Work Text:
They have the funerals on the same day, two empty coffins side-by-side.
Nearly the whole station has shown up, everyone wanting to pay their respects to their former lieutenant and the best blood spatter analyst in the state. Matthews speaks for both of them. He looks his age now, he’ll probably retire the second he gets his pension bump. Maria had always said that Matthews doesn’t have any feelings, but losing both Morgans on the same day had been hard for everyone.
Quinn is hungover, his eyes bloodshot and his face pale and drawn. This is the first time he’s been sober since they got the call that Deb had vanished from her room. The hospital cameras had been on the fritz because of the storm but Dexter’s boat - the same boat the coast guard found pieces of - had been docked by the hospital. Angel remembers Dexter’s face the last time he had seen him, the gleam in his eyes as he had watched the security tapes, and then the strange emptiness in his expression when he had left the station. The Morgans had always been close, Angel looks at his own sister and wonders what he would do in the same situation.
Jamie is in tears, of course. She hadn’t always gotten along with Deb but she liked Dex and she loved his son. No one has been able to find Harrison, but Dexter loved his son more than anything else and Angel knows that he would have made sure his son was safe before he did… whatever he did.
The other scenario is too awful to think of.
There have been whispers around the station, about Deb and Dex dying on the same day, more about his son being missing too. Angel has shut down as many of them as he’s heard, he won’t stand for the Morgan name to be tarnished.
Of course, he’s had his own thoughts.
In the middle of the night when he can’t sleep, he can’t always control the way his mind wanders. He hopes that Harrison is safe, considers Elway’s claim that Deb and Dex had been harbouring Hannah McKay. Jamie had said that Harrison really took a shine to her, and Angel had never seen Dexter as happy as he was with her. Maybe not even with Rita. And Elway said he spoke to Hannah and Harrison on a coach, around the same time Dexter went back to the hospital.
(The fact that there’s no one left to back up Elway’s claims, that no matter how much they look they can’t find any solid evidence of Hannah McKay even being in Miami at all, is something Angel tries not to think about. Harrison in the care of an alleged serial killer is hardly a comforting idea, but it’s better than the alternative.)
Angel gives a speech, he’s barely aware of the words leaving his mouth as he tells the crowd how he met the two of them, about bowling with Dexter and when Debra got made lieutenant.
Maria had been pissed about that, he remembers. She had wanted it to be him, to be honest he had expected it to be him, but Matthews had undercut her one last time. He misses her still, he doesn’t think he’ll ever really stop. If only she hadn’t become obsessed with the Bay Harbour Butcher, if only she hadn’t got it into her head that Dexter was involved in the whole case. He thought, briefly, about looking into it after she died. Maria was so convinced and while she wasn’t the best detective on the force, she knew what she was doing. And the way Dexter had taken care of Saxon, so quickly and efficiently, the way Doakes was always so suspicious of him... But the concept is ridiculous.
Dexter was a good man. A little odd and he would seem a little too happy at crime scenes sometimes, but not a serial killer. He shakes his head as if to clear the thoughts from it and focuses on making it through the rest of the day.
He’s already dreading the aftermath. Going back to work and not seeing Deb at the food truck outside, looking over at the lab and not seeing Dex watching the precinct through the glass of his office. Sitting at the desk that should be Deb’s.
The desk that should be Maria’s.
There are too many ghosts in the precinct. Dexter and Debra and Maria and Mike and even Doakes. Quinn will be next, if he isn’t careful. Something else to take care of.
He thinks back to New Years, was that the last time they were all happy? Before they got the call about Maria, everyone drinking and laughing at the restaurant he had hoped to run for years.
But Angel’s hopes had never come to much.
He bows his head over his friends’ empty coffins and says a prayer to a God he’s not sure he believes in.