Work Text:
He finds it easily. James hadn't even been searching that long.
Miami boy, Dexter Morgan, found safe after abduction, is the title of the piece.
He reads it. Then easily finds the same story in the Miami Tribune copies in the library news archive from July of 1981.
The fucker had been kidnapped as a kid. And that was certainly one way of fucking a guy up.
Finding and borrowing the case file is easy after that. No one really cares if you want to borrow cold missing persons cases where the person was found.
Abducted from soccer practice when he'd gone to the bathroom in a nearby hotel. No witnesses to the abduction. No security footage of it.
No one even knew he was gone until his cop father came to pick him up only to find he wasn't there.
No leads or evidence was found until Morgan showed up in a suburb nearly an hour away sitting in the front bushes of some guy's house, found only because the homeowner had a sick dog.
Wearing different clothes than the soccer uniform he'd last been seen in and awake but unresponsive. Didn't answer any questions about what had happened to him.
The case file has pictures of a small shell-shocked-looking boy, and of a pair of patterned pajamas. (Morgan's got the same floppy hair now that he did then, and the same freckles and moles on his face). (It's weird, looking at pictures of a kid and seeing the features that grew to be those of his creep coworker).
There's also a doctor's summary of injuries; cuts on the forehead, bruises from getting grabbed and thrown around, and a few bruises and scratches on the face that could suggest that the kidnapper had tried to smother him. All of the conclusions are speculative. No one who wrote the report actually knew what exactly had happened to the boy that had grown to be Dexter Morgan.
The interview transcripts show one-sided conversations. Questions asked but not answered. Descriptions of a small, scared boy who only shook and cried silently while people tried to figure out what had happened to him. Morgan's parents had cut off each interview or interrupted it, apologizing to both parties; questioning and questioned.
He doesn't know what to make of it.
He had known that Morgan was hiding something, but he never would have thought it would be this.
If this is all that Morgan is hiding... Well, it explains a lot of why the man is such a freak. especially if he never told anyone what had happened to him.
James may not have been an open book, or good at the talking thing. But when things got bad enough that he needs to let it out, he finds someone to talk to. He finds some way to let some of it out.
He may not be close with Morgan, but he gets the feeling that the creep doesn't really talk to anyone. Not really.
Not the truth. Morgan the younger had even complained of exactly that to him.
That her brother doesn't talk to her.
And she is the closest one to Morgan, as James is sure the man doesn't really talk to that girlfriend of his.
No wonder the man freaked and trashed his place when the Ice-Truck killer had Officer Morgan; he'd lived through a kidnapping and grew up only to have his fucking little sister taken by a G-ddamnned serial killer.
And as far as James knows, the man doesn't talk to anyone about any of that.
(And he doesn't really need to think about how alone that ought to make someone).
And solitude is one bitch you don't want to mess with.
If Morgan had been keeping that to himself for twenty-five years, well, there was only so long that you could let things stew before something burnt or went rotten. Before the pressure of that rotten shit continuing to stew exploded.
It doesn't change much, but it does change things.
James knows what it's like to have a shitty childhood. It sucked, but it isn't a damn excuse for anything, not that he could prove Morgan had done anything.
And maybe he really hadn't and he is just some weird creep who doesn't talk about the shit that happened to him and doesn't act normal because of the shit that happened to him.
That's a slim chance though, something in his gut is telling him that there's something more to Dexter Morgan and that this is just a piece of the fucked-up puzzle. Part of him feels sick looking through the file, wondering how the guy had chosen to switch out from top of his class at med school for fucking bloodwork. Why would he want to go into forensics when this had happened to him?
Was it because of that?
There hadn't been any blood found besides on the guy himself when he'd turned up at four in the damn morning in someone's front yard. But that didn't mean the guy didn't see some shit for the day and a half where he'd been missing.
Only Dexter Morgan and the fucking guy that took him knew what he had seen back then.
And shit always seemed to fuck someone up worse when they were young.
"Minivan's that way."
He scoffs, of course, the Sergeant is already out there, waiting. And of course, he's already figured out the new vehicle.
"Field morgue's this way," he answers, gesturing with the file Vince had asked him to drop off. (The least he could do for ruining the guy's social life).
"I'll wait." And of course, the Sergeant can, he seems to have all the time in the world to follow him around. Dexter wonders how he possibly has enough time in the day to follow him around like a nuisance and still get his job done.
"You should take the night off, Sergeant," he suggests, knowing already that this is a battle he'll lose.
"On Pizza night? No way,"
At least he can say that he tried. He turns his back to the man, rolling his eyes and heading over to the field morgue.
But Doakes just can't let him be; "What does that girlfriend of yours see in a freak show like you, anyways?"
"You'd have to ask her," he shrugs off, it's part of his mask, part of the truth of him, that he never seems to know what it is that the people who think they care about him see in him.
"Maybe I will," Doakes says.
That's it. That's too close.
He rounds back because everything needs to be a confrontation with the other man.
Why can't the man just leave him be? Why can't he just let up for a day or two? At least let him have time to sleep?
"What exactly is it that you think I've done?" He asks because he is pretty damn sure that there is no evidence, no concrete crimes the Sergeant can pin on him. And maybe, maybe if he keeps bringing up how much the man is escalating things, he might tone it down a notch. Go back to just workplace harassment instead of stalking and prying.
"I know you're connected to the Ice-Truck Killer." He wishes the Sergeant would just drop this. If he drops nothing else, just Brian. He's trying to move on, to live with the fact he's killed his own biological brother for someone he knows will never really know or accept him.
"You mean the serial killer who kidnapped Deb? Yeah, if you remember: he tried to kill my sister."
"More connected than that."
"Could you be more vague?"
"I know you're too careful; you keep your assets in cash, you don't have any affiliations or belong to any alumni groups, top of your class in med school but you traded it for fucking blood spatter," And there it is, the devil in Doakes, hellbent on knowing him, on revealing him. With a cold focus in his eyes that Dexter's sure mirrors his own.
"What can I say, I wasn't cut out for that kind of pressure." It's a noncommital answer like most of his responses to the other have been.
"Then why didn't your grades slip before the transfer?"
He doesn't have a good answer for that. Not one the Sergeant would accept. How does he explain that Harry helped him realize that his mask wasn't strong enough to pull off working as a doctor, that Harry thought he shouldn't be trusted around children. (Even after everything...) That he suddenly realized he didn't have the toolset to comfort patients and family members if and when something went wrong. That he felt far more comfortable with the limited interactions that forensics would require of him.
"I know that in college you took martial arts classes, so tell me: what reason does a lab geek like you need advanced jujitsu?"
"Ever hear of an easy credit?"
"It's more than that," the Sergeant chuckles, then, the man hardens again, "Something to do with that abduction thing?"
The night isn't that cold. But he can feel something in him freezing.
So, the Sergeant had looked back that far.
Dexter closes his eyes, breathing in the cool Miami night air, the sounds of traffic a few blocks away. He isn't a kid. And the Sergeant isn't a real threat to him, not yet.
He is just an annoyance.
He looks the other man in the eyes, "What do you want from me?"
"I wanna know the truth," Doakes says as if it's simple. As if it's possible.
And maybe it can be. At least some of it.
"When I was ten years old some guy grabbed me and threw me in the back of his car, the last thing I saw was the parking lot. Then my father was taking me home, and everyone told me how strong I was for escaping. But they wouldn't stop asking me questions I couldn't answer. Then the nightmares started, I got Harry to teach me self-defense and didn't matter. So when college came around and I saw jiujitsu class I thought: this is how I make sure that never happens to me again. And it helped, so I enrolled for the next class in the sequence."
His voice is quiet and toneless as he quickly spins an abridged version of the uneasiness of that series of events. It only leaves out the other reason he may have needed to learn martial arts.
The Sergeant doesn't look smug. He doesn't look like he expected this. (Dexter hadn't expected to say this much either, but it felt surprisingly good to vent). (To let some of the steam escape before his head explodes from the pressure).
And because he's talking now, "Maybe that's what Rita sees in a freak show like me: someone who's trying to put the past behind them and live a normal fucking life." Quiet, toneless, cold. Agressive but on defense. He is being too reactive, letting the Sergeant get under his skin.
But he hasn't slept in days and between the heat of Rita's insistence that he tries the Narcotics Anonymous problem, the FBI investigating him, and Doakes' constant tailing, and now this. He's close to boiling and feeling cornered even though he knows he hasn't been trapped yet.
There's quiet in the field morgue, but it's not calm.
He doesn't flinch when Special Agent Lundy surprises him, though it's a near thing. He hopes it doesn't seem suspicious to the Agent. Having Doakes breathing down his neck is more than enough law enforcement keeping a close eye on him.
"I'm Dexter Morgan," he says, awkwardly. A semi-truth of the mask. An important part of his act that is far more truthful than almost any other aspect.
"I know who you are."
The chill of the field morgue is getting to him. The contrast of it casts the night air just outside as sticky and humid. It's not the FBI man that is chilling him or Doakes' unexpected knowledge of...
He sets the file on the lab tech's desk. Not willing to investigate the filing system and make it seem like he is prying.
Lundy is just sitting there. (It's unnerving).
"You hoping they'll speak to you?"
"The ones with heads anyway," Lundy jokes, "They always do. Eventually."
For his sake, he hopes that they don't. That the man is wrong.
"You just got to ask the right question," Lundy hums, bringing up his thermos lid to sip whatever hot beverage he'd brought with him.
Dexter nods, his throat drier now than it probably should be.
"Why them?" The Agent continues, almost to himself, "No one kills this many people without a reason; some twisted set of principles,"
"They'd have to be twisted, wouldn't they?" he finds himself asking. Because he is a monster and he knows it. And defending his actions to a serial killer hunter currently honed in on his work would be a remarkably terrible idea.
Lundy tilts his head, watching, a different kind of predator than either him or the Sergeant. But a hunter all the same.
"There's never any justification for killing," he says. Because he knows, even though Harry had never said it. Because he's always known: he deserves to be on his table just as much as every one of his victims, the eighteen in this room and the dozens more still sitting on the ocean floor.
"No," Lundy agrees, "Well, one: of course," he corrects himself; "To save an innocent life."
The man doesn't know it yet, and Dexter hopes that he won't ever know it, that his correction was the basis of the code. That each and every one of his kills had been to punish a killer that had been missed by the system and to prevent future loss of life. Who knows, maybe Harry and Lundy would have agreed on the code. Or maybe Lundy would have taken one look at a disturbed young Dexter and locked him away and thrown away the key.
The night air feels warm and dense. Not cool or refreshing. Not open like it had when he first walked out of the precinct.
He feels like he's a second away from being trapped. Nearly claustrophobic with the dread hanging over him.
He knows there is no one behind him. But he can feel a shadow of a memory lurking, just out of view. The hair on the back of his neck standing on end and his face tingling with the memory of chloroform in his lungs.
He doesn't feel bad for slashing the Sergeant's front tire. He probably should. But as the air whistles past rubber, he can feel himself exhale. Somewhat freer.
And the night air feels somewhat less oppressive, knowing that at least a real person won't be following him, sneaking up from behind.