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First, he cannot trust the world. But that is just worry.
A violent altercation at the high school, Harrison had been involved. He gets to his truck and drives there as fast as he can. He can't lose Harrison again. He can't let Harrison die too. He can't lose his son.
The gurney he sees wheeling out a body doesn't have his son on it.
He almost imagines body bags before the officers tells him where his son is. (Harrison is alive!)
He's shaken up.
There's blood on his side, an open wound.
The other boy had stabbed him he says. Shaking and scared. (It's wrong. His son should never have to be stabbed. His son isn't like him, he should never have to be hurt like this).
The angle on the wound is wrong too.
Stop that, part of him whispers with his dead sister's voice. He isn't lying he's just confused, he's not like you, he's not a fucking monster.
He has to believe the voice.
Harrison hasn't done anything wrong. Well…
Harrison is hurt and needs him to be a comforting Dad and be there for him and help him clean his wound and take his antibiotics.
(He hopes Harrison knows he would take that wound in a heartbeat if only so his son wouldn't have to be hurt).
The angle of the wound is still wrong, and now Harrison doesn't seem scared, he seems angry.
Stop it. He's not like you. He's a fucking hero and you're just trying to find things wrong with him because you can't fucking have a relationship with him if he's just another goddamned kid.
He never thought of himself as a particularly insecure person.
But he's never wanted to trust someone as badly as he wants to trust Harrison, and he's never found it so difficult before.
It's an itch. And it won't leave him be.
The angle is wrong.
So he checks Angela's office.
In the pictures, the gym floor, Harrison's bloody side, the other boy’s bloody leg, it's wrong.
The blood is wrong.
The angles are wrong.
He wants to trust Harrison. Because he's his son.
But Dexter has never been a good person, much less a good father. The only thing he's good at is finding and killing monsters like him.
He doesn't want Harrison to be like him.
As much as the part of him that uses Deb's voice tries to say he does. That he's jealous. That he wants Harrison to be a budding killer so that he can relate to his son.
(Even if he is, he isn't a monster, like Dexter. He can't be. He's just-).
(He could never be a monster like Dexter is. Harrison is his son).
But the evidence is piling up.
The other boy's leg wasn't cut with the hunting knife.
The other boy hadn't attacked first.
It's all in the blood.
And like it always seemed to do, the blood makes him sick.
He cannot trust his son.
His son doesn't want, didn't want to tell him the truth.
Blood never lies, but now, Dexter wished that it would.
How he wished he could chalk this up as his mind playing tricks on him.
But 20 years working as a blood-spatter analyst did not leave him so quickly.
Even if it had been ten years since he'd quit the profession.
Blood had been his life.
He could always trust the blood. He wished he could say the same about himself, about Harrison.
The blood almost makes him as sick and disgusted as he is just knowing that he doesn't trust his son. That he couldn't trust his son enough to take his word and let it go.
Even if the angle and his narrative hadn't matched.
Then he wouldn't have to sit with this feeling.
Then he wouldn't have to find the straight razor in Harrison's flashlight. And wonder if he had chosen the weapon after finding out what happened to his mother.
He knows Harrison can't have remembered what happened to Rita. He was 10 months old. Children didn't remember things from when they were babies. They hadn't developed long-term memory yet.
But he can't trust Harrison.
His own son.
So who is to say that he can trust the words of that family therapist.
How can he trust that his son isn't exactly like him? Empty in the worst and most isolating of ways. Incapable of human connection, of feeling human.
How can he trust his son isn't doomed to the same fate of loneliness and constant pretending as he is?
And how, how can he ever trust that all of this wasn't his fault? That he hadn't been the one to have doomed Harrison from ever leading a normal life.