s lips on his father’s neck. He's completely draped over his father, so Harrison can’t fully see Dexter. The motions of Brian’s hips, his thighs, his ass as he lifts himself up and down with surprising strength is mesmerizing.
Without looking away, Harrison shoves one hand into his pants, into his underwear, hoping his father and uncle’s rustling and constant motion on the bed will drown out the brief clink of his belt and clothes. He bites down on the gasp of sheer relief when he wraps his hand around his cock. He’s pulse-throbbing, painfully hard, and the touch makes his body shake, makes the heat in this closet cloister even harder around him. It’s a tight fit, constrained by his clothes—he barely has room to properly jerk off, limiting the motion of his fist, more squeezing his cock over and over and pressing his fingertips against the slit. All Harrison wants to do is spread his legs and luxuriate in it, stretch out, as if he could drown himself in his own sickness, let himself get lost within it, same as any time he’s given into his worst impulses.
Harrison shoves aside all of his hurt in favor of his lust, trying to catch every glimpse of his father and uncle together—Brian grunting and panting with exertion, Dad’s nails digging red marks into Brian’s hips, his uncle nipping at his dad's neck, his father’s thick moan—letting it all wash over him.
Harrison shivers and watches with horrified fascination as his uncle comes all over his father’s chest, spurting and spilling out white on his skin, in his chest hair, over his belly. His eyes snap back to his ass, watching his hole clench down, squeezing his father’s cock. He can see it then, just the slightest bit of white drip out past the rim, down the back of his thighs.
Fuck. Harrison’s mind just whites out entirely. His cock twitches as he humps into his own fist; he can feel the blood rush down, and with it, all his higher brain functions. He bites hard enough to bleed, hot iron on his tongue, the microflash of pain intertwining with the blistering pleasure that explodes in his belly, in his crotch, in his cock, spitting out hot fluid warmth over his hand. He can’t catch it all, and it drips between his fingers, staining his underwear and the insides of his jeans, dazed and warm all over as the orgasm hits him.
Harrison thinks he blacks out for a moment—or maybe he finally manages to just fully dissociate from the situation, his brain going offline as he tries to gather his wits about him. He misses Brian dismounting his dad, he misses whatever they say to each other, the words blurring into a white noise, as Dad lies down and his uncle slumps next to his father on the bed. Dad stares up at the ceiling, blinking, as if he’s also stunned by what just happened—this angle, he can’t see much of their eyes at all, blocked from view from his own limited position, inside the closet and outside of them. Brian leans in closer, places a palm on his chest. Their legs collide, one of Brian’s twisting itself over Dad’s calf.
“Hey,” Uncle Brian says, reaching out with a possessive grip on Dad’s chin, voice soft and tender. His father turns to face him, and all Harrison sees is the back of his head, away from him. “Did you like that?”
“Yes,” Dexter agrees. He shifts on the bed, until his back is fully to Harrison, long expanse of teasing flesh, freckled all over. “You know I did.” His voice is a small whisper of breath that cracks right into Harrison, making his eyes burn.
He wants to wipe at them, but he can’t move—too worried about being heard, in the now mostly quiet room, no sounds for Harrison to hide behind; he can’t even take his hands out of his pants without making some noise, his cock soft and oversensitive.
He just has to endure, squeezing his eyes shut, forcing himself to hold still, hoping they’ll leave soon. He tries not to think about how to even escape from this closet without being seen by them.
"So what happens now?” Uncle Brian asks.
A beat. Harrison hears the soft inhale of breath, Dad reluctant to answer.
“What do you mean?”
Rustling on the bed. The soft squeak of the mattress. Someone is moving. Getting up, perhaps?
“Once you and the kid go off to Canada. You go back to your previously sober lifestyle?” The word sober drips with condescension. Almost contempt.
“Are you trying to ask me something, Brian?” Harrison recognizes that tone. Withholding. Defensive. It’s familiar.
Brian sighs, long-suffering. “I just want to know how long I get to keep you this time,” he says. Harrison, for a moment, almost feels bad for him—he knows that longing, like a physical ache in his chest. “That’s all.”
Harrison opens his eyes to see the positions have changed. Dad—fully naked, nude, and seemingly almost unaware of it—on his elbows on the bed, sitting up as he watches Brian move around the room, keeping an eye on him, like he’s a tiger that might pounce.
“You know, if you’re killing again, I don’t see why we can’t...stick together. Be a family. The three of us.” Brian says, picking up his clothes off the ground. There’s something fascinating in how he moves, all smooth elegant motions, his body under his full control; it almost barely registers that he’s completely naked too. He’s just an expanse of skin, stark and white, as natural as breathing. “Unless you don’t want me around your kid.”
He sounds hurt.
“Would I have brought him here if I didn’t want you around him?” Dad says. He curls his fingers into the dirty sheets.
Harrison leans in as close as he dares. He suddenly needs to hear everything they’re saying about him—a front row seat to the truth.
“I don’t know,” Brian scoffs, “you tell me.”
Brian balls his clothes up tightly together, and it takes Harrison too long to realize he’s heading straight towards him in this closet—he’s walking forward, getting closer and closer, until Harrison sees white skin come into his sight, dark hairs on a mostly flat belly, his uncle’s body filling up the whole of his vision, and then—
Harrison has no time, no ability to react. Uncle Brian opens the closet door, tugging open the doors together all at once, and Harrison realizes he’s right next to his laundry hamper, and it’s too late for any of this.
Brian looks down at him, taking in the full state of Harrison with no reaction—his nephew sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, hand still awkwardly in his pants with the belt loosened and zipper pulled down, the smell of fresh teenage spunk high in the air, and a obvious stain spread across the blue denim.
Harrison glances up, meeting his eyes. He can’t move. He can’t say anything in his defense, caught in the act.
But he doesn’t look away from Uncle Brian, who stares down at him with a curious expression on his face.
“I want us to be a family,” Dad says, soft enough so he’s barely loud enough to hear, not looking in Brian’s direction at all, staring straight up the ceiling, as he’s not even talking to Brian. “I want you to know my son. I want…” he trails off; he can’t finish, his sentence left hanging.
Harrison is frozen. He can’t turn away. He expects anger from Uncle Brian—or perhaps disgust, or ridicule—waiting for him to process what he sees. Harrison doesn’t dare to move, unable to make his limbs work or his throat say anything. The moment between being discovered and being exposed lasts forever, too long, expanding out into decades, Harrison’s own impending doom rattling away in one long stretch of time. He wants to take his own fucking hand out of his pants, but it’s covered in his own come, and he needs to wipe it off, and doing that in front of Brian would be abjectly more humiliating.
His uncle cocks his head like a wolf amused by its prey, and Harrison meets his stare head-on; he may as well face his own doom in the face. He finds that Brian’s eyes are a dark, deep shade of green, brown in the wrong lighting; he and Dad have that in common.
“What?” Dad asks.
Brian grins down at him, a shark tooth smile.
“I get it,” he says down to Harrison, and dumps his dirty clothes on him. He shoves the closet door completely this time, not a crack of light getting in, leaving Harrison in the dark, no view this time.
Asshole, he thinks.
“I want the same things. I always have, remember?” Brian’s voice is slightly muffled, straining for Harrison to hear.
Harrison wipes his hand on Uncle Brian’s jacket. Serves him right.