Archive of Our Own

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

  - Margaret Atwood

There is a noise in James Brahms’ home. 

The man raises his head up from grading papers, his hand paused mid-red ink strike in his eleventh grade composition assignment. They were closing in on the final week of reading The Great Gatsby, and none of these papers were particularly inspired; there’s only so many times James can read about the Eyes of TJ Eckleburg representing God, or Daisy as the great American dream, year after year, without getting bored. He can feel his eyes drooping, falling heavy, his attention growing wane and listless, words blurring into one another, the letters sliding together. The cup of coffee beside him has long turned tepid, still half full. 

But the sound of weight on old floorboards upstairs startles him into full alertness, eyes blinking rapidly. 

He stops and listens carefully. All he hears is the low gentle hum of the overhead lamp. Wind outside, faint in the distance, like a storm may pass over them soon. 

James shakes his head, taking off his glasses briefly to press the meat of his palm into his eyes. He can feel a headache start to form at his sinuses. Already, he wants to simply write off this paper and give the student an A for effort and nothing more, without even reading. 

He sighs. Bad teacher, no biscuit. He shouldn’t hit the point where he no longer wants to bother with grading. It sets a bad example. 

He resists the urge to crumple the paper beneath him and instead stands up, with no particular destination in mind, pacing around his circular kitchen table like it could give him some reprieve. 

It’s Friday night. He doesn’t need to be grading papers. He could do this tomorrow. He could, should be out doing normal people things. What do people his age do at this hour? Do they still go to bars? Is it all online now? James has never been good at social gatherings, and he’s never been much for clubs. James’ passions have always lied elsewhere. 

The floorboards creak again. Just a soft sound that pierces through the haze in his mind. If James holds still, or perhaps takes another sip of coffee, he could pretend he didn’t hear it, that it doesn’t matter, it’s just the sounds of the old house settling. This is an old house. It was his parents’ house and it’s been through many repairs. 

It’s not the sound of footsteps upstairs. He’s familiar with that sound, from the many times his niece has slept over, running around upstairs in her pajamas. That’s not the sound he hears. 

James heads upstairs, leaving his coffee cup sitting on the counter by its lonesome and the light on in his kitchen, like a beacon to call him back. He climbs up the stairs and turns on all the lights in the hallway, illuminating pale grey carpets he didn’t pick out, cracked walls he needs to spackle, all the dark corners in his hallway—but there is no one hiding behind some end table or bookshelf, picture frames hanging on the wall right where he left them. He checks his bedroom, but it's same as always, messy unmade bed, messy room, hard to tell if anything has been taken or moved. He is about ready to check the bathroom before he decides he’s being paranoid, stopping in his tracks before he turns on the lights. His heart is racing for no good reason, adrenaline spiking in his veins and he feels so silly, he starts to laugh. 

There’s nothing upstairs. There’s no one upstairs. He’s hearing things. He’s tired. He’s sick to death of idiot sophomores and juniors, and reading their vapid thoughts so much that it’s destroying his brain. 

James lets out a sign of relief. Feeling awfully silly about himself, he trods back downstairs. He flicks the light back on in the kitchen, frowning as he does so, the motion giving him pause—if only for a moment. He moves to return to his papers, beginning to open up his briefcase folder to stick them in for tomorrow—he is done for the night—and reaches for his lukewarm cup of coffee when he remembers with startling clarity—

He never turned off the light in the kitchen. 

Before he can process that, he hears it again, another creak of floorboards, this time closer, louder in his ear, unmistakable the sound of footsteps. Perhaps it wasn’t even upstairs at all, but something, someone right around the corner. James’ heart rate spikes as he feels his palms start to sweat, shaking at the incontrovertible sensation of something being horribly wrong. Instead of going upstairs, he runs to his supply closet down the hall. His hands tremble as he fumbles the door knob, an easy circular turn is all it takes, but he can’t figure out how to work it for too long of a minute, rattling under his finger tips. 

At last, he remembers how doors work and he pries the closet door open. The linen closet stares at him indifferently, as James searches for the gift his brother gave him once, a .38 special. Eric had always been trying to drag him to the range to shoot this off and James always waved it off, made up excuses to avoid his brother, created busywork for himself—that was never his style. He wouldn’t say he had a strong stance on gun control, James always avoided any political messes, preferring to draw as little attention to himself; he didn’t like guns and he didn’t like the weight of one in his hands for certain, but right now, he needed—

It’s not here. 

He kept the thing tucked in between two sets of towels he rarely used. James rarely had guests, the only person who came by regularly was his brother or his niece, dropped off on long nights where he couldn’t be home, but Eric was out of town right now on a business trip and he hadn’t moved these towels in a while, certain he hadn't touched them. 

Someone took the gun. 

The groan of floorboards makes his hair stand on end. Outside, the wind whips around loudly, gearing up for a storm. James takes a step back and another, seized by a kind of cold falling heavy in his guts, in the pit of his stomach. He backs away and that’s when he sees it. 

To his right, was the downstairs bathroom, door cracked open. The sound and thunderous fury of the wind howling through the air was coming from the bathroom. 

James crosses the short distance between closet and bathroom, and looks inside. All looked well, normal, everything in its place. His downstairs guest bathroom was a small room, with white tile adorning the walls with black accents, shower decorated with a plain white curtain and then the plastic cover behind it. The window next to the toilet, high on the wall, was open a crack. 

It’s such a simple thing, a cracked open window, like someone closed it in a hurry, unintentionally, a small little mistake. But James never opens that window. 

He has no time to process that, as he’s slammed into the wall from behind, shoved forward as if pushed by some great, tremendous force. His head hits the tile with a thunderclap, and the resulting injury makes James’ head spin in dizzying circles, as a horrible, terrible throbbing fills his brain. There’s a burning aura of pain around his head, a starburst of light behind his eyes, vision swimming.

Instinctively, he tries to push back, shove his elbow behind him at whatever was attacking him and someone behind him lets out an oof, the sound of a faint gust of air leaving someone. It clicks in his head, now, at least—someone is here. Someone is invading his home. Someone is attacking him, every fear made manifest. 

He’s shoved forward again, then shoved to the side to slam him into the sink, the edge hitting his guts. The intruder is strong but he can’t focus on that because he can’t breathe, the air rushing out of him, gasping like a dying fish, a ragged cough bursting forth from the back of his throat. A wave of nausea hits him as the world spins. The air leaves his lungs, a great pressure on them, pulling inwards—the intruder behind him has placed an arm across his throat, another around his neck, wrapping like tentacles tightly around him. 

His throat, his lungs, from deep within his chest, are making low whistling noises, wheezing sounds, struggling to take on a breath. Through that mystifying haze of pain, his eyes find the figure in the bathroom mirror, nebulous through his vision turning black at the corners. He cannot focus on a single image but his mind latches on to features, little details of the man attacking him, zeroing in—a tall young man, dressed all in black, surprisingly young, with hair that may have been lighter but only registered as black to him, a shock of green-ocean foam eyes. It’s then that James recognizes the boy from his own classroom, pieces falling together. 

“Harrison?” He asks weakly, voice barely more than a croak. 

His student does not respond. His face, flushed a ruddy red from exertion, does not change, does not acknowledge the call of his name. The pressure increases on his throat, his arm pushing against James’ skin, in an intimate parody of an embrace until finally the world drops all around him and James succumbs to a dizzying darkness, at the mercy of his familiar intruder. 

James Brahms did not live in suburbia, surrounded by kind, helpful neighbors. Nor did he live in an apartment complex in the city, with CCTV or any number of cameras that could capture them. No, the high school teacher had inherited a family house out on the outskirts of town. The Brahms family came from farmer stock, but neither brother became a farmer, selling off their livestock, their livelihood—one a small town lawyer, one a teacher, both public servants, a sterling picture of decency. As the older brother, James inherited the family’s house, down a lonely stretch of road. Not quite deserted, there were still homes on all sides, front and beside, other fine folk, but few street lamps illuminated the road, stars bright in the sky, not drowned by the local city lights. The road turned off into a winding curve uphill—a short distance, between the main back road and the house itself, enough to see from the road, but also just dark enough to disappear in the middle of the night, if you weren’t looking for it. Certainly, dark enough to commit a murder, and not alert the neighbors.

Dexter thinks that maybe that’s a blessing. For them, at least. Not for Mr. Brahms.

He drags his car slowly up the path and the motion light turn on as he passes by. Dexter winces—Harrison’s first mistake. Geographic isolation may forgive it, but he should have cut the power. A lot of headlines rushes through Dexter’s head; concerned neighbors wondering why the motion lights came on. Could he claim a possum? A stray cat? Any number of animals could be out here at night. After all, there are wolves among the dear Mr. Brahms. 

There’s a lot of things he would do differently, and Dexter reminds himself it’s a learning curve. That he has to trust Harrison now if they’re going to do this together. 

Of course, he reminds himself, the neighbors here are hidden, tucked away by trees. It’s not quite his cabin back in Iron Lake—he had no neighbors for miles—but the good people of Willowbrook, Minnesota valued their privacy. They didn’t want to know the going-ons of their neighbors. That’s always worked out nicely for Dexter. 

Dexter parks off center, away from the garage, out of sight. He looks around for any sign of Harrison but the lights inside are dark, and he’s honestly not sure how Harrison got here—it’s certainly not within walking distance. That’s good. If Dexter can’t figure it out, then the cops shouldn’t be able to.

His burner buzzes. Back door, his son texts. Curt, almost flippant. Harrison did the legwork for this one all on his own. 

My son has brought me a fresh kill. 

The thought makes Dexter’s insides go all warm and tight, a buzz of delight from a thrilled dark passenger. 

“You don’t have to act so fucking happy about it.” 

Debra sits in the passenger seat of the car. She’s wearing black and white stripes, she has her arms folded across her chest, face set in hard, unforgiving lines. She hasn’t talked to him much lately. Sometimes, he barely ever sees her. All those years with only her ghost as company, but now she’s fading away, like a sepia photograph. 

“He needs this,” Dexter reasons. “I’m helping him—”

“Helping?” Debra scoffs. Her mouth twists into a ghastly smile, almost skeletal. “With what? Serial killer 101?”

“Deb…”

“No, you need this. He can be normal. That’s what he wants. He said that, remember?”

Dexter remembered. How could he forget the cold, awful day they left Iron Lake, Harrison levying a rifle at him? The fact that he didn’t go through with it made Dexter pause: was Harrison choosing him, or simply not able to pull the trigger?

They’ll find out tonight.

“He wants this, too,” he says, rather pointlessly—he shouldn’t let himself get dragged into this with his dead sister again. “I know what it’s like to want to reconcile both.” To crave the comforts of normalcy and the satisfaction of violence. 

“You’re dragging your son into your sick fuck fetish—”

“It’s a little late for this, Debra,” he tells her, growing tired of the same protestations. It’s been too late ever since he found him in Rita’s blood, and he could no longer stomach arguing. 

It’s too late to go back now, even if he wanted to. Harrison’s as eager for the kill as he is—he did the research, he made the plan, picked the time and date, as if looking for ways to to prove himself to his dark father.  

This is inevitable, he thinks, stepping out of the car, the thought wrapping itself around him like a warm embrace. It was a chilly night in early October, leaves crunching beneath his feet, wind blowing in the distance. He retrieves his kill kit from the car, gets his gloves on, and strides off towards the back of the house, glaring at the motion detecting lights. First thing he’s going to do is shut them off. 

He barely finishes shooting off a text to his son when Harrison opens the side door, grabbing Dexter by his arm, dragging him inside in a little kitchenette. 

“Easy—” Dexter says. 

“He has a basement and an attic,” Harrison says before Dexter even gets out a greeting. 

His son is breathing hard and heavy, still wearing a black beanie over his head, but pulled back just enough to reveal his face, his eyes gleaming. Just looking at him, this setting, what he’s ready to do, makes excitement spike within Dexter, his guts swimming warm in his belly. 

“A basement and an attic?”

“You know,” Harrison pants, reminding Dexter of an overly excited dog. “For the k-kill room?”

There’s something cute about the way he stumbled over that word, and Dexter can’t help but smile at his son. He takes a look around—a small farmhouse kitchen, a coffee mug in the kitchen sink, papers strewn about on the floor as if in a struggle—and of course, lots of plastic everywhere. From the looks of it, he interrupted Harrison wrapping everything in plastic—from table to counter tops to the floor, his feet making a little too much noise beneath him. The plastic covered half the floor of the kitchen and led out into the living room, the door more of an archway between rooms. If Dexter pokes his head out, he could see the plastic line the hallway and foyer, covering the entryway ground but not the end tables or any part of the stairs. 

“A little overkill, though? The plastic is for the kill room.” The kitchen table was too small to comfortably hold the body of a large man and the counters even smaller still. They couldn’t do it here. Harrison is bound to use up all their polypropylene on this one kill if he keeps this up. 

“Yeah, but...leave no trace...” He trails off, and Dexter can see the little flush of embarrassment in his pale skin. He reaches out, cupping his son’s face in his gloved hand. For a moment, Harrison leans slightly into the touch, guiding his body towards it. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Dexter says, letting out a little chuckle, lowering his hand. “Better overkill than no kill,” he jokes but Harrison doesn’t laugh at it. 

“He’s in the living room,” he says instead, swallowing. Waiting for Dexter’s approval. “I used the chokehold you taught me.”

Ah, yes. The same one Harry taught me. But unlike his own father, Dexter relishes playing teacher. He gave Harrison needles for this, but his son seems to favor direct contact. Fun wasn’t the right word, but it’s been… gratifying showing Harrison all the tricks Dexter’s learned. He soaks it up like a sponge, his mind always whirring. 

“Good,” he says, and watches the way Harrison’s face lights up at the praise. “Show me.” 

Harrison reaches up for a split second, before putting his hand down—an aborted gesture, as if reaching for Dexter’s hand like a child, and deciding against it. Dexter wouldn’t have minded but Harrison turns around instead and heads out of the kitchenette, expecting Dexter to follow.

The kitchen has no door to the living room—just a door to the backyard, and a door to the basement, next to the pantry. It opens up naturally into the main hall, lights off, pictures lining the walls. There's an open foyer to the left of them, where the front door stands at the end. Across from them is another opening in the hall that leads into the living room—more photo frames, true cool blue color scheme, a glass coffee table and a television hung high on the wall. The walls are lined with photographs, but otherwise bare, as if he had no idea how to decorate outside of looking at a catalog for what should a home look like, no real personal touch—who did that remind Dexter of? Harrison had laid out plastic here too—all along the hallway, climbing up the walls, over the coffee table and sofa, as if he was expecting some sort of blood bath.

Maybe he is, given his experiences. Can't hardly blame him for that. 

The couch is backed against the wall (eggshell white), upon which lay their prey, hands bound with zip ties, legs tied together at the ankles with a length of synthetic rope. Harrison neglected to gag him, and he's starting to come too—a ring of purpling red around his throat, and dark red bruising on his forehead—perhaps a contusion, perhaps a concussion? Dexter isn't sure. 

On the couch, tied up, the man looks delicate to Dexter. Fragile. Not like a monster. His hair is thinning, but not receding yet, falling in his eyes in messy strands, spotted with gray. His blue eyes have that dull glaze of the barely conscious, blinking slowly as he starts to realize he’s not alone in the room. He’s a slim, slender man, probably weighed less than Harrison, and certainly didn’t look like he could put up much of a fight. He’s dressed in professional slacks and a blue & white checkerboard button-up. His face is angular, with high cheekbones and sharp lines of his face, his body strangely reedy, like he could snap in two if the wind blew him the wrong way. Dexter places him at mid forties. He’s almost handsome, and absolutely unassuming. 

“You didn’t gag him,” Dexter points out, not entirely scolding. 

In the corner of his eyes, Harrison shrugs. “He was out cold,” he says. “Didn’t seem worth it. You didn’t gag Kurt,” he reminds him. 

I did, Dexter says, when Kurt started to talk too much. “It’s fine,” he says, setting his kill kit on the ground—filled with knives of various shapes and sizes, bone saw, garrote, duct tape. The works.

“I thought you liked to talk to them,” Harrison says. 

On my own terms, Dexter thinks. “It’s not time for that yet,” he says. “Your kill room isn’t complete.”

“Fuck,” whispers the small man on the couch, mostly to himself. This is why Dexter uses needles. Cleaner. He doesn’t have to hear the begging and kicking and screaming until he wants to. “Kill?”

Yeah, this is going to be annoying. Instead of focusing on him, Dexter turns back to his son. “You have your supplies?” he asks.

Harrison nods, darting into the kitchen for a moment. 

“Wait wait wait,” the man on the couch whispers rapidly, in the raspy voice of someone barely catching his breath. “You can’t—I don’t—"

The man tries to move futilely on the couch but his faculties haven’t come back yet and his head must be killing him. It occurs to Dexter he doesn’t know the exact details of his crimes—he let Harrison take the reins on this one. His son has presented him with a scenario, like a teenager giving a presentation—James Brahms, school teacher, three missing girls. 

“I didn’t do anything,” he says, glancing around before his eyes land on Dexter, wide with a plea. 

Dexter can’t help the smug, satisfied smile. It seems after his ten year hiatus, he relishes the prospect of kill more than ever, starved by the intervals in between. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.”

“But I really didn’t do anything.” The edge of panic starts to creep into his voice, as Harrison returns to the room with a backpack. “I swear,” he says. 

“Again, not the first time I’ve heard that.”

Deciding that Dexter is a lost cause, Brahms turns his gaze on his son, almost fully awake now, expecting to find sympathy in the younger boy’s face. 

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he entreats. “Harrison, c’mon. You know me.”

That gives him pause, an uncomfortable stirring in his gut. Dexter turns back to face his son. “How does he know your name?”

But the answer comes from the unknown itself. 

“I’m his English teacher,” he says. 

“Oh, what the fuck?” Debra asks from the entrance way. She’s been leaning on the wall, but upon hearing that, she stands up straight, glaring at the scene before her. 

The uncomfortable stirring turns into full unease. 

“Harrison, why is your English teacher tied up on the couch?”

“Because he deserves it,” Harrison says coldly. Not a trace of apology on his face, in his voice. 

“Whatever you think I did—” Brahms starts. 

“I know what you did,” Harrison says, taking a sudden step closer, no longer content to hang in the background. The coldness gives way to a shaking fury, heat licking into his voice. 

Dexter takes a step in front of his son. “Harrison,” he asks slowly. “Three missing girls. You have proof, right?”

His son doesn’t answer. 

Cold blooms in his stomach, somewhere in the pit of Dexter where something human still lived. Is this dread? Shit. I hate that emotion. He hated feeling like he missed a step. 

“Missing? Who is missing? I’ve never hurt anyone,” the man says. “You have me confused with someone else. You have the wrong man.” 

“I don’t,” Harrison says without a trace of mercy, so sure of himself that Dexter wants to simply take him at his word and move ahead with the kill ritual.

“Harrison,” Dexter warns. 

“Please,” the man pleads and Dexter is ready to gag him. I need to think. 

“I know what you did,” Harrison hisses, glaring past Dexter, his eyes dark with reproach. He’s ever the dark avenger here (sidekick? Budding partner? Serial killer-in-training). “They all told me.”

“Who told you?” Dexter asks, wondering who confessed to witnessing a murder. 

“Dex,” his sister says, standing by him. “I don’t think this guy is a killer.”

The cold spreads throughout his body. Brahms did not look like a killer, but neither did Dexter. Neither did Harrison. Looks don’t matter, and yet, something about the pathetic man on the couch, begging for his life, gave him pause. 

“Harrison, are these women still alive?” he asks. 

“I never killed anyone!” Brahms shouts behind him, fully awake now. He’s giving him a headache. 

Dexter is very lost. 

“Shut up,” Dexter growls, “or I’ll break your teeth.”

He shuts up. 

Back to his son: Harrison, throat bobbing, hard eyes. He folds his arms across his chest, defensive. “Yes. They’re still alive. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to die.”

Shit. 

“What have you done?” Debra hisses behind him. Dexter doesn’t know if she’s talking to him or Harrison. 

Brahms, thankfully, stays silent but Dexter can’t have this conversation here. 

If Brahms doesn’t fit the code, he can’t know anything else. He’s already seen far too much. 

“You’re going to have to kill him anyway,” Debra says, “you really think you can just say sorry for the misunderstanding, I’m off to kill someone else now ? Get real.”

Dexter feels a migraine grow behind his eyes. 

“Harrison, can I talk to you alone?”

*

In the kitchen, Dexter leans over the table, palms flat on the surface. Harrison stands over by the basement door, facing the window over the sink, looking out, his profile to Dexter. Not looking directly at him, like he’s ashamed, can’t meet his eyes directly. Of course, nothing in his body language indicates shame otherwise, so maybe he’s wrong, maybe he's simply staring out the window and watching the perimeter. Dexter’s always had trouble reading his son. 

“Why are you bringing your English teacher to kill?” In his house. We’re in his house. We are all over this house. 

It’s far from the first time he’s killed in his prey’s home, but all those other times he’d been in control of the situation, he’d known every variable, known what to expect. He let Harrison have control this time—let him organize the time, location, trusted him when he said he fit the code—and thus, Dexter is tossed into the deep end of the pool without any life vests. It’s his fault; Dexter didn’t press nearly as hard as he should, ceded up control to his son. He was just happy that Harrison was talking to him again—he’d been so angry after they left Iron Lake, and the memory of his son pointing his rifle at him was still burned onto his mind. 

“Because he’s a monster,” Harrison says. 

“Does he fit the code?”

Harrison looks at him then, sidelong glance, frowning at him. Moonlight streams in from the window, even through the curtain, illuminating Harrison in pale blue light. The shadows frame him nicely, Dexter thinks. Like he belongs here.

“What? Do you think I picked him because he gave me a bad grade or something? You think I wouldn’t have a good reason for this? You think I’m that petty?”

He’s not answering the question , Dexter notes. Evading, just like he does. 

“Harrison—”

“I thought you were gonna trust me now,” Harrison says like a condemnation. 

“Does he fit the code?” Dexter repeats the words slower this time. He can see his son’s shoulders stiffen in frustration, holding himself steady, arms folding across his chest. 

“He should,” Harrison says finally. 

Don’t shit where you eat. Don’t kill anyone that can be traced back to you. Dexter thought this was a basic rule but maybe he didn’t impart this strongly enough on his son. 

“Harrison,” he sighs.

“No,” Harrison cuts him off and steps forward, standing by the table now. “No, you said this was my hunt, that I got to pick. This guy deserves it.”

“You told me he fit the code—”

“He does—”

“Not that he should fit the code.” He isn’t shouting. He doesn’t shout, but his voice is colored by a strange urgency, a foreign vehemence. “Why are we killing him? Who are the victims? Do we need to go over this again?”

It’s too soon, Dexter thinks. He needed more time. I shouldn’t have...

Even in his own head, he can’t finish that sentence. 

Harrison steels his jaw tight. In his peripheral vision, Dexter sees him clenching his fist—white knuckle, bony digits. Harrison doesn’t look like he could punch particularly hard, but Dexter knows better—what he lacks in stature, he makes up for in rage, passion, intensity. He wonders if Harrison will hit him, lash out at him. 

Some part of him has been waiting for that. 

I’m not like you because I’m angry. I’m angry because of you. 

It’s not that Dexter is a masochist. He has no death wish. He would like to keep living for as long as possible. But if Harrison decides to turn a gun on him again—or better yet, a knife, a switchblade, a straight razor—well. Maybe I’ll just let him do it. 

Maybe he’ll even be proud.  

But Harrison takes off, turns on heel with quick efficient steps. He heads to the living room area, then his footsteps trot off elsewhere in the house, while Dexter waits in the kitchen, keeping his ears open for their prisoner behind him. He hears faint muffled breathing, edging on panic; his son’s footsteps, soft like falling snow. 

When Harrison returns, he has the pack Dexter got him for this specifically. He pulls out pictures, lays them out on the table before them both, and oh yes, now we’re getting somewhere. 

Spectacle. Vision. Production. He’s glad Harrison understood the assignment. 

He pulls out one photo of a girl in her mid teens, ash blonde hair, braces still on. It’s a yearbook photo and she’s grinning at the camera. 

“Sarissa Edwards, junior year,” Harrison rattles off. “We have PE and Honors English together. She’s fifteen, she’ll be sixteen next year. She’s a year younger than everyone because she skipped a grade. She was in foster care for a bit, her mom lost custody of her. She’s living with her aunt now, but it’s rough. She’s never around.” He pulls out an older photo of James Brahms—black and white, no doubt from a different yearbook. “He raped her.” 

She looked closer to twelve than fifteen, but Dexter doesn’t comment on that. 

“And how do you know this?” Dexter asks. 

“She told me,” he says simply.

“She just happened to confide in you? The new kid at school?” 

“Is that so hard to believe?” 

Dexter blinks. “I worked in the police department for years, Harrison. Most rape victims who don’t report it aren’t telling random teenage boys either.” He thinks of Lumen, suddenly—he hadn’t thought of her in years, his heart giving a little pang as he remembers their brief connection. “They don’t feel safe.”

Harrison’s mouth twists into a mocking smile. “Well, that’s you. She wasn’t talking to the police. She was talking to her friend.” 

Debra’s laugh is ugly behind him. “Of course. Your son is more charming than you. More empathetic. They probably bonded over their shitty parents.” 

“Harrison, if you’re killing this guy because he hurt your friend—” He’s going to press for more details, but Harrison is already moving on, ignoring him as he sticks a photo of another yet nearly identical girl next to Sarissa. 

“Mayday Teague, goes by May,” he talks over Dexter. Another blonde. “Graduated a couple years ago.” 

“You talk to this one too?” 

Harrison’s face tightens a bit. “No, not directly,” he admits. “But this one is an open secret. Everyone knew, but no one did anything.” 

“You’re basing this off rumors?”

“It’s a pattern of behavior,” his son stresses. He throws down another photo of a similar girl, along with a newspaper article about a suicide. Juliet Keene, age twenty two. She must have graduated a few years ago. There’s no way Harrison would have ever spoken to her. 

“This is—”

“She killed herself because of him,” Harrison spits. “He fucked with her head and she never recovered.”

“You know this how?” He asks. 

Harrison’s lips curve into a mirthless smirk. He pulls out a flower covered notebook, clearly worn. 

“Because she wrote about it herself,” he says. “About his whole fucked up predatory behavior. About how he held her grades and reputation over her head so she didn’t report anything. Is that enough proof, Dexter? Is that good enough for you?”

Ouch. First name basis. 

“Does her writing about how he groomed her count for anything?” Harrison goes on.

“It’s not nothing,” Dexter says.

“It should count for something,” he says, venom spitting, soft spoken menace.

“How did you even get this?” He asks.

His son’s jaw twitches. In the dark, Harrison’s face was half in shadow, half in moonlight, eyes flickering brightly in the room. “Her sister is in my chemistry class. We talked.”

Dexter bites back a sigh. “Quite an investigation,” he says. He can already tell this is personal for Harrison. He can see the ideas in his head, the noble goal of ridding the world of a sexual predator. Even so, this wasn’t the code he was teaching Harrison. “Well, this is circumstantial evidence of him being scum—”

“Circumstantial?”

“But it’s not proof of murder—”

“Juliet Keene died—”

“Not by his hand—”

“There’s more proof here than there ever was for Matt Caldwell,” Harrison hisses, eyes blazing.

Ah. There it is.

Dexter nearly argues—Matt Caldwell killed five people, he admitted it on the table, but he doesn’t want to get caught up in constant arguments with his son. They've already talked about this. 

“Harrison,” he breathes, staying as calm as he can, “I’ve told you about the code—”

“Yeah, I know—” Flippant, curt, dismissive. 

“You told me you understood—”

“Are you mad at me? For real?” Harrison says, as if it’s an unreasonable prospect. It’s hard to be angry with Harrison—Dexter never had much of a temper to begin with; perhaps his extracurricular hobby purges it all out, leaves him cool and calm and collected even at the worst of times. Every time he feels his temper start to rise with his son, Harrison just reminds him of all the years he spent away from him. He doesn’t like guilt. It’s a useless emotion. Harrison is good at playing it. 

“He doesn’t fit the code!” His voice is low, but agitated, and Dexter finds his hand leaving the table, pointing back at their prisoner in the next room. “The code isn’t some arbitrary thing you can choose to ignore. It’s there to protect us.” 

Harrison eyes his hands, and straightens up, squaring his shoulders. His chin juts out defiantly. It’s an expression Dexter is growing more and more familiar with. 

“So you can break the code whenever you want, but I can’t?”

The air gets sucked out of the room, like a pressure valve. Dexter feels as if his lungs are being compressed, squeezed tight, as his son backs him into a corner. 

He can almost feel Logan’s neck snap under his hand again, the bone crunch, the body go limp against him. 

“Is that how it is, Dad?” Harrison’s words are sharp as needlepoints. 

So that's what this is about? My son is punishing me. Dexter wonders if he’ll ever stop. 

“You can’t run before you walk,” Dexter answers. His words are a low simmer. 

Harrison steps back, eyebrows shooting up in his forehead. “You can’t run before you walk? You’re a fucking piece of work, you know that? I used to think you were so...” Harrison doesn’t finish his sentence. There’s a thread of something in his voice, a tremble, eyes looking away from him as he rubs them with the back of his palm. Dexter feels like he is missing something, as if he stepped up some staircase and didn’t realize there was a step missing and now he’s falling. 

You’re never going to be able to connect with your son. 

They’re at an impasse. He has to get control of this—his son pulling away from him as he speaks. Minute by minute, clock ticking. 

“Find me proof,” Dexter says. 

Harrison cocks his head. “Proof of what? That he did it?” 

“I’m not doubting your friend,” Dexter says, shaking his head. “I’m not calling anyone a liar. I just think we need absolute certainty before we snuff out a man’s life. You want to do this? You have to know for sure. So find something.” 

He expects a protest, name-calling, more rage bubbling up in his son but he can see the challenging dawning in Harrison’s eyes. He steps closer. 

Reeling him in. 

“Guys like...” Us, Dexter thinks, but the charge isn’t murder. It’s rape. That’s always been outside of Dexter’s purview of understanding. “Guys like these tend to keep trophies, remember?”

Harrison nods, enthralled, hyper-focused, but even as he says it, there’s uncertainty in his voice. Dexter knows murders, predators, hunters—fellow travelers searching for prey. He is not as familiar with serial rapists.

“So, what would that look like?” 

Dexter shrugs. “A burner phone. Secret emails. A keepsake. You’ll know it when you see it.” 

He is hoping dear Mr. Brahms has a skeleton in his closet. A literal one, if the universe wants to be kind to him. Letting his son’s first kill be someone who’s not even a killer feels like a failure already, even if dear Mr. Brahms is scum. 

Harrison stares for a moment. Then he turns on his heel, heading towards the stairs with a resolute set to his shoulders. 

“Harrison,” he calls back.

His son turns around before he turns the corner. 

“We have to be honest with each other if this is going to work,” Dexter says, measuring his words carefully. 

He sees his son consider this for a moment, head cocked as if he was listening closely. Harrison nods. “I know. Do you want to start first?”

Dexter doesn’t think that’s fair. He’s been more honest with his son than anyone else he’s ever been with.

When Harrison is gone from the room, Dexter lets out a breath he’d been holding, leaning back against the wall, until his head thumps against it. His shoulders and back muscles are radiating lines of pain down his body, from all the tension he’s carrying. He places the palm of his hand into his eyes, as if he could rub his headache away. This was not the bonding night he wanted with his son. 

He wants to let Harrison have his righteous kill; it’s not as if he’d personally cry if Mr. Brahms was no longer in this world. But it’s against the code and the code is all-important, the code is the only reason why Dexter isn’t in prison right now, if he can’t even teach his son that, then—

“I told you this was a mistake,” Debra says, hissing in his ear. “Didn’t I say you were giving him permission?”

“Not now, Debra,” Dexter hisses between his teeth. “I don’t need your snide comments.” 

“You’re going to create a monster. Just like Miguel. You’re going to make another Brian.”

He’s not a monster, Dexter thinks, a knee-jerk reaction. He’s my son; he’s resourceful and brave and smarter than everyone else in his class and—

—he broke a kid’s arm, just because he could. Stabbed a friend in the thigh, nearly killed him, to see what it would feel like, then casted himself as a hero in a manipulative masterstroke even Dexter could not have managed. 

As if sifting through the sieves of his mind, he is thunderstruck by the memory of his son—barely a year old, fresh from Rita’s death, leaving scratches on other boys in daycare. He remembers the mothers gossiping about him and Dexter scooping him up, snarling out there’s nothing wrong with my son at them.

It’s just you and me, against the world. 

“Don’t fool yourself,” Debra’s voice cuts through the memory, abrasive. “The more fucked up he is, the better, right? You’re basically grooming him.”

“Stop,” Dexter orders, squeezing his eyes shut. 

Deb doesn’t listen. She never has. 

“What did you think was going to happen? That you’d get to ride off into the sunset, play Bonnie and Clyde with your son? That making your son like you wouldn’t backfire on you! You’re impossible to live with.”

“I’m not turning him into a monster,” Dexter repeats. He pushes his hand into his eyes, blotting out his vision with white spots. "I am giving him the tools to cope with his urges."

When he opens them again, he barely has time to register his sister in his face—spindly hands, dark curtain of hair, paler than she’s ever been in life—when she shoves him down. Dexter startles, his knees crashing into the kitchenette table, thumping loud on the ground. The pictures Harrison laid out scatter and fly to the floor. It’s not much but pain blooms and throbs within him, his body not quite what it used to be anymore, not as able to bounce back. 

“Debra,” he snarls. 

She grabs him by the lapels of his jacket, pinning him between her and the table, body pressed to him so tightly, she could disappear within him. 

“You don’t get to be happy. You don’t get to be left alone. This never turns out okay—not with Miguel, not with Lumen, not with Zach. You’re not some old man passing the torch, you are a fucking serial killer— ”

“Deb—”

“Who’s Debra?” 

From the living room, Brahms calls out. His voice shakes with fear. The sound of it is quite small for something that carries through the house, mouse-squeak, soft trembles. Prey animal, not predator.  

Dexter looks around. Debra is gone. 

He sighs, and reaches for the fridge, tugging it open, wondering if Brahms has anything worth eating. He sees leftovers wrapped in containers, seltzer water, a container of leafy greens going bad, some deli cold cuts. The man had a wine bottle tucked into the bottom corner of the fridge, which held no appeal for Dexter.

“Is there—is there someone else out there? Hello?” 

Dexter tilts his head back, rubs his sinuses. This kill was already giving him a headache. 

(Kill. As if he's already decided to satisfy his son’s dark passenger with this one)

Dexter pulls out a yogurt from the fridge—zero sugar vanilla, Brahms likes to eat clean—as well as a spoon from the drawer, then heads back into the living room. Brahms is right where they left him, lying back on the couch with his hands zip-tied around his back, uncomfortably shifting back and forth. His brow is gleaming with nervous flop sweat, the flush of being caught off guard gone from his expression, now pale and wane as if he’s losing energy the more he stays in this position. Dexter cocks his head, examining the man moving slowly about, like a bug under a microscope. 

He takes a spoonful of the yogurt. Not bad. “You keep moving, you’re gonna fall face first on the ground and I’m not going to help you up.” 

Brahms stops squirming. “Who were you talking to?” He asks. “Is there more than you and Harrison?”

“None of your business.”

Brahms' eyes flicker back and forth between the yogurt cup and Dexter’s face, confusion dancing in the darkness of his eyes. Dexter keeps eating.

Brahms decides not to acknowledge the yogurt, or Dexter talking to himself. “You’re Harrison’s dad, aren’t you?” he states, voice numb and flat as a warm coke. “We missed you on parent-teacher day.”

Oh, this keeps getting worse. The last thing he should be is recognized.

“That was what? A month ago?” Dexter asks. “He’d been in school a week then, I didn’t think there was much to talk about.” 

“Your son’s real bright,” Brahms says. “Top marks in all classes. All his teachers like him.” 

“Complimenting my son won’t save you,” Dexter says tonelessly, but he can’t deny the warm glow of pride in his chest.

“Most kids don’t do well in AP chemistry and Honors English. Harrison exceeds all expectations.” 

Dexter’s mouth twitches. He doesn’t respond. He can see Brahms waiting for Dexter to soften, to open up to him, find a way to hook him, to find some way to desperately save his own life—some with violence, some with honey-sweet words. They all do this. Every last one of them. 

“Bargaining is usually a common response to those in your position,” he says, a bland smile on his face. 

Brahms blanches. It’s fascinating to watch, the color drain from his face in real time, the physiological reactions to the impending death hanging over his head. “Listen, I know your son thinks he’s doing the right thing—”

Is he? Does my son want to be a hero? “You two have that in common—”

“—but I didn’t kill anyone. You got the wrong guy.” 

Dexter takes another bite of the man’s yogurt. “So what, we let you go and then everything is...fine? You don’t tell anyone? Everything hunky-dory?” 

Brahms nods his head so hard, he looks like a bobblehead. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

“Hmm, sounds like a guilty man who doesn’t want the police poking around his life,” Dexter says.

“Hey—”

“Maybe you didn’t kill someone,” he goes on. He inches closer, leaning over the edge of the couch. Brahms' feet are uncomfortably bound together, enough to be cutting off his circulation. “But did you rape anyone?”

Brahms sucks in a breath. “No,” he insists. “That’s a lie, I don’t know where your son heard that, but I never—”

“I don’t know,” Dexter shrugs. “I’m leaning towards my son being right at this point. You’re not acting like an innocent man.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You don’t seem surprised by the allegations.”

Brahms slumps his head down on the couch, hitting the arm of it with a soft thud. He lets out what sounds like half a sigh, half a growl. Dexter does not know what to make of him. 

“For god’s sake,” he pleads. “I’m not what you think I am.”

“Hey, Mr. Brahms, what’s your cell phone password?” 

Harrison slides into the doorway that separates the living room from the kitchenette. He slouches against the wall, the very picture of casual teenage delinquency, disaffected wasted youth. He holds up Mr. Brahms’ cell phone, a plain black phone in an otterbox case. Functional. Respectable. 

“I’m not telling you that,” Brahms responds immediately, fury in his voice, as if he’s not at their mercy, tied up on his own couch. Whoops. Perhaps he’s gotten too comfortable with Dexter. 

Harrison shrugs, relaxed, not worried. It’s an act, Dexter thinks, but a good one. With his son, it’s difficult to tell what’s a lie, what’s a truth—Harrison is far too adept at mixing them together. 

“You have face recognition on this thing, so it’s not like I need it,” he says as he strides over to the couch. He holds up the phone to his face, but Brahms angles away, closing his eyes shut, making the wrinkles of his eyes stick out, brow squeezed tightly, fighting all the world to not unlock his phone. 

Harrison sighs and climbs up on the couch, ignoring Brahms’ protests and squirms, until he’s sitting astride his English teacher, his weight heavy on his sternum and chest, holding him down with his body. A little too close and personal for Dexter’s tastes. Brahms lets out a gust of air as Harrison drops his weight on him, like landing a solar plexus punch. 

“Hold fucking still,” Harrison hisses, reaching to grab him roughly by the chin, while holding up the phone to his face, far too close to get an accurate reading. Brahms squirms even more, making mewls of protestation, shaking and trying to buck Harrison off. Dexter isn’t sure how Harrison is holding on, digging his nails in his chin and manhandling his face, while the other hand holding the smartphone wavers unsteadily. 

Dexter moves around the couch until he’s behind him, squeezing between the wall and furniture, and presses his forearm down on Brahms’ throat. With his other hand, he pulls his head back by the hair. He hears the wet sound of choking, the sharp hiss of pain, all the lovely sounds a human body makes under pressure. 

“Hold still, or I’ll cut your eyelids off,” he whispers. 

Brahms obeys immediately, going completely still for them with a frightened gasp.

Harrison removes his hand from Brahms’ chin, no longer necessary to hold him steady, but he brushes it against Dexter’s arm, fingertips lingering over his coat sleeve for too long a time. He nearly misses the phone unlocking, too busy staring up at his father with a wide-eyed expression—the kind of look that could be shock, could be horror, could be surprise—he isn’t sure. He just knows Harrison fixes him with a prolonged stare, dark hooded eyes, mouth half parted, pink and wet. He takes in one deep breath. Dexter watches the pulse beat in his throat. He watches his face flush, cheeks going a little red. 

“Have you ever done that?” He asks with no shortage of quiet awe. 

Oh, are we bonding again? Am I your hero again? 

“I’ll tell you later,” Dexter says, fighting a smile. Something flutters in his chest, not his heart beating, but a warm feeling in the center of him. He wonders if this is love.

He points to the phone in Harrison’s hands. “Be careful—the phone is going to lock down again.”

Harrison nods. “I’ll change the password settings.” 

“Jesus,” Brahms lets out a shuddering breath, no relief in it. “What is this? Apt Pupil?”

Harrison blinks. “What’s Apt Pupil?”

Dexter’s mouth curves in a silent laugh. 

*

An hour later, Harrison is growing visibly frustrated. He comes storming down from the attic, dust in his hair, before sitting down at the kitchen table. “The phone is useless… just texts to his brother about his niece. Stuff from his boss. I checked his laptop too, no secret photo stash.”

Dexter could have told him he wouldn’t find anything in the attic. Or the basement. Dexter always liked keeping his trophies near him. Out of sight, hidden away, but somewhere close, not tucked away in a dusty room to never venture in. 

“Check his bedroom—”

“Already did,” Harrison snaps. 

“Check again,” Dexter stresses. 

“You could help me look, you know?” 

“I’m keeping an eye on him,” Dexter nods in Brahms’ direction—they’re separated by a wall, but he’s close enough that Dexter can hear him breathing. Thank god they’re out in the countryside—Brahms hasn’t tried pleading or crying for help, there’s no neighbors close enough to hear. “I don’t like to leave them alone when they’re awake. You never know what could happen.” 

Harrison lets out a childish growl of annoyance. 

“This part always takes work,” Dexter reminds him. “You just gotta keep at it. The research can take months.”

“While you what, wait for someone to kill again? Wait for Mr. Brahms to hurt someone again?”

Dexter closes his eyes and the bathtub full of blood, fresh and pouring out onto his son, just as it happened yesterday, the smell of his wife’s blood clogging his nose. 

When he opens them again, Debra is sitting next to Harrison, in a hospital gown, a blood stain looming large in her side. 

“You want to look behind photo frames on the wall,” Dexter changes the subject, keeping his mind off old ghosts. “In safes, in vents, in floorboards, somewhere close to home. Maybe a burner phone, or secret photographs, the physical kind. Items like a hair tie, or articles of clothing. Did Juliet’s journal mention anything like that? Did her sister mention anything like that?”

If he’s the type to take trophies. Brahms could just be opportunistic scum. 

“I don’t have anything,” Brahms protests from the other room. “I didn’t hurt them. I'm not some creep.”

“I’m going to gag him,” Dexter growls, grabbing a kitchen towel and duct tape, but Harrison is already rushing towards the living room with single minded focus. Goddammit. 

“Yeah, that’s not what Sarissa said,” Harrison hisses, sounding very much like it is personal. 

“Sarissa is a troubled kid,” Brahms counters. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“So Sarissa, May, and Juliet are all liars?” 

“Do you think I would still have a job if I kept fucking my students?”

Harrison slips a hand behind his back, and pulls out a mean looking .38, holding it in his hand like a natural. He points it at Brahms, square in the chest.

“Fuck,” Brahms says suddenly, leaning as far back as he could, as if there was anywhere to go.

“Harrison,” Dexter keeps his voice soft, trying to soothe Harrison’s anger, but he can feel his son’s dark passenger rising like a physical thing between them. “Where did you get the gun?” 

Harrison shrugs. “From him,” he says. “I took it from him. I made sure he couldn’t use it.”

His son is adept with weapons. Dexter could hand him anything and he’d pick it up almost immediately. 

“Very thorough of you,” he praises. 

For a moment, Harrison’s eyes flicker towards him, and his smile is boyish and charming, face free of any lines, open and light. He’s his five year old boy again, beaming at his father. 

“Jesus Christ,” Brahms starts to panic. No one likes a gun pointed at them. 

Harrison turns back to Brahms. He takes a step closer, then another, until the muzzle of the gun is an inch away from Brahms’ mouth. 

“Jesus Christ, call him off,” Brahms pleads. A mistake; the moment his mouth opens, Harrison takes the opportunity to slide the gun inside, stretching out his lips with gun metal, teeth clicking. 

“I’m not his keeper,” Dexter says, staring back and forth between them. The safety is off. Just like he taught him. Is he going to shoot him here? There’s not even a silencer on the thing. 

Is he going to stop him? Guns are loud and messy, not his preferred way to kill. Too much of a mess, harder to clean up. Dexter always liked the steady control of a knife better than anything else, but he can’t tear his eyes away from his son, like he’s seeing him for the first time. His own heart is loud in his ears, a strange excitement at the back of his throat. For a moment, he wants to—craves it, willing to beg for it—see his son pull that trigger. 

“Harrison,” Dexter breathes, exhales softly. It’s not a protest, or a command. He’s simply feeling his son’s name on his lips, tonguing it between his teeth. 

Brahms whimpers, his eyes peeled back, whites showing. He’s terrified. Harrison doesn’t look away from his face. He meets his prey’s stare head on, looking into him. He pushes the gun further into his mouth until he can hear Brahms start to gag. He has to have it down his throat. He has to be touching the tip of it to warm, yielding flesh. 

His son is full of rage, but there’s an eerie calmness to his movements, his stare focused, his body controlled. 

Brahms is making choked panicked sounds, bordering on a scream, muffled and terrible. His eyes burn wet, tears starting to leak. Harrison doesn’t relent, nor does his face twitch in sympathy. He stares down at his potential kill with a godlike detachment. 

Is this my influence? Was he like this with Ethan, or is this new? Did I teach him this? 

(In the woods, with the ice cold in their bones, Harrison lowered his rifle. For him)

Brahms is a butterfly, and Harrison is pinning down his wings, watching the way they flare out, splayed open. 

Dexter takes a step closer. He places his hand on Harrison’s forearm, gently as he can, like trying to touch a spooked animal. Even through the layers of clothes—his gloves, Harrison’s kill shirt he gifted him—there’s a charge in the air, thick with electricity, as his son finally looks away from Brahms.

All Dexter does is shake his head. Not like this. 

Harrison pulls the gun out of his mouth. He grabs the gun by the muzzle and hands it to Dexter, grip out. 

“It’s empty,” he says as Dexter takes it—and yes, the thing is uncharacteristically light—walking away, flickering through Brahms’ phone mid step. 

The walls of Mr. Brahms’ hallways are nicely decorated. No wall art, or decals, but photo upon photo: an older woman Harrison can only assume is Brahms’ mother; a young man slowly turning into an older one, his close cropped hair turning salt and pepper, then to all gray hair. There’s a young blond girl in these photos, and Harrison can see the progression from pigtails to braids to headbands and ponytails, watching the girl get older until she must be his age. She’s in the photos with Mr. Salt and Pepper, and occasionally Brahms himself. 

Harrison keeps his eyes on this as he goes through Mr. Brahms’ phone. He should be looking around more, but he stares at the phone, hoping he’d stumble upon something in his emails or texts he didn’t notice before. The cell phone light is the only light in the room, illuminating his face and the image in front of him. He kept the lights in the house dim. Safer that way. 

“Harrison,” his father calls out behind him. He followed him out. He can feel his footsteps behind him. Harrison doesn’t acknowledge him. 

“Harrison,” his father says again, slowly, like Harrison is a wild animal, like he might go off if he gets too close to him. 

He bites down on the impulse to kick and scream. “I’m sorry,” he says, automatic and practiced. Is he? Is he sorry at all or just sorry his father saw? 

He is, for a moment, terrified of his father, and the way he’s staring at him. The dark hides his face from him. He doesn’t want to meet his father’s eyes, and see what’s there—anger, disappointment or worse of all, fear. 

You don’t want to save people at all. You just want to feed the dark passenger. You like it. 

They were words Harrison spoke months ago, they barely feel real now. 

Since Dad killed Logan, the lines have been really blurred. 

“You don’t have to be,” his father’s voice is soft, curling around Harrison like smoke. 

He feels his dad stand next to him, darkening the hallway. Only then does he look, turning his face. The shadows swallow half of his father’s face, dimming his eyes. 

Before Harrison can say anything, Dad grabs him by the wrist with a gloved hand—no, not grabs. Just wraps his fingers around it, lingering on his delicate bones, one thumb on his pulse point, hearing it race. 

It speeds up faster when Dad touches him. He can feel it in his chest, feel a burning crawl up his spine. Harrison isn’t sure how to explain that, his eyes wide. I’m not scared of you. It’s not fear that’s driving him. 

Even knowing that Dad enjoys the kill more than he should, that he’ll bend and twist the code around to try to justify needless deaths—he’s not scared of him. 

“Did you like that?” His father asks, head bent, the shadows between them. He doesn't say what he means; he doesn't need. “No judgment,” he reassures him. His lips twitch upwards, as if fighting a smile. “It’s just a question.” 

“Dad,” he whines. Don’t make me say it. 

“Harrison.” Dad repeats his name like wrapping rope around his wrists, holding him steady. His heart is a loud drum beat. He’s back in Iron Lake, sitting at the back of his father’s pick up truck, working up the nerve to confess his worst crimes. 

“Yeah,” he says, glancing down at his feet. 

His father traces his thumb across his wrist, where the vein pokes out. For a moment, Harrison wishes he could feel bare skin. Not fair, that Dad can touch him like this and he can’t touch back. 

“Okay,” Dad breathes. Hand under his chin, tilting him up. Harrison tries to squirm away but he ends up meeting his dad’s dark stare head-on. “That’s okay. That’s why we’re here.”

There’s a lump in his throat. He can’t speak. It feels like he’s done something horribly wrong and yet…

Dad takes a step back.

“I’ll go look upstairs for a bit,” he says. “You take a break. Get a breather.” 

“Try to calm down?” Harrison’s lips curl up ruefully. “Don’t…do anything you wouldn’t do?”

His dad mirrors the expression, laughing. “Keep an eye on him.”

Then he goes upstairs, leaving Harrison alone. 

For a moment, Harrison stands there in silence, cell phone long gone off, wondering if he’s being asked to kill Brahms. 

*

“That’s my niece,” Brahms speaks. “Nicole.”

Harrison doesn’t deign to look at him from the corner of his eye. He’d been avoiding actually entering the living room but now he stands in the corner of it, eyeing a photograph on the wall—the same blonde girl, twelve or thirteen, dressed in soccer clothes, a smile full of braces, clinging to Brahms’ side. Post-celebration. It’s the same girl that lines all these walls, as if she’s Brahms’ daughter herself. 

“I didn’t ask,” Harrison says. Upstairs, if he listens, he can hear his father’s quiet footsteps. 

“I can tell you’re interested,” he says. “My brother has her this weekend. He’s on a work trip to Saint Paul. I was supposed to have her, but she asked to go with him instead of staying home.”

Harrison does look at him then, throat bobbing as he swallows down the anxiety pushing at his esophagus. Why does dad have to make this so fucking hard?

“Yeah,” he says, smiling, all teeth. “I know. I did my research.”

Brahms sits on his hands and says nothing for a long moment, perplexed. On the couch, he seems small, easily breakable. He’s a thin, reedy man in front of class, but you don’t see it right away there—well dressed, big talker, good at getting the class excited for The Great Gatsby or A Raisin in the Sun, joking around with other students. With him. 

“Why do you hate me, Harrison?” He asks. “I thought we got along well. You’re always raising your hand in my class.”

“You raped three girls,” Harrison’s voice is soft and unwavering. “And that’s just how many I know of.”

“What did those girls tell you?”

“You’re gonna call them liars? They all told the same story.”

Brahms' face is ruddy with sweat and fear. His forehead is damp. His hair sticks in his face. 

“None of them ever reported anything. Maybe ask yourself that?”

Harrison wants to lunge at him. Instead, he redirects the burst of violence under his skin to turn around and march himself into the kitchenette, grabbing the flowery journal, then returning to fling it in his face. It bounces off his chest harmlessly with a soft landing. 

“What do you call this? She lied to herself then?”

“I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but this ain’t it, kid,” Brahms says, taking a breath, inhaling heavy, then exhaling.  “Look, you’re a good kid. I can see that. You don’t really want to hurt me. You want to make things right for your friend.”

You’re just like me, kid, Dad said. Dad, who cut up Kurt right in front of him, easy-peasy. When your dark passenger rises, Dad said, because Harrison can’t be trusted, Harrison’s a wild animal in a person suit, a bad seed—social workers and foster parents, all looking at him like they can see right through him, like everyone else knew about his dark tendencies before even he did. 

“I’m not a good kid,” Harrison says. 

I’m not like you, Harrison told his dad at the time but he’s not sure. He’s not sure anymore. 

He reaches in his back pocket, pulling out the straight razor he favors. “I really do want to hurt you.” 

Harrison flicks it open, twirling it in his hand. Sometimes, the thing centers his rage, his brain focusing on thoughts of cutting Trinity up, slice after slide, watching him bleed out. Ever since he sliced Ethan up (ever since he watched his father dismember a body, all the red blood heading right for his feet), it doesn’t center his rage anymore—it just makes his heart start to pound. 

“I’ve hurt people before,” he promises. A whole string of them, across the states. 

He places the blade across Brahms’ cheek, pressing in, not quite drawing blood. It creates an indent against pink skin, blade biting into it. 

Brahms sucks in a breath, like he’s trying to hold it, to be still, like that could save him. His shoulders are shaking, and his eyes are shining wet. He goes almost a little cross-eyed, as his pupils dilate, eyes narrowing down to the glinting edge of a blade. 

Harrison breathes hard, then another, another. It sounds ragged in his ears, frayed and cut up, if a sound could be scratched to ribbons. It’s an unnatural sound in his teenage boy's lungs. He shouldn’t do this to him, shouldn’t hurt him like this—

Harrison slices him across the cheek before he thinks about it. 

Brahms doesn't scream, to his credit. He draws a sharp, pained gasp, bleeding into a whimper. Blood wells up in one fine line over his cheekbone, dark red. It’s not a deep cut. It doesn’t drip down his face. 

Harrison pulls back his hand, shaking. 

Brahms stares at him, assessing—wild-eyed, flickering back and forth between blade and Harrison’s dark eyes, as if trying to determine what will hurt worse. “But not kill them? You don’t kill people, do you?”

Harrison has nothing to say. It’s you. You're my first. I picked you for this. 

He folds his straight razor back and tucks it away. 

“Is he making you do this?” Brahms asks, with the sharpness of someone who has suddenly realized an answer. 

“He can’t make me do anything,” Harrison protests. The words fall easily off his tongue. 

“There’s a word for this, you know. It’s called grooming—”

Harrison’s hand moves before his brain catches up, body losing control. He smacks Brahms across the face, right where he cut him. Brahms cries out with shaking breaths. Blood smears, red on pale skin, red on his black gloves. 

“My dad’s never touched me,” Harrison says. The accusation lodges itself between his ribs. It sits there heavy, weighing him down. “He isn’t like you.”

“I think he’s worse,” Brahms breathes raggedly. “Teaching you to, what, kill me? That’s above and beyond.”

Harrison grins. “Is that a confession?”

Brahms clams up, as if he realized what he was saying. 

I could end it right now. Right this second. The knowledge makes him feel drunk, unsteady, the same way he felt after Ethan, before he had to put on his performance. 

“You’re a mild mannered English teacher who rapes girls and I’m a straight A kid with a...” Harrison trips up then, struggling for the words. Dark passenger is the first thing that comes to mind, but Brahms will never understand that. The dark passenger is shared between him and his father, and no one else. That’s their private secret. 

“But you’re not a killer,” Brahms interrupts, voice grating like nails on a chalkboard. “It’s just him, isn’t it?”

Harrison heads towards the kitchen, or the hallway, the staircase. Somewhere else. 

“Look. I get it,” Brahms cries out behind him. “He’s your father. You don’t want to disappoint him. You want to be like him—”

“I don’t want to be like him,” Harrison snaps when he comes back, the duct tape his dad dug up earlier in hand. Brahms blanches at the sight. “I want to be better,” he says, and gags him. 

It’s a little past two AM when Dexter finds his son slumped at the foot of the stairs, looking for all the world like a sulky teen, and not someone who’s kidnapped a school teacher. 

He peaks in on Brahms for a moment, wondering if Harrison killed him, but he finds the man with duct tape over his mouth and even more duct tape covering his wrists. His circulation must be cut off. Dexter chuckles. 

There’s a cut on his cheek as well, a small red line under his eye, that makes Dexter feel like a ghost is haunting him. He has to remind himself he never told his son about his sick fuck ritual, as Debra called it. 

He approaches his son, leaning over the railing. In this way, he towers over Harrison. 

“Hey,” he says softly. “I didn’t find anything.”

Dexter sees what Harrison has in his hands then—his straight razor. It’d been missing in action all night. Dexter was starting to wonder if he left it at home. He opens it and closes it, over and over, fingertips occasionally running over the sharp edge. 

Harrison is not looking at him, staring down at the blade. “So what now?” He says sullenly. 

Dexter spares a glance back at the living room. Then he decides to sit next to his son on the stairs. There’s enough space for the two of them but it still feels unbearably close, breathing in the same air, sharing the same space, their thighs touching. 

“Go home, Harrison,” he says gently. “You can take the car. I’ll take care of this. Don’t worry about me.”

Behind him, Debra places a palm on his shoulder, squeezing gently. Warm, soft. You’re doing the right thing, she says. 

He doesn’t need to do this. He doesn’t need to be like you. 

Harrison raises his head, glaring at him. “You’re going to kill him, aren’t you? Because of the code, right? Don’t get caught. That’s the first rule.”

He suddenly feels defensive of Harry. They’re good rules. Solid. Other guys like him have been caught by now. 

“Harry killed himself because you were a monster,” Debra reminds him. She squeezes his shoulders. It hurts. “I sure hope Harrison doesn’t do the same.”

A violent urgency claws at his throat. “Harrison—”

His son’s eyes narrow down to slits. “Don’t lie to me. Tell me what you’re doing.”

He sighs. He rubs his chin with the underside of his hand. “I can’t let him go after all of this—”

Harrison’s hand clamps down on the open blade. If it weren’t for the gloves, he’d be bleeding. “What the fuck is the point of the code?” He hisses angrily. “You have this set of rules so your dark passenger doesn’t cause too much trouble, but you can kill anyone you want whenever you want if you just make up a good enough reason!”

“I wouldn't have to kill him if you vetted him properly—”

“Fuck you,” Harrison snarls. “Don’t put this on me. My proof is solid, he basically confessed, and you’ve killed people for less.”

Dexter swallows down whatever he wants to say. He takes a deep breath. 

“Haven’t you? Haven’t you?”

“Yes,” he confesses. “And worse.” 

He’s thinking of Deb. Rita. Doakes. 

His son laughs, of all things, bending his head down between his knees, dropping the straight razor on the steps. 

“Why do you even care? About Mr. Brahms and whether he fits the code or not? You’re just gonna kill him anyway.” Harrison asks. “What does it matter, as long as you get to feed the dark passenger?”

“Harrison—”

“You killed Logan,” he says, and Dexter flinches. “So why should any of this matter? I brought him to you, he is good for it. Why does it matter if he never physically murdered anyone, he deserves it more than—” 

Dexter grabs his son’s hands. Not hard, not painfully—he just needs Harrison to listen. For his part, his son stops talking, startled, out of breath. 

“It’s how I’ve always been,” Dexter says. “My father gave me these rules. They keep me from going too far. From spiraling out of control. Every time I’ve tried to bend them, it’s backfired. They’ll help you, too.”

“I’m not—”

“Why did you cut him?” He asks. “Brahms? He didn’t have that injury before.”

Silence. Harrison swallows hard. Dexter shows mercy and doesn’t force the issue. 

He lets go of his son’s hands and places them down on his knees. “If I didn’t have the code when I was your age, I would have killed someone just to watch the blood flow.” 

The words sound alien in his mouth, like he can’t figure out the shape of them on his tongue—a lifetime of clamping down on everything dark and ugly about himself, that verbalizing thoughts he’s had time and time again feels all wrong. He’s never said that to anyone before, not even Debra—it’d be easier to peel off his skin and expose his insides.

Harrison blinks, his eyes wet. He nods, as if he understands, and then he lays his head on Dexter’s shoulder, tucking himself next to him, feeling for all the world like a small child again. Dexter instinctively wraps his arms around his shoulder, his son’s body heat warming them both, his soft breaths against him. If he leans his head down, Dexter's chin would be on his hair. 

Was that all I had to do?

“I wish you hadn’t killed Logan,” Harrison says softly, in a little boy voice, a child’s voice. Repaying the honesty. “Because…before that. With Kurt. Watching you. Being with you. That was the closest I ever felt to anyone.”

Dexter’s chest hurts. He thinks this may be what heartbreak feels like. 

“And I just...I wish you didn’t do that.” 

Dexter almost says I’m sorry, but that would be a lie, and he promised not to lie to Harrison. He can’t say he’s truly sorry about that—not if it meant getting out of Iron Lake and absconding with his son. That matters more than any pretense of morality. 

Instead, he holds his son for a long moment, time stretching out into eternity, settling into the delicate sounds of his body. 

“Let me look with you,” Dexter says at last. It’s an olive branch. It’s last call. 

Harrison lifts his head up, flicking it in the general direction of Brahms. “I thought it didn’t matter?”

“Maybe,” Dexter says. “But if this guy is as bad as you say, then there’s something to find.” 

It’s good to be thorough. 

*

Brahms’ upstairs bedroom was much the same as his living room décor. More beige than cool blue tones, one large queen sized bed in the center, another television on top of a dresser, some fancy Amazon alarm clock and not much else in the way of decoration—no plants, no hobby kits, just books on shelves. The spartan mindset truly shined through here. Less photos adorned the walls here than downstairs, but one of Brahms and his brother together sat on the nightstand, showcasing a younger era, an earlier age. Touching, Dexter thinks, as he puts together a picture of Brahms in his head. A man with a family and an inherited house and not much else going for him, not much to define him—a man who cloaks himself in the memories and comforts of home, of familiarity, who has nothing else otherwise. No hobbies, except perhaps underage girls.  

“Fucking English teachers,” Harrison says. He’s agitated. He’s poured through the bookcases and found nothing of note—classics and best sellers, but no secret compartments. Again, an approximation of normal, stolen from a catalog of what a comfortable bedroom should be like—or perhaps Dexter is projecting.

Harrison moves on to the closet, and at this point, he is just emptying it out of items, looking for some secret lockbox, like this is a spy game, and not an impending murder (and who’s fault is that, Dexter ?). He had already looked under the bed, in the bedside drawers, behind wall hanging photo frames, and gone through the medicine cabinet looking for a skeleton in the closet. An air vent lays open wide, with nothing behind it. Brahms’ laptop lay on the bed, open wide, almost cracked open like a book at the spine. Dexter thinks he could take a crack at it, but Brahms doesn’t strike him as a man that relies on electronics. 

“This guy has really gotten under your skin,” Dexter comments, keeping his tone neutral. His brain trips up on a thought, stumbling over something he can’t believe just occurred to him. 

“What’s your point?” Harrison asks. He pulls out a wooden box from the closet and opens it with excitement, that immediately turns to disappointment when he finds it’s just dominos. 

“Did something… happen, Harrison?”

Harrison’s jaw twitches. He pulls his head out of the closet, to fix Dexter with a withering stare. Teenagers can be so cruel. “What are you asking?”

“With Brahms, or… in foster care. At some point—”

“Just say what you mean,” Harrison says. 

To the point, then. 

“I’m asking if anyone ever raped you?” 

“What? No! Jesus,” Harrison lets out a breath, hand on the back of his neck, as if he felt his spine prickle. Dexter can’t say he’s not relieved to hear it, even if he just pissed his son off yet again. “Why does something need to have happened to me?” He’s waving his hands around now, trying to get some point across. “Something fucked up happened to a girl at school and I found out. Why do I need to be…projecting or some shit, why can’t I just have fucking empathy?”

Dexter deflates, sits back down on the bed, and when Harrison realizes he’s not going to get an answer from him, he turns back around to going through the closet, this time with more force, heavier thuds as he moves items around. 

He knows he’s bad at this, the actual connection with someone, talking about subjects that are actually meaningful, that matter—a lifetime of hiding who he is, ten years of a false identity, have left him bereft of the skills needed to truly connect. He is trying to remember how he made this last with Rita, with Angela. 

Debra sprawls on the bed next to him. “He’s better than you at that, you know this. He’s more human than you’ll ever be.” 

“You know, you don’t have to do this,” Dexter finds himself saying. He splays out his fingers on the bed, watching the way they flay out. “You don’t have to do this right now.” 

Harrison doesn’t answer him. He goes still, stops moving altogether, as the implication washes over him. 

“You’re only seventeen,” Dexter says. “You have time. I didn’t start until I was twenty.” 

Silence. 

“Harrison?” He asks. Still no answer. 

Dexter gets up and goes to check on his son. He finds him sitting on the closet floor—not quite a walk-in, but bigger, enough to comfortably fit two or three people standing. The floorboards have been pushed up. Harrison found the one spot under the carpet that was loose, easy to rip away, as if someone had been pushing up the carpet for a while now. Under that still were loose floorboards, and under that, the burner phone they’ve been looking for—and a gallery of photographs. Polaroids, the white edges smudged with use, all depicting a young teenage girl in various states of undress. In some of them, she’s asleep on the very bed behind them, and thankfully dressed in pajamas, the camera intruding. In others, she’s awake, dead-eyed, looking off camera as she sheds her shirt, her pants, her underwear. 

The girl ranges from various ages, Harrison’s age to much younger, mouthful of braces and hair in pigtails. She’s not any of the teenagers from Harrison’s school. Dexter leans in closer and recognizes her from the photographs on the wall, Brahms’ niece. 

Jackpot, Dexter thinks, though he doesn’t feel the slightest bit pleased about it. 

Neither does Harrison. His son stares in mute silence. The expression on his face, blank. Eyes dark. It reminds Dexter of being back at Kurt’s place, the way his face had shifted, as he took in Kurt’s doll-like victims, all organized in a row, a mausoleum to depravity. Dexter could see the remains of his son’s innocence crack open then, and the dark passenger rise up, beckoning. A better man would tuck it back in its box, a better man wouldn’t let his son see such awful sights, protect him from the horrors of the world, but Dexter knows he must. Harrison needs to know. He asked for this.

Without thinking about it, Dexter reaches forward to put a hand on his shoulder, his fingers on his shoulder blades—he feels bony and skinny under him, smaller than him, still growing, still in need of protection. His skin is fever-warm even through the black cloth of his kill outfit. He watches his son’s adam’s apple bob, as he swallows, his jaw clenched tight, locked down. 

“Harrison,” he begins, unsure of what meager comfort he could offer, and his son stands up, as if to get away from him as fast as possible, recoiling from his touch. He hears him stomp back down stairs, almost at a gallop, as far away from him as possible. 

“Nice job, asshole. Traumatizing your son again!” Debra hisses, and before he can say anything in return, he hears a scream. 

Dexter finds himself moving as fast as he can, not sure what he’s going to find as he rushes down the stairs. In the living room, Harrison has ripped the duct tape off Brahms’ mouth. He’s not sure why, because he’s not talking to him, he’s in the process of beating him.

“You sick son of a bitch,” Harrison snarls. He aims a kick to the ribs with steel-toed boots that has Brahms bent almost double in half, his cries turning choked, curling his body into a fetal position on the couch. 

Stop him, Dexter thinks, while the dark passenger whispers why?

Isn’t this what he wanted? 

“She’s your fucking niece, asshole,” Harrison goes on. He never raises his voice, but it becomes sharper, with serrated edges, like a rising crescendo of an orchestra, a piano wire pulled and ready to snap. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He asks and aims another kick to his breastbone before he can even respond. 

The man starts to cough, not able to answer, and Harrison just keeps going. He’s never seen this before; Harrison’s bursts of violence have been impulsive, but carefully controlled. Well planned out. It’s like you gave him permission. 

“Harrison, that’s enough,” Dexter hears himself say, but Harrison doesn’t listen to him, breathing hard, throwing another kick to his clavicle.

“Harrison!” Dexter’s voice turns sharp, and he wraps his arms around his son from behind, throwing him off balance. Harrison responds like a live wire, kicking and elbowing, his legs in the air, as if Dexter is the enemy. They stumble backwards, and nearly fall over, bodies slamming into a wall. He clings tighter, even as pain bursts across his back, sharp and stinging as Harrison lets out a yelp of shock, as if he just realized Dexter was there. Harrison slips out of his grasp, pulling away from him. 

“Harrison,” Dexter cries out, more urgent now, reaching for his son with two hands, cupping his face, his cheeks, tilting his head up to meet his eyes. 

Harrison stops fighting like a wild animal and forces himself to be still, breathing hard as if he was running a mile, chest rising up and down with the expansion of his lungs. He can see the rage on his face, rising to the surface, turning his cheeks pink and hot. His pupils are blown wide, the whites of them stained with red, and Dexter realizes his son’s eyes are brimming with unshed tears, a fact that surprises Dexter, a gasp catching in his throat. 

“I need you to calm down,” Dexter says. He lowers his voice, hushed tones, secret whispers, just between the two of them. He doesn’t let him go. 

“I’m sorry,” Harrison apologizes, chest still heaving, struggling to form words. His eyes go wide and the wetness spills out down his cheek. Dexter, on impulse, reaches for it and catches the tear as it rolls down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—I’m not like this, I’m not—"

“Shhh,” Dexter hushes him, stroking the lines of his cheekbones. He finds he can’t stop touching his son, nor does he want to. He wants to hold him here, to feel his skin and his flesh as he breathes, like holding a butterfly in the palm of his hand. Fragile, about to shake apart. 

“It’s okay,” he promises. “It’s okay.” 

Harrison shakes his head. “It’s not. I’m not—I’m not okay, Dad. This isn’t fucking okay.” 

“I’m not—I didn’t—I can’t—” the man sputters out, unable to form an actual phrase. His words are claws on a blackboard, the screech of tires on the road, discordant and ugly, out of place. He sounds like his lungs are burning. He sounds like he may have a cracked rib, perhaps even a broken one. “I didn’t hurt her,” he promises. “I didn’t do anything to her that—”

“Shut up,” Dexter hisses, then focuses back on his son. He leans in, presses their foreheads together, close enough to breathe each other in. Harrison's eyes flutter shut against him, and something like peace passes over his face, being this close together. 

Deep in, deep out. Heavy breathes, almost sharing the same one. 

“I want to hurt him,” Harrison says. 

Dexter nods. See, this is how they connect—that secret, shameful confession, and here Dexter is, offering a reprieve, reprisal, to remove and take away that sense of shame. You don’t have to hide from me. I promise. 

“It’s okay if you want to,” Dexter reassures him, and then he says what he really means. “I want to hurt him, too. I want to hurt him together.”

Harrison’s eyes go wide. “You mean that?” He asks. “Even with the code? And everything?” There’s a gleam in his eyes, some dark glittering flame and Dexter knows there’s no going back here. He’ll give his son his first taste of death, watch the dark passenger under his skin, and then nothing could ever rip them apart again. 

He nods. Forehead still pressed together, he reaches forward to stroke some of Harrison’s sweat-damp hair back from his face. His son’s breath gets shaky and shuddery, but he doesn’t pull away. This close, he smells like moonlight wisteria, like a night blooming jasmine, and underneath it, he smells a little like blood. 

“We will,” he offers his son. An olive branch. “We can. I trust you.” 

“You mean that? Vigilante shit?” 

Dexter almost laughs. It’s sweet of Harrison, to want to play vigilante. Truth be told, Dexter’s always wanted to be this too. Dexter allows himself to share in his son’s grin, infectious. “Vigilante shit.” 

Dexter had been clinging on too hard. After all, good parents make sacrifices. The code stipulates a life for a life—but he’ll fudge the specifics if it’ll make Harrison happy. They can forge a new code, a new life, a new tomorrow.

Brahms never broke the code—but he was going to die tonight. It will be by Harrison’s hand. 

“There is something...sick about you two,” Brahms says in a horrified whisper. “What am I even looking at here?” 

It seems, at last, that James Brahms has finally put together that there will be no bargaining, no negotiating. Between the two of them, there is no good cop. 

In the dark of Brahms’ living room, Harrison beams. Dexter grins, full of teeth. 

On a workshop table in the basement, Harrison helps his dad lay his English teacher across it. 

Bodies are hard to move. They knocked him out first, because no one wanted to deal with a guy kicking and screaming, but that makes him heavy, dead weight. Harrison may have dropped him at least once while going down the stairs. It happens, Dad said.

The basement is illuminated by two overhead lights, providing just enough light to see. It smells like dust and mildew, old wood finish. There’s a thin layer of dust on everything and it looks like no one’s come down here in a while. Harrison’s moved paint cans and old boxes, looking for proof, trying to find something that hinted at a dark secret. 

Dad is having him do the plastic wrapping himself this time. He’s watched his dad do this before, but it’s never been him. He’s laid out the plastic all over the living room and kitchen, but covering tables and couches is different than pulling plastic on a living, breathing body. Something about the process feels unnatural, wrong in his hands. Something about the plastic distorts Brahms to him—turns his body opaque, blurs in the color of his skin, filtered out, unreal. He wraps more plastic around his forehead, layer after layer until it’s tight. 

“Is this okay?” He asks when he’s done, fully shrink wrapped. 

Dad is taping pictures of the girls to the shelves. He knows this is part of the whole thing—open your eyes and look at what you’ve done—but it makes him feel a little queasy, parading them around like that. 

“You did great, kiddo,” he says, voice a rumbling soft purr, placing a hand on the back of his neck. 

Dad reaches down and strokes Brahms’ cheek, fingertip under the cheekbone slice Harrison gave him. He can feel his skin turning hot, when Dad looks up at him, shame and embarrassment and some kind of hyper-arousal all turning up inside him. 

“Why the cheek?” His father asks, head cocked like a wolf.  

Harrison shrugs. He doesn’t want to examine that too closely. “I don’t know...I wasn’t thinking.” 

His father pauses, palm on his chin. “Did you like it?”

“Yes,” Harrison says. The admission feels like it’s giving something away, too many pieces of himself to his father. 

I don’t want to be right; I want to be normal. 

He looks down at the sleeping body. You do this, you’ll never be normal again. 

When he looks back up, his father beams at him, white splitting his face. 

“Okay,” Harrison says. His limbs feel heavy and buzzing all at the same time. On the edge. “Wake him up.” 

Dad takes out the smelling salts, holds it under Brahms’ nose. He startles awake, as if jolted out of a nice dream, eyes darting around side to side as he realizes where he is. He screams into the duct tape, muffled and clearly afraid. 

“Do you have anything you want to say?” Dad asks him. 

Harrison should. That’s the whole point, making them face it. Otherwise, it’s just plain murder, isn’t it? But he doesn’t have anything to say, mind going blank. All he sees is the squirming body beneath him, and he’s not sure what he wants anymore. 

“I feel like we’ve already talked about it,” he says. “He knows what he did.”

“It’s up to you,” Dad nods, taking a step back. “This is your show.”

Harrison waits and then, on impulse, not thinking too hard about it, rips off the tape.

“Harrison,” Brahms starts, gasping for breath. “I didn’t hurt her, I swear. I never touched her, I just looked. She just let me look.”

“But Juliet, Mayday, Sarissa—you didn’t just look there, did you?” Dad asks. “You have a type—small doll-like blondes. Were you thinking of your niece with them?” It’s like he can’t help himself, even though he just gave the reins over to Harrison. This is supposed to be for him, but he can’t think of what to say, just that he feels queasy listening to them both. He’s sick of them both. 

Harrison reaches back for the tape, but it’s wet now, lost some of his stickiness, it won’t fit right over his mouth. 

Dad hands him the roll of the tape. 

“Harrison, you don’t have to do this,” Brahms says, his voice rising. “I’ll turn myself in. I’ll tell my brother. I won’t touch another girl again, I swear.”

“They always say this,” Dad says. “If they really meant it, it wouldn’t take until the day of reckoning to renounce their actions.”

“Harrison, please, don’t—”

Harrison tapes his mouth shut, cutting him off mid speech. He doesn’t want to hear it, he’s just done with him now, over this entire plan. 

He outstretches his hand to his father. “I want to do it,” Harrison says. “I can do it.”

“No pressure,” Dad says, pulling out the knife roll and picking out something like a chef’s knife for Harrison, like it was designed for carving and butchering an animal rather than killing a human being. He sounds absurdly reassuring, talking about taking Harrison to little league and reminding him it’s okay to not hit the t-ball. “If you need anything, if you need a minute, a moment, time, just let me know.”

Between them, Brahms squeaks, noise like a pig. 

Harrison tries not to look at him. He never exactly wanted to see his English teacher naked, even if he is wrapped in plastic. He can’t help but be overly aware of him, the whimpers and squeaks and muffled, cut off screams. Harrison can feel himself spinning out. 

“What was your first one like?”  Harrison finds himself asking. 

His dad cocks his head, distant-eyed, almost dreamy look as he recalls something, lost in the throes of memory. “Messy,” he concludes, which wasn’t exactly the profound answer Harrison was looking for. “Inefficient.”

“Oh,” he says, and his father gives him a beatific smile. 

“The first time is always rough. It’s why I’m here,” he says. 

When Dad talks like that, it makes Harrison feel like the darkness is gonna swallow him whole. His insides get heavy, guts twisting and curling in. It’s like he can feel electricity, start at the base of his spine and crawl up through his veins and limbs and ligaments and tendons, until his body is buzzing with anticipation. 

“Do you want me to help?” Dad reaches for his arm. 

Harrison pulls back, pulling the knife towards his own body instead.

“I can do it,” he insists.

Dad puts his hands up, lets out a ghastly chuckle. “Okay, kiddo.” 

Harrison looks down and avoids Brahms’s eyes as best he can. He didn’t look Ethan in the eye. He didn’t look Jeremy in the eye either. When Kurt died, he watched his father. 

“Steady,” Dad slinks behind him and whispers in his ear, velvet soft and smooth. “You’re shaking.” 

“I’m fine,” he says. He can barely hear his father over his own heart, the pounding of it in his head, around his ears, behind his eyes. He can feel the radiating heat of his father’s arms, near him, beside him, standing too close and Harrison cannot move. 

His father’s hand locks around his wrist, fingers elegant, careful, touching along his veins, his tendons. “It’s okay,” he says. His voice fills Harrison with a strange, dizzy sort of heat. His touch makes his heart speed up, makes something inside him leap up and throb with warmth—the same way he always gets when Dad gets too close. His head is spinning. He can't think. A hard metallic taste fills his mouth, down in the back of his throat. 

“It’s okay, you’re doing just fine,” Dad reassures him. A hand slides up his hand, bigger than his, fingers over his own, Dad guiding him with the blade. 

He’s staring down at Brahms’ eyes, wide, nearly bulging, pleading before him, even with his mouth muzzled. There’s something pathetic about those eyes that makes Harrison hesitate, his hand going still. 

Everything is spinning. Everything is flung out far to sea. Harrison feels like a ship docked in the wrong place, beating against the tide and then—

He can’t do this. 

He looks down at Mr. Brahms’s face. He looks like some ghastly pale ghost, with shiny plastic skin. Unreal. 

He thinks of his mother’s blood rushing towards him, sticky in the back of his throat. 

He drops the knife and he can’t bear it, to look at Brahms. He jolts away so fast, he dislodges his father away from him. The knife hits the workman’s table, then clatters to the ground, thunderously loud. Harrison can’t stand to look at his father (to look at himself), but he can’t help but glance up and there he is, staring at Harrison with a stricken expression. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and runs up the basement stairs towards the hall light. 

*

The upstairs bathroom is brutally calm in its emptiness. He can hear the soft sounds of rain outside, pattering on the roof, but otherwise it’s this long, deafening stretch of silence, a desolate port in his internal storm. Something about the stark white of the tile, the floors, the porcelain, makes his eyes hurt. Brahms had a light gray bathroom matt against eggshell white crisscross tile and he fucking hates the look of it. Too planned out, respectable, in all the wrong ways. 

Thinking of Brahms makes him queasy, his body stretched out and wrapped in plastic, squirming in all the wrong ways. Harrison’s eyes burn and he just lets the tears fall. The house stays quiet, with just the sound of his own breathing to keep him company, the wet choked noises, like there isn’t someone dying in the basement right now. 

Like his father isn’t disappointed in him. 

That hurts most of all. 

In Iron Lake, Harrison pointed his rifle at his father. 

You have to take the safety off, Dad told him, pointing square at his chest. You deserve a better father. I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you, and Harrison was crying and he couldn’t do it then either. 

He thought it was because he loved him, all the same—but maybe Harrison isn’t wired for murder, despite their bad blood. Maybe what’s wrong with him is something deeper, isolated even from his murderous father. 

Harrison sits on the floor, slumped against the sink cabinet, the toilet in front of him. He thought he might puke at first, but nothing came out, just heaves, his stomach empty, bile stuck in the back of his throat. 

He’s not sure how long his father stays down there with Brahms. Time loses meaning. It keeps raining. Brahms must be dead by now. It wouldn’t surprise him if his father decided to do it himself. Now that Harrison is too much of a pussy to do it. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, but eventually, the sound of footsteps breaks through the quiet, little footfalls that go creek creek. He should tell his dad to walk softer, he could hear him coming. That’s not very careful of you, Dad. Not very dark avenger of you. 

“Harrison?” His voice rings down the hall, tinged with confusion. Harrison can tell he doesn’t know where he is, with the hesitant steps and the intermittent door creaks as he checks rooms. 

It doesn’t matter. Eventually, the bathroom door swings open, revealing the darkness of the hallway, his father standing in the doorframe, in that liminal space like a specter, clad all in black, face half in shadow. He can’t stop his dad from finding him anymore than he can do anything else. 

“Go away,” Harrison mutters sullenly, bringing his knees up, avoiding his gaze. He can’t look directly at him, like he’s an eclipse. His bones itch with the need to run out. He’s faster than Dad—he could push past him and go outside, take in the fresh air and rainwater, but he can’t make himself move. His body is just vibrating. 

Dad holds his hands up as he leans down, crouching before him. “Hey, I’m not mad at you. I just want to check in on you.”

He gets down on the floor with him, carefully maneuvering his body so he’s mirroring Harrison. There’s a few inches of space between them. Harrison’s throat aches as he’s struck by the memory of the car ride right after Kurt tried to kill him, the way he leapt at his father and wrapped himself around him. For one supernova of a moment, he felt close to his dad again. He felt like a kid again—safe, protected, loved. You never have to feel alone with your dark thoughts again. 

“Do you want to talk?” Dad asks. 

“This isn’t an after school special,” Harrison bites out. 

Dad shrugs in the corner of his eye. “It’s whatever you want it to be.”

Harrison still can’t stand to look at him right now. He stares between his knees; his father appears distorted in his own periphery, like trying to catch a ghost. His gaze makes Harrison’s skin feel pulled on too tight. He can feel his own cheeks start to go hot. 

I’m fine, he wants to say but they’re not supposed to lie to each other anymore. I didn’t mean to run, but that doesn’t feel right either. 

“Is he dead?” He asks instead. 

Dad shakes his head. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted...” He trails off, reaching out to place a firm hand on Harrison’s shoulder—soothing, he thinks it’s supposed to be, like a father should be. The world spins around Harrison in a topsy-turvy spiral.

“I’m sorry,” spills out of his mouth, his voice cracking into pieces. “I’m sorry, I fucked up. I fucked up the most important part.” 

“Hey,” his father pleads. “If you’re not ready, it’s okay,” and it sounds okay, it sounds almost normal, what Harrison imagined his dad would say if he froze up at a recital, or during a school play, or even wrestling—any number of events Dad missed out on because he left him. He sounds normal when he talks and not like they’re discussing murder. 

In some distant part of Harrison’s mind, he leaves his body and stares down at them both from on high, sees a father trying to comfort his son for not being able to kill. Isn’t this what you wanted? 

“If you need more time,” he goes on, words feather-down soft, yet weighing on Harrison like an anchor, dragging him to the depths. His hand slips down to the back of his neck instead. “If you want to do this later. If you want to watch me do it or stay up here, that’s all you got to say. I was older than you when I made my first kill. I don’t expect you to get here so soon.“

There's something draining about listening to his father talk. Some fundamental dissonance in what he says and what he means; the casual, almost humor of the words, as they discuss murder, like he’s trying to disarm him—and worse yet, the way Harrison finds himself both distraught and comforted by it. Everything Dad says sounds fucking surreal. 

Harrison rolls his shoulders, shrugging off his father. If Dad’s crestfallen expression bothers him, it’s over in a second.

He takes a deep breath. Reminds himself that Mr. Brahms’ death would be a net good. That's what matters right?

What comes out is:

“There’s something wrong with me,” Harrison confesses. He places his hands over his knees to keep from shaking apart. 

“Hey—”

“No, not like you,” Harrison clarifies and despite avoiding his father’s gaze, he catches his eyebrows shoot up. 

It hurts to even say it. He can already feel a gap between, a distance, cold walls placed between them. 

“There’s something wrong with me and I thought I was like you, I thought I had a lot of…really bad ideas and dark thoughts and I couldn’t stop them from happening and I was just waiting for a reason. Any reason.”

He sucks in a breath, trying to catch it. His throat is wet. “I thought I was like you, I thought we were the same and—”

Something chokes in his voice; the words get trapped. Gnarled. It’s too much to even say.  

Iron Lake. Red on his father’s face, lining the faint growing stubble of his beard. We’re not the same, not at all. 

“Harrison.” His father’s voice is so distant, it feels like a dream. His hand is off him, arm’s length. 

“We’re not the same and that means I don’t know what I am because there is still something wrong with me—”

His hand twitches, his body is tightening up until his joints ache. He can hear himself grinding his teeth. He closes his fingers, draws them back into his palm, one by one until he has a fist, muscles screaming with tension. 

He wants to bite his own fist, draw blood. He’d feel better that way, the way he used to press down on his self inflicted stab wound, used to wrap his hand around his razor blade and squeeze. 

His stomach churns. He thinks he may dry heave again. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Dad says, so soft and gentle. 

An ugly, braying laugh leaves his lips. 

“Don’t lie to me,” Harrison finds himself unexpectedly snarling. He imagines digging his fingers into his father’s skin. He imagines throwing a punch. There it goes, flaming up again, that urge for violence, to feel something living and alive beneath his hands. Instead Harrison peels his lips back in a grin that doesn't match his face, that must make him look awful. “Don’t act like—"

He’s shaking. He doesn’t realize it until Dad reaches out, cups his face in both his hands, large paws bracketing Harrison’s face. Dad’s hands are wrapped in heavy, thick, leather gloves and Harrison wants nothing more than to rip them off and feel skin on his face, feel the burn of contact, but he settles for leaning into the touch, barriers between them and all, pushing his cheek into his father’s hands. He lets out a shaking breath. 

“I’m not lying,” Dad says. “You’re my son. You’re my son. I say there’s nothing wrong with you.” 

Dad pulls him closer, awkwardly tugging Harrison in until his arm wraps around his shoulder, and Harrison lets himself be held, like he hasn’t in so long, not since he was little. He lets himself push his face against his father’s arms. He smells clean, disinfectant and bleach, the new smell of leather. 

Dad always puts the emphasis on my when he says that. My son, like a brand, a claim. Harrison wants to throw it in his face—if I’m your son, why did you leave—but he knows that’s not fair. He’s here now, isn’t he? He’s here and neither of them are trying to leave. 

“Dad,” he says, pitched low, deep enough that he can feel it in his belly. He wants something else. Something he can’t say. He buries his face against his father’s body, breathes him in. Maybe it’d be nice to just stay here. 

They’re both trying to make this work. If he’s rotten fruit, his dad is a petrified tree. 

“Hey,” Dad says after a while. “Will you come with me? Downstairs?”

Harrison stiffens up. 

“Not down to the basement,” his dad clarifies. As if Harrison needs to be protected from the basement. “Just back to the kitchen.” 

He doesn’t want to get up. He doesn’t want to leave here. It’s nice for once between them, not this constant power struggle. 

“Okay,” he agrees. 

*

Harrison is very familiar with the layout of Brahms’ farmhouse. He did a lot of digging before this day, dug up old blueprints, visited on days he was out, times he was still at school, pulling in late night work. He broke in a few times when he knew no one was around to catch him, to get used to the layout, the nooks and crannies, to figure out where everything was, where he could lie in wait. It’s a fairly simple layout. The upstairs was all one horizontal hallway, leading out into closets, bathroom and one master bedroom. Everyone coalesced downstairs, with the living room and the fireplace center, spreading out. 

Harrison made his preparations, familiarizing himself with Brahms’ schedule and his brother’s schedule, picked a weekend his brother would be out of town for the kill date. He planned it all. 

He follows Dad all the way back to the kitchen table, the little round thing barely big enough for two people. Dad stops at the basement door, cracking it open—down in the basement is just a void, stairs descending into darkness, nothing more to be seen. If Dad goes further, he would disappear. 

Harrison freezes up, shoulders going stiff, not sure if his legs can carry him down there. 

But Dad stops, turns around. He approaches Harrison with an urgency that startles him, a flash step forward, until his hands are on his shoulders. 

“You’re right,” he tells him. Words that hit him like a suckerpunch, too simple to fully comprehend. 

“What?” Harrison asks, but his father answers by stepping far too close, until Harrison’s face is buried, obscured, covered up by the skin of father’s throat, the V neck of his shirt drifting down to expose sweat-slick skin, heavy musk. Before Harrison can think, his father’s hand reaches into his back pocket, casually and indolent as if it was his own back pocket, stunning Harrison so much he lets out a shaky gasp. 

Dad pulls out his own straight razor. The sight of it in his father’s hand makes some possessive feeling inside Harrison curl, like the limbs of a twisted tree. Then he reaches for Harrison’s palm, and places his favorite weapon in his hand. 

“You were right about everything,” Dad says. He covers his hand in his now, the cold of steel and leather gloves between them. 

Harrison looks up and meets his father’s eyes. They are not quite wet, but strangely bright, the color of them stark in the darkness. He zeroes in on Harrison like he’s the prey, never moving from him, stepping closer. Harrison refuses to step back and back away, so Dad ends up too close, toe to toe, his warmth flowing over into Harrison’s body. Harrison is all discombobulated; his senses tell him to just cling to his father. His ears can hardly process the words. 

“What do you mean?” 

His father gives a low chuckle. He tilts his head, inclining forward. There was something frightening about the look on his face, but not to him—even after Logan, Harrison isn’t frightened of his father. He is scared of so many things, but not that. 

“I’m saying I was wrong, Harrison,” Dad says. “I was wrong to try to force you to be like me. You’re not like me. We’re not the same.”

“Dad—” he cries out, but instead of pulling away, Dad curls his fingers into his hand, over the back of his knuckles. Harrison longs to feel bare skin, to go palm to palm. 

“You need to be your own man. I can’t expect you to follow my rituals, when they don't mean anything to you.”

“Rituals?”

“I do what I do because I was taught to do it this way. Because of…how I was born in blood.” He pauses to take a break, letting the weight of that settle over them both. Harrison wants to ask more—how, how were you born in blood? But he goes on. “But you need to do this your way,” he says. “It’s your choice, Harrison, it’s always your choice.”

With that, he pulls away, rushing headlong into the darkness of the basement. He turns around once, staring into Harrison’s eyes. 

“Wait here,” his father says, and then he disappears. 

Blade in hand, Harrison doesn’t know how long he waits, or what he’s waiting for, the rain outside the only noise he can hear. He stares at the empty spaces, the void in the room, like it might come to swallow him whole. He looks at the straight razor and—whether on instinct or muscle memory or something worse—opens it up. The blade glints. He remembers it covered in Ethan’s blood, sticky coppery sharp scent in the air. 

And then as the ground beneath Harrison turns to liquid, the void opens up and from the darkness emerges a figure. 

It is both surprising and not surprising to see Mr. Brahms step out of the basement—after all, it was either him or his father, no one else. He’s found his underwear and he’s clutching a bundle of clothes that Harrison recognizes as what he was wearing earlier. His wrists are stark burning red with zip tie burn and his hair is standing up in a mess. He looks…pathetic. He comes to a stop in front of Harrison, taking one step back in fright. 

“Huh,” Harrison says. Not the most eloquent. 

Brahms lets out a breath, like the sound of steam leaving a kettle. 

He turns back and out from the shadows pops out his father, like some dark demon emerging from an inky black pool. He is unarmed—no needles or knives that Harrison can see—but he stretches his arms out like a great bird about to take flight, placing both palms against the walls. He doesn’t make a move forward, just casually shrugs, with an ease Harrison doesn’t ever see except in this setting; the kill room. 

There’s no way back. 

Brahms turns back to him, his eyes careful on Harrison, shoulders and spine stiff. One predator to his back, the other to his front. 

There will be no more pleas from a desperate school teacher to his straight A student. There is now just predator and prey. Locked in combat. Fighting for survival. 

Harrison gets it just a second too late. 

Brahms bolts like a gazelle, speeding off towards the front door. Like triggering some dormant prey drive, Harrison shoots off after him. 

Harrison is fast, but Brahms has the millisecond head start and the home turf advantage. He reaches the front door quickly, but his hands fumble the lock, slippery with sweat, and Harrison slams himself against his back, shoving him hard into the wood with a thump. The two of them fall to the ground, Brahms landing hard on his knees and Harrison on his back like a kid climbing for a piggy back ride. 

He catches an elbow to his face for his trouble. Stars explode behind his eyes in blue-white bursts. His face and head burn with throbbing pain. He wonders if something is broken and it takes far too long for his vision to clear up—Brahms is turning the knob. 

Harrison slashes at his Achilles heel. 

The scream Brahms lets out is loud, tinged with a whine and immensely satisfying, curling heavy in Harrison’s chest. The cut isn’t as deep as he wanted it to be, slashing with no power and no real control, but he bleeds deeply and red, splattering on plastic, splashing warm dots on Harrison’s fingers. 

Brahms slips, losing his grip on the doorknob. His foot flies out, ankle twisted on the ground in a grotesque display, twisted in ways human bodies are not supposed to do. Harrison can see the meat of his insides as his heel bends to the wound Harrison dealt him. 

He stares, fascinated. Blood keeps spilling out, in almost pulsing waves, blood running down the hardwood floor, red on brown on transparent plastic.

Harrison stares too long and catches a leg to his chest for it. He lets out an oomph as he falls flat on his back. His chest bursts into hard lines of pain as his breathing wheezes and whines. He can taste iron on the back of his tongue, like a seizure waiting to happen. His vision blurs for a second, as his body takes in the pain and makes room for it. It’s an oddly clarifying feeling. 

When Brahms reaches for the doorknob again, scrambling to leave, Harrison viciously kicks him where he cut him. 

The tendon seems to yawn wide open and Brahms outright screams. His voice sounds like shattered glass. He completely crumples to the ground, like someone smashed a piece of paper, falls to the floor with a dull, heavy sound. 

Harrison grabs him by the heel and delivers another, incapacitating slice to his other foot, not the tendon this time—to the center midline, so he can’t step easy without feeling it, a slice from middle to heel. 

The sounds Brahms is making are thick with sobs, exquisite agony. Harrison delivers another slash to the back of his thigh, watches crimson blood well up and slide down and across his body. Not quite the same place he got Ethan, not the same place his mom got sliced, but it’s a bloody, squelching cut nonetheless. Brahms' body is shaking at this point, involuntarily twitching.

The pain in Harrison’s chest is small now, a smaller thing than Brahms’ pain, shrinking in size. His heart is racing in his chest with the adrenaline of running a mile, of winning a wrestling match, of hitting a ball across the field. It blots out everything, vision narrowed down to the screaming bleeding person beneath him. 

Harrison grabs his shoulders and starts to turn Brahms over. Moving a kicking, screaming, crying old man is harder than it looks, throwing up resistance, but Harrison manages to turn him over, sitting on his nearly naked body to hold him down, raises his straight razor—

In a burst of frenzied adrenaline, Brahms reaches behind himself blindly, grasps the end table by the door, and knocks it down on both of them. Half of it and its contents—a photograph, encased in glass, of two brothers, shatter and scatter—lands on Brahms. The other half lands on Harrison, bashing him hard in the shoulder. 

He bites down on the cry of pain he wants to let out, jaw clenching as he forces down the violet burst of agony. Harrison’s ears are ringing. He can’t see straight for a moment, vision swimming. He wonders where his dad is. 

He leans forward to slash at him. Brahms grabs the photo frame and smashes it into Harrison’s skull. 

Harrison can’t help it now—he lets out a choked cry, ripped from his lungs. His insides burn as an aura of red heat throbs around his temples. He feels like he might cough up blood. He can taste blood in his mouth. 

He blinks rapidly, taking stock. There’s glass on the ground, shattered family frame. Brahms is, with great effort, trying to lift himself up, two hands leaning his all weight on the crooked, downed end table. Difficult with leg injuries but he manages to turn himself around. 

The glass from the frame has scattered, in small haphazard pieces, but Harrison grabs the frame—solid wood; must have been a gift—and brings it down on his wounded ankle. 

Brahms’ cry makes Harrison’s mouth split in a bloody grin. He can’t say he did it because he wanted to stop him—he should have taken the opportunity to slice him further, but he wants to see the swell of a cracked-sprained-broken ankle, wants to watch him wobble on his feet. 

“Fuck you,” Brahms lets out in a ragged, shaking gasp, as he turns to face Harrison. His ankle is spasming. 

This is the point where he’d say something, make some speech, some comment about all the lives he’s ruined, all the girls he’s hurt—they have to open their eyes and look at what they’ve done—but Harrison has nothing to say. He’s an immovable object. He just wants him dead. 

“Yeah.” Harrison’s voice is dry-mouthed, sandpaper. “You, too.” 

Brahms reaches for a shard of glass, to arm himself, even though he’s as likely to cut himself as much as cut Harrison—

Dad pops out suddenly from whatever dark corner he’d been watching them, positioning himself behind Brahms. He moves like a shadow, fluid and smooth as he looms large over them. Dad’s not a big guy, but he’s not a small one either, and he seems to take up so much more space than Brahms, like he could swallow him up whole. 

He wraps a garrote of piano wire around his throat, pulling hard, as Brahms’ noises turn strangled and desperate. The look on Dad’s face is not the high wire excitement of the kill Harrison has seen before—not anticipatory, nor eager, none of the enjoyment Harrison had come to understand. His eyes are black with fury, face set in stone and hard lines. So rarely does Harrison ever get to see him lash out in fury, and for a moment, they are one in the same, tied together by this piano wire. 

Harrison pulls himself to his knees, until he’s standing only slightly above Brahms, who has turned slack even as his limbs flail, hands uselessly tugging at the wire collar around his throat. The veins in his throat pop out, bulging, skin starkly red where the wire tightens. It’s terrifying. It’s beautiful. 

Harrison has a protest on his lips, some teenage bullshit, I don’t need your help, but Harrison and his father’s eyes meet then. For a moment, Brahms doesn’t even matter. It’s just the two of them, like they're the only people in the world. 

Harrison’s heart hammers in his chest, beating wildly. He cannot think beyond the sound of blood in his head and then it’s like every other time he’s felt like this, drowning in a sea of blood behind his eyes, free fall. 

On pure instinct, Harrison reaches up and twists his fingers in Brahms’ dark hair, holding on tight. His knuckles brushing up against his father’s stomach. Then, with his straight razor, his slashes across Brahms’ throat, right under Dad’s piano wire where the skin had turned angry, purpling red. 

Blood pours from his throat. Hot splashes of crimson go all over his face, his shirt, his chest, in his hair. It flows down his throat like a waterfall, covering Brahms’ chest, sticking to his chest hair. It splashes behind Dad. It’s all over the plastic wrap and Harrison is sure it gets under it too. Brahms makes a choked, bitten off scream that doesn’t sound like a scream—it’s not high pitched. It’s more of a final, rattling gasp of air, a horrible gurgling sound that dies out into a whistle. 

Dad lets go of him and he collapses to the ground in a heap, not quite dead. Not yet. Brahms manages to lift a hand to his throat, blindly pushing his fingers against the gash. 

Harrison, without thinking, kneels down and pushes his gloved hands against the wound he made. Tenderly kneads at the flesh, the wet red maw of blood. I did that, I did that. 

He blinks. There’s blood in his eyelashes, heavy. He has the sudden muscle memory of sitting in blood, a world soaked in red, a screaming crying mother, then silence. A nightmare—but nightmares are real. 

And then Brahms dies. 

His body stops twitching and he slumps forward on the ground for good. He’s just a body now. A vessel. Just shapes. No longer a person, no longer worthy of rage or retribution. He no longer means anything and yet Harrison can’t stop staring. 

In the quiet dark, the only sound is their breaths—Dad, steady and even flow. Harrison, a rapid intake of breath, lungs burning like he ran a mile. His heart aches with every beat. His head won’t stop pounding. It hurts to be alive. 

There’s an oily warm feeling in the back of his throat, clotting. His mouth tastes like an open wound. He is all too aware of his father’s eyes on him, picking him apart, exposed, laid bare. A hot flush of shame crawls up his throat. Harrison wants to look away, but all around him is the destruction they left, blood and broken furniture, and the fresh body in front of him. 

Dad crouches before him, slowly sinking to the ground, until they’re eye level. Harrison lowers his head, hair falling into his eyes—he has the perverse need to apologize, of all things. Some part of him, the small abandoned child, is still waiting for his father to shout out dark tendencies and send him packing. 

Harrison fixes his gaze on James Brahms, who died with his eyes wide open, as if they were still bulging out. A pool of blood runs out from under him, on the plastic wrap for now, but trickling further away. Staring at him makes Harrison feel a little dizzy. 

“Hey,” Dad says softly. He reaches out. One hand gently strokes the side of his head Harrison got walloped in. The other hand is trembling as he tilts Harrison’s chin up with one finger, hands on his body like they belong there. The leather gloves create a barrier, a space between his hand and Harrison’s skin that feels wrong—distance where there shouldn't be. Harrison wants something closer. He wants blood. Harrison feels his head be lifted like he’s having an out of body experience, with the penultimate air of a man heading towards his execution. “You okay?” 

His eyes flicker back down to Brahms. The corpse. Not his first dead body, Dad made sure that was Kurt, or the dead runaway women—but this one feels like it should matter more. Like it means something. Like it needs to mean something. 

Warmth drips down the side of his cheek. When Harrison’s tongue darts out, he tastes copper on his lips. 

When he meets Dad’s eyes again, they are gazing at Harrison like he’s looking through him, inside him, calculating every single mistake Harrison made. It feels like being stripped open. Harrison’s neck goes hot. 

“I’m sorry, there’s blood everywhere,” he can’t help but efface, looking around. There’s blood on his father, splashed on his chest, flickers on his chin and cheek. There’s no neat containment to plastic wrap on the kill table. Only Harrison’s obsessive over-produced wrapping earlier kept this mess contained to one spot, even if some blood dripped down the plastic and past the edges like running water. 

“It’s okay,” Dad says. Reassuring. There's something wrong with Harrison that he finds this comforting, that all he wants is his father’s soft touch and comforting words and hands around him. “I wasn't sure if I should have done that but...I think you needed this on your own terms. You did…” he pauses, mulling over the words. Harrison prepares for a critique, but the look on his father’s face freezes him in place. “You did so good.” He lets the words out like breath, like he’s been holding it in for a while. 

It hits Harrison like a punch, like his chest might cave in. When he speaks, he can’t help the almost child-like tenor of his voice. 

“Really? You mean that?” It makes him feel all too vulnerable—just a kid begging for his father’s attention. Just a kid asking not to be abandoned. 

Dad smiles, shakes his head almost ruefully. The hand on his chin slides back down around his neck, cupping it in one large, open palm. 

“You were magnificent,” his father says. His voice drops low, heavy and rough-hewn. There’s something obscene about the way he says it, magnificent simply too loaded to be contained in syllables. 

Something inside Harrison unfurls, expands, opens up. 

“Really?” Harrison says and he finds himself smiling, of all things. He can taste blood on his teeth and it must be awful, but his father smiles back just as awful, just as sick. 

“Cutting the Achilles tendon was inspired,” Dad says, with a quick glance to the side at the dead decaying Mr. Brahms. His mouth is curved in a tiny smile. “That was good, the way you incapacitated him. Brutal. Efficient.”

“You think so?” Harrison breathes. The noise Harrison makes stems from deep in his chest, like a whine. He can’t ask what he wants to ask. Harrison’s heart swells in his chest, the frantic beating of it butterfly quick, slamming against his rib cage. 

Dad’s mouth twists into a sharp smirk. “I could have watched you all day,” he says. Harrison exalts in it, soaking up the praise. “I’m so proud of you,” Dad says. He takes his face in his hands, gloves on flesh, hands cupping either side of him so he can’t get away, and pulls Harrison close. For one out of body moment, Harrison imagines his father kissing him, and feels himself leaning all the way into it, giving himself over. 

Instead, his father peppers every other part of him with kisses—mouth on cheek, jaw, forehead. Each little touch makes heat spread all over Harrison’s insides, in his gut and his belly and his crotch. He’s supposed to calm down, but everything is still going pitter patter now, racing through him. Worse than adrenaline, some terrible hyper arousal. 

His father’s lips must taste blood on skin. Harrison thinks he likes that. He lunges and wraps his arms around his father’s back in what’s almost a hug but not quite. A little too rough to be a hug, too needy. 

Dad pulls back then, but not away, leans back only just far enough to connect their foreheads together—sweat-slick, bloodstained skin pressing against each other. They’re sharing a breath, gazing at each other, breathing into each other’s mouths. His father’s eyes are fathomless dark, like infinity. 

Dark passenger to dark passenger.

“Take your gloves off,” Harrison demands. 

He watches his father hesitate as he considers the request, thoughts running behind his eyes. Harrison expects to be denied—leave no trace echoing in his head—when he pulls back just enough to slide his gloves off. He lets them drop to the bloody ground then places one hand on the back of his neck—heavy, warm fingers, pressing in. A hot hand on his cheek, smearing the blood on his skin. It gets under Dad’s nails. He wonders if he ever gets this close to it. 

Harrison lets out a soft sigh, closing his eyes, letting himself sink into his father’s touch. The very air feels electrified. The space between them barely a sliver. The world feels different, brighter, brand new. 

“Did you like it?” Dad asks. With his eyes shut, he sounds like the voice of god. 

Exhale. Breathe in. Breathe out. Dad’s fingers play with the hair on the nape of his neck and it feels so recklessly good. Harrison bites back on a moan. His cock is hard, Harrison notes, with an almost curious detachment—out of his own body again, here and not here. 

“Yeah,” Harrison confesses. The words are thick on his tongue, stumbling over them, foreign and unfamiliar from years of biting down on I think about hurting people all the time, at swallowing it all down his throat until it bursts out of him in a chaotic frenzy. 

Eyes open, meeting his father’s hungry gaze. “Yeah, I did. I do,” he says, his fingers struggling to rip his own gloves off, sticking to his skin. “My favorite part was when you choked the shit out of him—”

“Harrison—”

With his trembling bare hands, he reaches for his father and kisses him hard on the mouth. Harrison doesn’t know what to expect, not thinking, running off the humming of his body, the craving in his veins, but his father holds on right to him, cupping his face in his hands, opening his mouth and body to him in a moan. 

Harrison tastes blood. Hot and slick and curling around their tongues. He likes it. He likes it so much he gets greedy, licks his tongue around his father’s teeth, clicking against his in an uncoordinated kiss. In a clumsy gesture, he moves closer, shoving his body tight against his father, lining them up. 

Harrison moves his hands from his father’s back to his chest, palm on the center, listening to the heartbeat—the sound of drums brings a savage joy to him, hearing his heart race in an unsteady rhythm. Dad pulls away from Harrison’s clawing fingers—panting, his mouth red and swollen—and he stares Harrison down with wide eyes. Harrison wants to crawl right inside him. 

“We—” his father breathes hard. He’s struggling. Harrison thinks he loves him like this—undone, unmoored, horribly human. 

“I don’t care,” Harrison says before his father can finish the sentence. He doesn’t know what he was going to say, only that Harrison doesn’t wanna hear it. 

“Harrison,” Dad says, drawing out his name. A warning? A plea? It never comes—he just repeats his name, Har-ri-son, all three syllables falling heavy in his gut. 

Harrison bares his teeth. “Yeah?” There’s a hard edge to his voice, threatening to spill out, as heat crawls up his body. He strokes his father’s face, the rough stubble of it, petting and touching, too gentle for everything between. He smears blood into his skin, into the rough stubble of his cheeks and chin, the always-faint growing beard that he could never fully trim off. His father had been clean-shaven as a child, but he likes this, too—the rough texture, the feel of it against his fingers. Harrison studies his face. It’s an attractive one, for an older man—distinguished, strong and steady, gray in his beard and stormy eyes and lines around his face that Harrison traces—but that’s not why Harrison is here. That’s not why he’s hard, not why he’s about to burst free from his skin. 

“We’re not like other people,” he finds himself saying. His hands on his father anchor them together. “That’s what you said, right?”

Dad nods slowly, considering the truth of Harrison’s words. He reaches for Harrison’s hand, tenderly cradling it in his, in a touch that brings Harrison all the way back to childhood, his chest aching with it. Slowly, Dad brings it up to his mouth. He kisses the back of his knuckles, lips hot like a brand on his skin, one by one, taking his time. It’s a gentle touch, almost chaste, but the sight makes Harrison shiver down to his bones. Dad kisses his bare hand like he’s cherishing him, like he’s just so grateful that Harrison is here, overwhelming. He can feel it again, that burning excitement, the warmth pooling in his belly, arousal spiking sharp within him. He can feel his insides unfurling. He wants to do it again. 

The thought consumes him until it swallows Harrison in a fit of madness. 

“Fuck,” Harrison breathes and shoves their mouths together again and this time they both fall to the ground. It’s not the most graceful of landings. Legs go everywhere, unprepared, his own splayed out around his father’s waist. His father lets out a grunt that Harrison feels resonate in his own body. Their mouths part and break away, Harrison’s bouncing on his father’s lap. Harrison bites down too hard on his own bottom lip. He tastes hot iron. He feels heat, furnace warm, between his legs, and not just his own, his father’s cock hidden within his black slacks, rubbing up against his. 

Beside them, perpendicular, Brahms’s corpse lays twisted in repose in mock surrender, a captive audience. Harrison almost wishes he was still alive. 

A shudder wracks through his body. The thought of his father hard, here, same as him (for him) makes Harrison a little insane, like he’s spinning out, like a car crash about to happen, playing chicken with a runaway train. 

“I want,” Harrison stumbles over his words, struggling to get the forbidden ones out of his throat. He starts to tug at his father’s clothes, a hand fumbling inexpertly with the zipper. He should ask. He should wait but he can’t, doesn’t want to, he already feels like he’s on the verge, “I want, I want, can I—”

“Yes,” his father concedes, hand on his back, palm spread out. There’s the slightest bit of pressure. Come closer. Come here. “Whatever you want,” he murmurs, but the only thing Harrison ever wanted, can remember wanting, was father back. 

Harrison leans forward to kiss him again. Misses. He gets his chin instead, sloppy and wet. Embarrassment floods through him and he wants to apologize, but his dad’s hand is in his hair now, stroking through the stands in little movements that Harrison feels in his scalp, like tiny shivering sparks. It shouldn’t feel this good. 

The other hand goes down between his legs, cupping him almost tentatively through his jeans, broad palm against his dick. 

“Dad,” Harrison whines. He drags out the A, like a little kid, daaaaaad. His hands want to do everything. Shove his pants off. Wrap around his father’s dick. Smear blood across both of them and lick it off his fingertips like cake frosting. 

He settles for the first one, quieting the tremble of his hands as he shoves his jeans off with rough movements. Dad helps. Dad gets his pants down and then with two hands, tugs Harrison’s briefs down. His fingers are hot on his hips. Just the slightest touch makes Harrison shudder, and then his cock bobs out, and his father wraps his hand around him like he’s been doing it this whole time, sharp and sure. 

“Harrison,” his dad says. Harrison’s eyes flutter shut for a moment; he bucks his hips into his father and he thinks he could just do this, fuck into his dad’s hand until he comes on a wave. 

He bats his father’s hands away, diving in for his zipper. His dad doesn’t protest, doesn’t fight, just allows Harrison to pull his cock out. He lets out a sharp exhale of breath when Harrison’s fingers stroke alongside the shaft. He’s shorter than Harrison but thicker too, the pink head of his dick crooked and curved just a bit, spongy against his fingers. For a moment, Harrison can think of nothing else but this—his dad is hard, his dad is hard for him, and that’s so sick that it circles back around to being amazing, perversely good. 

Dad’s eyes flutter shut, letting out a carefully, measured breath. Harrison shifts, maneuvers a little awkwardly until their cocks nudge against each other. Each little motion make his insides spasm, make Harrison want to push for more. 

“I wanna,” he says, licking the words out of his mouth. His own teeth feel sharp between his lips. “I wanna feel, I wanna feel you. You’re hard for me. God.”

They’re not the right words but they’re close enough. It feels as if Dad wasn’t his father but the very twin of him instead—Dexter is Harrison is Dexter, on a long enough timeline, cycling in a Möbius strip. 

“Harrison,” Dad whispers across his lips. This time his name in his mouth tastes like supplication. The soft low timber of his voice makes Harrison feel like he’s free falling, jumping off the edge of a cliff, except soaring, lungs burning and stomach flopping in euphoria. He shifts again and the friction makes him moan.

“Did you like it? Did that turn you on?” Dad says this as he wraps a decisive hand around him, stroking him—it feels like hot molten lava curling in his guts. 

Before he can even answer, Dad flips them over. Or to the side—he moves faster than Harrison thought he was capable of, until they’re both rolled over on their side, face to face. The motion dislodges Harrison from his father, no longer on top, but Dad wraps his palm around his cock in a strong sure grip, no hesitation, just one sharp stroke on the upswing. His dad’s hand is wet, slickening the way, making it easier for friction and Harrison realizes it’s with blood. 

Harrison lets out a ragged gasp, high, needy, completely unmoored. “Please,” slips from his mouth, begging, though for what he’s not sure. He’s gonna come, he realizes helplessly, soon—can feel it build at the base of his spine. He pulls one arm around his dad’s shoulders and snuggles in as close as he can, tucking himself against his father. This close, he can see Brahms behind him, over his shoulder. He died with his eyes open. He’s looking at them both, the two monsters wrapped around each other like a twisted, gnarled tree. 

“Tell me,” Dad demands now, his voice dropping until it’s wicked and honey sweet, the drag of his hand tight. 

I need to be with you Dad said back in Iron Lake and at the time the words felt like a choke chain. Harrison wants to wrap a choke chain around his father’s throat instead. 

“Dad, please,” Harrison says, voice breaking on a whine. 

“This what you wanted? Does this turn you on?” 

“Yes,” Harrison admits. It comes out as a sob. “Yes, I know, I know, I’m so fucked up—”

“You’re perfect,” his father purrs. His fingers run against the slit of his cock. Harrison can’t breathe, his body is a live wire of pleasure, the air tastes of sweat and musk and blood. 

“I got you, I got you,” his father whispers as he jacks him. Brahms died with his eyes open. Harrison looks into them, cloudy gray, into the split gash of his throat, creaking open like a grisly surprise. His Dad’s garrote is still wrapped around his neck.  “I’m here now. I’m here now, I’m not going away.” Then lower, deep in his throat, with a growl as he twists his hand around the head of Harrison’s cock, “That’s my boy, that’s my good boy.”

Harrison comes with a sharp cry and a gasping shudder. Instinctively—not sure if it’s the urge to be close or just to hurt— he bites the side of his father’s neck, digs his teeth into the hot skin, hard enough that it’s not sexy, not by a long shot. He hears Dad yelp in genuine pain and pulls Harrison impossibly closer. His vision blots out and Harrison thinks he moans, shaking, his heart pounding so hard he knows his father must hear it too. 

It's like being born in blood all over again. 

Dad waits for Harrison to settle, his come white on his hand, mixed in with red blood. When Harrison pulls away, he glances down at his softening dick, droplets of come on the plastic, on his father’s hand. I did that. 

His father’s lips press against his temple. Sweet, the way his dad used to kiss him before tucking him into bed. 

Harrison then tilts his head back and watches the way his dad’s face changes as he wraps his hand around his father's cock—still hard, throbbing in his grip, heavy and warm in his palm, the weight of it hefty and perfect—and strokes up. He can see Dad’s mouth part open, breath leave his lips, holding back on a noise. Tension runs up his spine, stiffening beneath him. 

“Don’t. I wanna see you,” Harrison entreats him. “Don’t look away from me. Stay with me, Dad.”

That’s the closest Harrison has gotten to outright begging for attention.  

Dad nods and he slips a little closer until their foreheads touch, gazing into each other’s eyes. Soft little gasps leave his father’s mouth, that turn into a moan when Harrison thumbs the spongy head, when he squeezes a little harder. 

“Does it feel good?” He asks, twists his hand on the upstroke, just the way he likes it. A shudder rolls past his father’s spine. 

“Yes,” his father confesses. “Yes.”

Slowly, he jacks off his father and waits for him to come, in one slow great exhale of release, his face twisting and then slackening in ecstatic pleasure, a face he’s only ever seen when he kills. Harrison swallows the sounds his dad makes with a greedy, bottomless hunger.

He strokes his cock until it turns flaccid beneath his hand, until his Dad is gritting his teeth in discomfort but he doesn’t tell him to stop. Harrison pulls his hand away, blood and come tacky on his palm as it dries, red stains in the crevices of his palm and knuckles, milk white semen coating his fingers. He brings it up to his mouth and licks it clean off, taste sharp and bitter. 

*

“We should get you cleaned up,” Dad says at some point, so up they go. 

In the upstairs bathroom, Harrison strips before his father. He takes off the now-blood stained black thermal, the dark pants, the sticky come stained underwear until he’s bare before him, pale with streaks of red. There should be some sense of embarrassment—naked before his father—but that feeling has quieted, like a deadened nerve. 

“Shouldn’t we…” Harrison starts to ask, setting one foot in the tub, cold beneath his skin, still damp from an earlier shower. Leave no trace repeats in his head in his father’s voice. “Isn’t it dangerous to do this here?” Shedding hair and skin cells and all sorts of trace evidence. It feels like a crime of some kind, as if that’s what they’d lock him up for. 

Dad nods, rubbing his chin. He is keeping his eyes off Harrison’s body, drawing a thick boundary line between them. Gentlemanly, one might say, as if he’s never seen Harrison naked before. 

“That’s why the shower. It all goes down the drain. Just remember to wipe your fingerprints after.” 

He looks around, taking in the bathroom, examining for points of contact. High volume areas. If they pull this off, there’s no reason to assume cops would canvass this room. His eyes flick over to the shower head, over the caddy—someone else’s life, now over. It’s not guilt that hits Harrison, but something equally heavy—the acknowledgment that something is different now, like a stone thrown in a lake, sinking to the bottom. 

“Okay,” Harrison nods, stepping in fully. He goes to draw the curtains, expecting his dad to wait outside but it’s his father that reaches for the shampoo as Harrison goes for the knob. 

“I’d wash you off in the sink,” Dad says. “But I don’t want your hair to clog the drain.”

A frisson of desire runs through Harrison’s veins. He can feel it light up something inside him. 

“Well, you gotta come in too,” he tells him, pushing past the boundary. “You can’t get your clothes wet and track water everywhere. That’s leaving a trace, isn’t it, Dad?”

“You really absorbed that facet of the code, didn’t you?” 

Dad’s mouth is wry, but his smile fades as his eyes flicker from side to side, but with nowhere to land, their eyes meet. 

“Harrison. I’m your father.”

Harrison’s breath catches in his throat. There’s a word for this, half sick at the thought of it—they killed Brahms for this—but Harrison doesn’t want to say it. For as long as he’s been alone, he’s only wanted one thing. It’s a thought that cracks him open, scatters him about in brittle pieces. 

A stone sinking to the bottom of the lake. 

“That’s the whole point,” Harrison says. “You’re my dad.” 

Harrison catches his father’s gaze—inscrutable. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking; this bothers Harrison more than it should. 

“Alright,” he agrees. Then Dad starts undressing. 

In the shower, Harrison is back to chest with his father. The water is loud around him, drowning out other sounds. Dad runs his hands through his hair, fingers massaging and working the scalp with surprising tenderness, so much that Harrison doesn’t think it has any right to exist. His touches at each point of his skull are soothing, a touch that goes down into his whole body—skin, scalp, blood and bones. He’s a child again, being bathed by his father, scrubbed down, scrubbed clean—alive again, born anew.

Harrison sighs, looks down at the ground. Blood washes away in a pale pink swirl, all the way down, disappearing in darkness. For a moment, his vision shakes and goes dark and he can see it, blood spreading out to him, blood crawling up his body, covered in it while his mother dies—

Harrison gasps, his body betraying him in a shudder, shoulders going stiff. 

“You okay?” Dad asks, his hands stilling in his hair. 

My father said it got to me too young. As if the day his mother died, something crawled up inside him, some piece of evil. Death leaves a mark on the living, on the empty spaces, and fills you all up. 

“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t have the nightmares of blood everywhere anymore. Now he dreams of body parts. 

“I missed you,” Harrison says, the words slipping out of his throat. It’s somehow easier to say them staring down at the bathtub floor, their feet together, as blood washes away. “I used to dream about you all the time.”

Behind him, his father’s breath catches. His hands land on Harrison’s shoulders. Harrison closes his eyes, leans back into his father’s grip and allows himself to rest there, letting Dad support him. 

“Did you miss me?” Harrison asks, dangerously close to just begging. His throat aches with everything he can’t bring himself to say, as the silence stretches around them, the sound of running water pattering in the floor and their hearts the only thing Harrison can hear. 

“I thought of you every day,” Dad confesses. “My phantom limb.”

*

They still have the clean up to do. That’s always the worst part. Harrison likes just leaving the mess for someone else to pick up—Ethan, Jeremy the Moose Creek kid—but Dad says part of being a grown up is cleaning up after yourself. 

Harrison picks up everything they brought, picks up the plastic, wipes down fingerprints, straightens out everything that got knocked around. He does whatever he can to stay away while his Dad deals with the body—the whirr of a saw, the sounds of cutting and flesh squelching pervading through Harrison’s periphery. 

He wants to suggest just leaving him here—splay out the photos for the cops to find, let everyone know just how much Brahms deserved his death, some sick satisfaction in imagining his brother coming to investigate only to wish him dead himself. 

But the body is already in pieces—with the lights dimmed and the windows blacked out, the hefty bags already half filled with body parts, sickly scent of death and blood and gore permeating the air. That’s all people are at the end, just parts, just pieces—a leg, neatly sawed off at the knee joint, thigh meat wrapped up in black plastic—everything Brahms was, cut to size. Dad is in full regalia—gloves and apron and face shield, the saw in motion, red-black blood flooding the plastic on the ground. He doesn’t acknowledge Harrison, focused on the body. 

Dad really gets in the zone for this. He’s humming some soft little tune to himself, hard to hear over the other sounds in the room, over the rain outside; he looks like he should be fixing a watch in his study, rather than a butcher. 

Harrison’s eyes go unfocused as he watches, like his body is trying to protect him from the sight, but it’s always like this—the rush of blood makes him feel impossibly small again, world spinning in circles. He can feel the blood crawl right down his throat. 

“Everything done?” 

Dad’s question doesn’t quite jolt Harrison out of his memory—he’s always back there, all the time, his dead mom screaming and the Trinity killer with him every time they do this. 

Harrison nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak. 

His dad frowns nonetheless, brow furrowing, like he doesn’t believe him. 

“Do you want to try?” He asks—affable, like this is no more than a woodshop class. “I could use a hand.”

Harrison swallows. Eight or nine equidistant pieces, depending on the size of the body. 

“No pressure,” he says, one hand up. Gloves bloodstained, to be washed off and re-used later. “Whenever you’re ready. Doesn’t have to be today,” he reassures him. 

But it will be one day. 

Harrison shoves down his nausea, the panic bubbling in his throat. His belly squirms with eels. 

“Okay,” he steps closer, holding his hand out. “I’m ready.”

His father hands him the saw. Harrison takes it. The thing feels foreign in his hand, and he forgets how he’s supposed to use it, like a stupid little kid who hasn’t watched his dad do this before. 

“How…who showed you?” He breathes, keeping it even and steady. If there’s a tremble in his hand, his father doesn’t draw attention to it. 

Dexter’s mouth is grim. He thinks he’s trying to smile. “My father,” he says. 

Still staring at the bloody instrument, Harrison asks, “Will you…help me?”

“Of course,” comes the instant reply. He moves behind Harrison, one hand on his shoulder, the other trailing down his arm, sliding down until strong fingers wrap around his wrist. His father blankets him, engulfing him in his shadow. It’s both comforting and claustrophobic all at once. “Of course. Just like this.”

Together they cut into the body.  

EPILOGUE 

“It’s a beautiful day,” Harrison says. 

They’re at a diner. After dumping the body and switching into a change of clothes, Harrison turned to him and asked if he was hungry. 

“Starving,” he agreed. 

Dexter—eggs, sunny side up, ham steak, hash browns, plenty of ketchup and tabasco sauce. Not the most healthy of meals at his age, but Dexter thinks he’s allowed a cheat day. 

Harrison—a short stack of blueberry pancakes and maple syrup, side of bacon, extra crisp, and orange juice. He takes huge ravenous bites. His right hand idly strays to the paper placemat they’re given, doodling on the back of it with a pen from school. Sketching, really. Dexter can see a face starting to form. 

They’re both a little black and blue. Harrison has a bruise on his forehead, disappearing under his hairline. He shoves the hair forward in his face, but in the right light, Dexter can see the redness growing. Dexter’s neck aches and he knows the skin there, where Harrison bit him, is turning a dark purple. 

Dexter glances outside the window. The rain has stopped, and the sun has come up fully in the sky, light streaming across the downtown streets, warming his face. People are waking up, going to work, getting their morning lattes from Starbucks or gas stations or little indie coffee shops—whatever works. The hustle and bustle of a city waking up surrounds them, inside and out. Within the diner, a waitress—older than Harrison, younger than Dexter—refills his coffee; a gray haired man eats country fried steak; a tired, red-eyed, young man despondently stabs at his omelet. Typical diner fare—Dexter has always been good at people watching—and then there’s them. 

Just two killers having their morning breakfast, no one the wiser, the clacking of spoons and the smell of cooking eggs surrounding them. Papa bear and baby bear, together at last. 

It’s a powerful feeling, sharing a secret. 

“Yeah,” Dexter says. They haven’t spoken much since Harrison helped him with the body. He’s been quiet the whole car ride, staring out the window, in such a way that Dexter would say he’s avoiding his gaze, if he didn’t know better. 

He’s not sure he knows better. 

Dexter, for his part, can’t seem to stop staring at Harrison, mapping out his son’s features—his sweet-faced boy, his soft eyes, brown hair that falls in his face as he grows it out, the last of his baby fat still melting away from his cheeks. Such a contrast to the brutality he displayed last night, the vicious pleasure he took in attacking their prey. His son seems wholly new to him now, but he isn’t, isn’t he, not really—Dexter just scraped the paint a bit and there he is underneath, same as him. 

“You’re turning him into a monster,” Debra slides into the booth next to him, mouth against his ear, twisted into a furious snarl. “You got off on it, you sick fuck. What was that last night? What’s wrong with you?”

So many things. He has no words for last night, except for an ugly I word he doesn’t want to say. Dexter isn’t that sort of monster—or at least, he wasn’t. 

When Debra told him she was in love with him, Dexter hadn’t known what to do with that. What was he supposed to do with that information? There’s no script for that. He worked hard emulating normal person behavior, but there’s no handbook, no code of Harry, for when you tell your sister you’re a serial killer, for when she shoots someone for you, for when she claims she’s in love with you. 

For when you jerk off your son. 

Uncharted territory. 

“What?” Harrison asks. Uh-oh. He’s been staring too long without saying anything again. “Do I have syrup on my face?”

Dexter curves his lips in a grin, but it quickly disappears, as he searches for the right words, the right things to say. 

“I was thinking, maybe,” he hesitates. “I was thinking we could make…a new code?”

Harrison pauses mid bite. He takes a moment to swallow and wipes his face with the back of his sleeve. 

“Our own code?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like that a lot,” he says, all careful reticence, but a warm smile bursts on his face. “Code of Harrison?”

Dexter laughs. “Sure, buddy, whatever works.” 

Harrison mirrors his smile—almost as if he’s mimicking—and then his face turns downward. The sun casts a light across him, lightening his hair up, turning it bright, making his eyes pop. The figure he’s drawing on the placemat starts to take a fuller shape—a face now, not an outline of one, dark set eyes in a skull. 

Dexter thinks it almost looks like him. Before he can ask, Harrison takes a gulp of orange juice, washing down a blueberry bite, then sets down his pen before meeting his gaze. 

“When I came looking for you,” Harrison says, in the tone of someone psyching themselves up, “I was so… angry.” Harrison shuts his eyes, as if admitting that is too much to bear, to look straight in the face. 

A beat. The diner goes on around them, eating their breakfast, but the sound of Harrison breathing is the only thing Dexter can focus on. 

“Are you still angry?” He asks at last. 

Harrison’s smile is thin and pinched, a sharp line across his face that betrayed no mirth. “Oh, yeah. I’m angry all the time,” Harrison confesses. “I look at your face sometimes and I just want to…do things to you.” The words leave him in a puff. His eyes go dark with heat, pupils wide and expanding, as the faintest sheen of pink darken his cheeks. 

(Dexter thinks back to Iron Lake and the fleeting moment where Harrison had him in his crosshairs, caught at last)

They can’t talk about this here, not out loud. Dexter doesn’t know what Harrison means by things—sex or murder, if his son wants to kill him or fuck him. The intensity of his gaze makes Dexter feel like he’s back in the kill room, except Dexter is the one at another predator’s mercy. He feels his heart speed up in his chest with an excitement he only feels during the kill, pumping loud like a drum beat, reminding him of its own existence, fiercely alive. 

He wants to know what sick dark fantasies are rolling in his son’s mind. If he’d ever hold that straight razor to his throat. The dark passenger purrs to life. 

“I don’t want to be, though,” Harrison says at last. He struggles with the words, as if having trouble wrapping his tongue around them. “I don’t want to be like this all the time. I don't want to be angry. I just want to…be with you. All I ever wanted was to have you back. I just want—”

“Connection,” Dexter supplies and Harrison’s head snaps up, eyes wide and bright with tears, staring through him as if Dexter pierced his heart. 

His son is a fountain of emotion, more than Dexter was at that age, ever could be at that age—everything from black rages to the purest affection. 

Dexter reaches over the diner table and gently wraps his fingers around Harrison’s hand, interlocking them together. His pulse is racing, like a hummingbird in his palm, beating his wings against him. Harrison lets out a soft, shuddering gasp, and all Dexter wants to do is hold him. 

Is this love? Is this what I’ve wanted my whole life? Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? Real love?

“It’s a beautiful day,” Dexter agrees. 

And I know there is something all wrong about me—

believe me. Sometimes I shock myself. 

But there is a reason: you. 

You never let up

this one same pressure of hatred on my life:

I am the shape you made me. 

Filth teaches filth. 

  — Elektra, Sophocles