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She’s 8 the first time she sees her brother with blood on his hands.
Mom’s in the hospital and dad is working late and she doesn’t want to be alone, but Dex is off in the backyard, cooped up in the shed with the door closed, doing who knows what. Why he’d want to hole himself up in there is beyond her, but she thinks he must be scared about mom like she is, and surely he doesn’t want to be alone. They should be together, she decides, puts on her rain boots (yellow ones that go up past her knees, just like her big brother’s), and stomps through the mud toward the green shed.
When she opens the door, he jumps. His head snaps toward her, lips pressed tight in a snarl, eyes narrowed and for a moment, just a moment, he reminds her of the vampire in the movie she’d stayed up watching with her brother a week ago, when the monster was caught, red-handed, his sharp canines to a woman’s neck and blood dripping down his chin. But then Dexter’s eyes settle on her, and he softens. “Deb,” he says, and when he smiles, she can see his teeth, perfectly straight and flashing white and not at all like a vampire’s, and he is her brother again. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He steps toward her, puts his hands on her shoulders, tries to block the rest of the shed from view. His shirt and his hands are coated in red and she thinks he must be finger painting. She peeks around his arms, and oh, he’s got a new toy, too, and it must be a puzzle, because its pieces are all strewn about the table, a rainbow of sizes and shapes all dark and gooey and covered in the red paint, and how selfish of him to keep it all to himself.
Then she sees the head.
The head, torn from the rest of the body, dark liquid spooled around its base, messy and all over the table. Grey fur, matted and wet and sticky from the paint-that’s-not-paint. Eyes that are still open and staring and blazing. And the sharp, gleaming rat teeth glaring from the snarl still plastered on its face.
She screams.
It takes him hours to calm her. He begs her not to tell dad, tells her he’d found it that way, a cat must have got it, he was trying to save it but dad wouldn’t like that he was touching a rat, so she mustn’t tell, it will be their little secret. She agrees and she believes him, because he’s her big brother, and he’s good and he’s kind, and she knows from dad that only bad people kill.
For months, she dreams of him, covered head to toe in the red red red, and the rat’s staring eyes.
The second time she catches her brother with blood on his hands, she’s on her way to tell him she is in love with him. Instead, he breaks her heart.
Life’s been complicated, and royally fucked up, but she is happy that it’s finally starting to make sense. He won’t reciprocate, doesn’t have to, she just wants him to know how much he means to her, wants to share this revelation that finally makes the pieces fall into place.
But there are voices in the church when she pushes the door open. She steps slowly, cautiously, around the corner.
The man standing at the altar, the man with a cruel smile revealing canine teeth, the gloating man who plunges a gleaming knife into a body that screams and thrashes against the plastic that ties it to the altar, is not her brother. He is a phantom who looks and talks like her brother, but is most certainly not her brother, a monster from another world who crawled into the marrow of her brother's bones while he slept, slowly learning his form and his voice and his ways. She can see it now, how the phantom peeled himself from her brother’s skin, inch by agonizing inch, and began maiming and killing in her brother's name.
A gasp escapes her lips as the knife goes down. The phantom's head snaps toward her, fury etched on his face, dark eyes narrowed, a cobra who's prey has been snatched from its clutches just before it strikes. But then his eyes settle on her, and they widen. He mutters, "Oh, god," and the fear in his voice is unmistakeable, even if it's an emotion she's rarely heard in her brother's tones.
She rushes toward him with her gun raised.
“Deb, it’s me,” he says, hands in the air. And the mirage breaks, and she knows it’s true.
“He came at me with his sword,” he placates.
He twitches and steps toward her when she takes out her phone to call the station. She steps back, wary, and doesn’t understand. “But it was self-defence,” she says, phone shaking in hand.
In high school, they taught her how religions distinguish between murder and killing. Murder is rage and blood and selfish cowardice; murder takes the lives of wives, sisters, fathers, coworkers, lovers, snuffs out all that is good and pure. To kill is to be blameless, for the perpetrator to be a victim, too; killing is self-defence and accidents, and taking out God’s enemies, an act of mercy, hunting down animals who don’t believe. Only murder is forbidden, because even (especially) religion needs, at times, to take lives.
A cop’s daughter, she always thought it was bullshit. She looks at her brother, the man she loves, the man who has lost and suffered beside her all her life, and thinks that maybe she was wrong. Dexter killed Travis Marshall, but he did not murder him. She’s come a long way since Harry’s death, and she knows that only bad people murder.
So, despite all the signs, she believes him (for now), and she helps him as best she can, because he’s her big brother, and she loves him, and she can’t lose him or let him lose Harrison—not when they’ve both already lost so much.
Debra Morgan’s life has fallen to shreds the third, and final, time she sees blood on her brother’s hands.
It’s different this time, because now she sees all of it, knows everything, knows what he is, and understands. She opens the shipping container door, gun drawn, and takes in the scene. Plastic covers the container, glinting lurid and wrong in the haunting light that hangs from the ceiling. Hector Estrada lies motionless on the floor, drenched in thick, dark fluid that pools around his grey head. And LaGuetra. LaGuerta, unstained but unmoving, slumped against the wall, dark hair brushing her cheek, Dexter kneeling in front of her. Fuck fuck fuck.
"Deb," he says, rising slowly, stepping toward her, toward the knife on the table. "You shouldn't be here."
He says it's what needs to be done, and she loves him, but she's can't believe him, not this time. Not this time, when he’s standing over their Captain, knife in hand, blood spattering his chest, looking more like Brian than she ever remembers. The butcher’s outfit would be comical if it weren’t so fucking tragic.
“Do what you gotta do,” Dexter says, hands outstretched. But LaGuerta is shouting in her ear to shoot him, and god all mighty, she wishes she’d shut the fuck up so she can fucking think. And the red on his gloved hands seeps behind her eyelids, consuming everything, and the strange, haunted lighting of the green shipping container takes her back to a dark green shed and a headless rat with staring eyes.
He’s looking at her wide-eyed, helpless and open and vulnerable like she’s never seen him, truly unguarded for the first time she can remember. But the blood, and the knife on the floor, and a fucking corpse, and Maria helpless against the wall.
“Do what you gotta do,” he says.
And she does. She lowers her gun, and steps toward him. Trembling fingers take him by the wrist and guide him to the table. “I’m sorry, Dex, but I--,” she cuts herself off, swallows hard, unable to finish.
She cuffs his hand to the table leg. He doesn’t resist, his hand limp in her tiny grasp, and she avoids his eyes.
“You win, Maria. Take him in.”
Fucktopia knows she can’t do it herself.