don't let the days go by

by scorpiod

Summary:

There's a lot of things Harrison wants to say to Dexter; unfortunately, they don't have the space for that.

In which Kurt never tells Angela who killed Matt, Dexter never gets arrested, and the two Morgans try to make things work in Iron Lake after the fire.

Notes:

• For gaialux.

Title taken from Bush's Glycerine.

As soon as they’re alone together again, Harrison comes out with it. 

“I don’t want to move,” he tells his father. 

That’s not what he meant to say, it’s just what managed to come out. 

He agreed earlier to avoid a fight, but after spending a night with Audrey and Angela, after seeing the whole town come together to help them rebuild, Harrison feels renewed, bursting with energy at the seams: he feels like he could take on anything, make this all work. 

He corners his father in the hallway. It’s December 27th, and the morning winter light is barely cresting over the sky, shining lights inside the foreign spaces of the Bishop home. It’s two days after Kurt’s death, and his body is still vibrating from it, humming through it. 

“Harrison,” his father starts, drawing out his name, stretching it out slowly. It makes the faint tinge of condescension stand out, the I know better tone. Harrison knows he should listen to his father, that he should trust the man knows what he’s doing—he’s gotten away with vigilante shit his whole life—but he can’t help but want to scream. 

“I like it here,” Harrison insists, the words are sharp and unforgiving. “People like us here. They like me here, at least.” His father winces. Good. Harrison moves past that.  “I have moved around my whole life. I don’t want to move again.” 

His dad presses a palm to his temple, as if Harrison is a minor daily irritant that he needs to bat away like a gnat. 

It makes him grit his teeth. It makes him want to throw a punch. It makes something dark and ugly flash through him. The dark passenger, maybe. 

His father closes his eyes, rubbing his temples, an early morning headache, brought forth by yourself truly. “We have to move,” he says, a finality in his voice, firm. “We can’t stay here on a long term basis. Especially if we want to continue our work.” 

“Bullshit—”

“But we can finish out the school year,” he continues. Placating. Soft spoken. “So you’re not so displaced.” 

Compromising. They’re compromising. They’re standing too close in this hallway, whispering like plotting thieves, the girls waiting for them downstairs. There’s a liminal space between them, cut off from the world. Harrison is eye level with his father’s throat, the pulse and the beat of it, as if he could reach forward and rip it out with his teeth. 

That’s a dark thought. It’s not the first of which. A flash of blood goes red behind his eyes, leaves Harrison breathless, sick with fear and desire. 

“Fine,” Harrison agrees, dragging the words out of his throat like chopped glass. 

His dad reaches out for him, a hand on his arm, open-palm. Harrison is down to one layer, and he can feel the hot warmth of his father’s hand, radiating heat into him, blocking out the winter chill. 

“But we can’t kill anyone until then,” he says, his eyes dark and intense, holding Harrison in place more with his gaze than with his touch. “It’s not safe. We need to go elsewhere for that.”

He says this like it’s like that’s meant to be a challenge for Harrison. 

“That’s not exactly hard for me, Dad,” he says, taking a step closer, until he can smell his father’s breath. Harrison has gone his whole life not killing someone. It’s not him with a body count over in the hundreds. 

“Is it?” Dad says, quiet and soft, like pressing into a still-healing wound. 

“What is that supposed to mean?”

A sigh. Disappointed dad face. He lets go of him and crosses his arms over his chest. Like this, everything feels normal. He could be the Dad in a sitcom, long-suffering, disappointed in his son’s grade, or whatever teenagers do on tv now. 

But Harrison looked in his eyes when he killed Kurt. He watches him chop up a body. He saw the light go out of Kurt’s eyes and seep into his father, like a soul sucking vampire, the way he seemed so energized afterwards. 

Harrison has seen too much. Things will never be normal between them again. 

Dad’s mouth quirks upwards. There’s a flash of teeth, white and clean. 

“I’m saying, you’ve been in Iron Lake less than a month and you’ve already put two boys in the hospital. What are you going to do in six months?” 

Dad’s words seem lightning precise to upset him. For a second, Harrison is blinded by fury, heat fluttering in him, the same kind of black rage that makes him wanna pull out his razor and cut into something. He’s gotten good at firing back, at pushing back, but for a moment, it feels like he’s collapsing in on himself, struck by a desire to get away, and the bubbling urge under that, to attack. 

“I’m not gonna snap, or something,” he snarls out, and steps backwards, breathing hard, because he wants to, right now, wants to hit something—and isn’t that just proving his point? That there’s something wrong with him. 

Harrison turns to get away—to run back to the guest room made up for him, and do… something, he’s not sure what, bite down on his own metaphorical tail, perhaps, like a scorpion stinging itself in a panic—but Dad comes up behind him. He makes a grab for him before he goes too far, wrapping his arms around him and under Harrison’s armpits, as if he’s hauling him up—he places his palms on his chest, and just breathes, soft and deliberate, against him. Harrison can’t help, but follow it and he can feel something in him calming, something else stirring. 

“Hey, I’m not mad,” he soothes, calmly whispering. “I’m not mad. I get it, I get it. When I was your age, all I thought about was how I could hurt my classmates.” 

Said like that—so blatant and blunt, his own dark deeds given shape and verbiage—makes something in Harrison deflate, snap in two and fall apart, his body leaning into his father’s for support. It’s different, to hear it stated out loud—at once surreal, and all too real at once. Makes him think of his hand wrapped around Zach’s throat, and how good it felt to make that asshole squirm for once. 

Dad bows his head, so his forehead ends up pressed against the back of Harrison’s neck. He can feel his breath ghosting across. Harrison swallows, hard, but it feels like there’s something trapped in his throat, something clawing at his insides to get out. He wants to desperately plead I’m not an animal, I’m not, but all that comes out is a muffled sob. 

His father holds him tighter. 

“I want us to be on the same page,” Dad says. There’s a plea in his voice, like Harrison is being the unreasonable one by not wanting to move. He’s not sure how he ended up here. “We’re in this together.”

“Okay,” he agrees, trying to remember their agreement. Vigilante shit. When your dark passenger rises, I’ll be there to help you out. 

It’s been two days since they killed Kurt, and in that time, the special connection they share seems almost ephemeral, as if it could evaporate away, as if that night never happened, now that they’re not killers lurking in the shadows, but normal everyday men. 

***

“What are you drawing?” Audrey asks at the breakfast table, peering over to look. 

Shit. 

Harrison’s pencil stops. He hadn’t even realized he was drawing something, but he has his school notebook out, idly sketching while he eats his eggs in the morning, his hand moving by itself, a second instrument

She stares at him, eyebrows knitted, head cocked. 

On his paper, is a sketch of a body. Kurt’s body, but his off-hand pencil scribbles aren’t good enough to reveal his face just yet, no specifics in the details. It’s a man, on a table, the lines beginning to form something male shaped and naked—thighs and abs, faint lines that haven’t fully rendered yet. 

“It’s not done,” he says, self-effacing. “I’m just fiddling. I don’t know what it’d be.” He wants to scratch it out, erase the lines but he thinks that would be suspicious. That would look bad at least. Audrey is staring at him with genuine curiosity, not suspicion, but there’s anxiety in the pit of Harrison’s belly suddenly, like his food might come back up. 

Two weeks ago, Audrey watched him break a boy’s arm and told him they needed to take a break, because even though she didn’t realize it, she saw what was under his skin, the dark passenger creeping out for a blind moment of rage. She saw him, and reacted appropriately, even if they’re back to fooling around now. 

Behind Audrey, his father crosses the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee. He watches him kiss Angela on the cheek, missing slightly and getting the sharpness of her jawline instead, not that he seems to mind. The scene is very normal, and once again his belly twists, watching his father and his girlfriend together at breakfast, faces pressed too close together. 

It bothers him more than he thought it would. It didn’t used to bother him. 

Harrison forces himself to meet Audrey’s smile. “It’s just something I’m fiddling with.”

Still, he puts the sketch away before his father notices.

It’s getting harder and harder to pretend to be normal, which makes him feel guilty, =ugly feelings swirling around in his insides; it was easier before, when he was hiding from Dexter, when the secret was with him alone, and so much smaller. Now that someone else knows, now that their secret is bigger, it almost wants to burst out of him. 

Now that Harrison watched his father kill a man, it feels different—his participation has shifted something fundamentally inside him, and he doesn’t know how to talk to other people anymore. 

In five days of pretending to be normal, of barely having a moment to talk, just you and me you and me, Harrison is starting to regret living with Audrey and Angela. 

The Bishop house is large—it’s two stories, with extra rooms that no one is using, including a whole real room for him, as opposed to living in a closet in Dad’s one bedroom cabin—and yet, it’s beginning to feel suffocating. School is out for the winter break, starting up again next week, and he’s actually looking forward to it, because going for long walks every day to get some time for himself isn’t fun in below freezing weather. Audrey is with him most other times otherwise (a fun novelty that wears off after day three of hanging out together constantly), then Angela is home some time after six, and they all have dinner together. 

Dad cooks and makes casual chit-chat with Angela, asking about her day, her work, how the hunt for Kurt Caldwell is going. Molly Park is officially a missing person now, and Kurt is a person of interest, if not officially a suspect. Harrison listens in, simmering with a strange sort of guilt—not for killing Kurt, but for chopping up his body and burning it to ash, knowing no one will ever find him, and those girls in his bunkers will remain just as missing. 

After dinner, he and Audrey hang out for a bit in her room, even if it’s just Audrey strumming along her guitar while Harrison tries not to sketch something dark and twisted, but eventually Audrey wants space in her own room for the night, which Harrison is more than happy to give her. By then, Dad and Angela retreat to the bedroom they’re sharing for the night. 

Between Angela, school, and Dad’s job, Harrison barely gets time with him.

Sometimes, Harrison gets these thoughts, these bad ideas, sick and twisted and lodging themselves in his brain: he wants to hold him down, pin him down like a butterfly; he wants to corner him somewhere and—

Harrison doesn’t know. There’s a hot flash of jealousy whenever he watches his father’s back disappear in the bedroom, the door closing, as if he’s trying to get away from him. He wants to reach out and steal him from Angela, stake a claim, my father, my father, he’s not yours, I know him not you. 

Harrison shakes his head against the deranged thought. He doesn’t have anything against Angela; she’s been nothing but kind to him. Harrison isn’t even sure he really knows his father. Self-awareness is a curse. 

He can’t tell Dad this because it would be admitting defeat. It would be admitting Dad was right. We should move. Even if Harrison knows there’s a middle ground between let’s move across the country and let’s live here for a while, he knows he will be ceding some kind of win to his father.

Are all father and son relationships supposed to be this much of a power struggle? Is it just them? Is it just what they are? The monster inside them both?

Harrison lies awake in the guest bedroom—all beige sheets and neutral colored curtains, boring but comfortable—and stares at the ceiling, trying not to think of Kurt’s death. The death rattles of his body. The muffled screams. The bulging eyes. His father’s face, frozen in his mind’s eye. 

The thing he cannot tell his dad is that he wants to see it again: that look on his face, when he drove the knife in, the expression of release, rapturous and overcome. Terrifying. Exhilarating. Dad and his dear, dark passenger, calling out to his own. 

***

This is a dream. 

Harrison is dressed in all black, like a grim reaper, clothed in a black leather apron. Dexter is spread out on a steel table, wrapped in polythene plastic wrap, miles and miles of it spread out, wrapped around the whole world, as if Harrison and him lived in some plastic, cold womb, just the two of them, one born after the other, mirror images. 

The kill room, Dad called it. Dad has all these rules. All these codes of living. All these secrets.

Harrison needs to carve it out of him. 

Dad’s on the table, just like Kurt had been. His father, naked and pale, at his mercy. Kurt had been afraid at the end (they always are, Dad whispered to him, one scant bit of truth he clawed from him), shaking, eyes widening—but not his father. It’s not bravery, though, that keeps him from panicking. He gazes at Harrison with something like pride in his gaze, looking up at him, his image topsy turvy and upside down. It’s pride, and breathless excitement—palpable, just as hungry as Harrison, as if they’re both eager for this kill. 

He has his father’s blade placed over his chest, the curve of it wicked sharp. He doesn’t immediately stab into his body. He slices, over and over, until the plastic falls off, because Harrison is still new at the code and can’t quite figure it out, maybe doesn’t want to figure it out, maybe he’s a bad seed, born bad, born wrong. 

In either case, he strips his father bare. He places a palm on his chest, feels him breathe in and out, and starts cutting. 

Squelch. 

Rip. 

So much blood. 

He slices into his chest. He tears open his ribcage, bones dyed red and ribs pointed in furled claws. His father’s blood is so hot on his hands. Harrison sticks his fingers inside the wound, sliding inside that hot warmth, until he couldn’t feel anything, but his father’s beating heart. 

His father is, of course, alive. He doesn’t die from anything as simple as a knife wound. He watches as Harrison presses around inside him and feels for his heart, smiling at him. 

Now you’re getting it. 

Harrison wakes up from this nightmare hard, his cock pulsing in his tented pajamas in a blinding rush. It takes a couple seconds to realize he’s orgasmed, had a fucking wet dream, like he’s still thirteen, his boxers sticky and slick. A wet dream about cutting his dad open. 

He doesn’t really know how to unpack that. 

***

Harrison doesn’t sleep. 

It’s dark when he walks up to Angela’s bedroom, somewhere past midnight. It’s a winter darkness, overtaking them early and overstaying its welcome. It turns the hallway into an eerie shadowed passageway from a horror film. It turns Harrison into some kind of creeper as he lurks right outside Angela’s bedroom, staring at the door between him and his father—white, wooden, ordinary. He waits outside, like a child looking for his parents, but he doesn’t have a goal, or an end plan. He doesn’t know why he came here, a sleepwalker wandering a vast wasteland. 

In a fit of bravery, or perhaps frustration, he wraps his hand around the doorknob and very slowly, very carefully, pushes it open. It’s silent as the crack gradually widens, giving him a flash of what’s behind, a split between worlds—his father asleep in the bed, breathing softly, Angela’s back to him, a lump under the covers. The sight of him and Angela sharing a bed feels wrong, somehow, like a little kid that still wanted his parents to be together, be it his birth mom or stepmom—but no, it’s not that. He knows that’s not why a hot flush fills his cheeks. 

There’s nothing wrong with them sleeping together, he tells himself. There’s something wrong with me. 

Back in the cabin, when it was just his father alone, Harrison was always a little too painfully aware of his father’s presence, even as he retreated to his own little closet of a room, he could feel him moving around, could hear him in the bathroom shuffling around, talking to himself. Dad didn’t know it then (god, he hopes he doesn’t know), but Harrison used to creep in and watch him sleep in the bedroom: never for too long, he’d just crack the door open, the sliver of light entering the room, and watch his father’s form in smooth repose breathe in and out on the bed. Just a few minutes, holding his breath, not willing to wake him, before he slinked back to his cot. 

Harrison didn’t know what he was doing there, only that he felt unsettled, restless, something creeping and crawling under his skin. It’s like his body knew what his father was before his mind caught up, as if their blood could mutually speak to each other. Sometimes he’d creep in and wouldn’t find him there, disappearing out into the world, not telling Harrison where and why and how. Harrison supposes he knows what he was doing now, but the sensation, the pull in his belly, of missing something, of lacking, still remains. It’s here now. Something is missing, and he’s not sure what. 

We killed Kurt and I still don’t feel any better. It’s just a new kind of empty space. 

Harrison misses the cabin. The intimacy of the space. He even misses his small little room. The energy is different, with Angela and Audrey here all the time, one or the other, rarely the two of them left alone. The four of them playacting as some makeshift family, held together with duct tape, a facsimile of normalcy. If you asked Harrison a month ago, he would have said he wanted this. 

He doesn’t know what he wants now. 

Harrison doesn’t know what to say to his father.

In the morning, before Dad goes to work, Harrison slips a sheet of paper into his father’s jacket. It’s a sketch—rudimentary, not his best work, but Harrison knew Dad would understand it—of a man on a table, naked, a knife buried in his chest, and another man, dressed like the grim reaper, wielding it. 

***

On the night before school starts, his father creeps into his room like the boogeyman. 

Harrison is a light sleeper; he has had to be, to survive. He’s spent several nights sleeping on a park bench or under a bridge, worrying when someone would try to take something from him, take advantage of him, attack him. That time he woke up to that man running his hand up his legs had left him jumpy and twitchy. He wakes up immediately with the door creek, eyes blinking open, shifting around on the bed and turning his head.

For a moment, the figure in his room seems less like a person and more like a ghost, a photo negative of a human being, a hazy shadow entering his space, like a bit of leftover dream. Harrison blinks sleep out of his eyes, shaking off the remains of sleep paralysis, and focuses closer.

“Dad?” He asks softly. Another blink. The shadow begins to take shape, forming more solidly defined lines. His father, clad in dark blue pjs, moves closer to him, stopping abruptly when he notices Harrison is awake. “Dad, what are you doing here? Is something wrong?”

His father pauses, a furrow in his brow. Harrison thinks he’s come to reprimand him for the drawing. The first rule is don’t get caught. He thinks drawing evidence of their crime may fall under that. 

Harrison knows when he’s breaking a rule; he just does it anyway. 

His father sighs. “Angela… needs her space,” he says. A chagrined smile on his face, that Harrison was beginning to suspect was fake. A kind of performance. He’s learning a lot of things his father does is an act these days. He kinda hoped he’d turn off the act for him—it’s getting disconcerting. “She’s not used to sharing a bed for this long. I thought I’d give her a break.”

“So, you’re...here?” He asks. Harrison raises himself up, scooting up to sit, resting his weight on his palms. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to check on you,” Dad says, palms on his thighs, glancing around the room. “I was going to use the fold-out couch, I didn’t mean to wake you—”

“You can say it, Dad,” Harrison says. “You can just say it.” 

“Say what?” 

Harrison sighs, bites down on his teeth, and then decides to just spit out what he wants to say. 

“Do you even like Angela, Dad?” 

“Of course I like her—” comes the practiced response. Harrison rolls his eyes before his father finishes talking, because he knows this is a lie. He knows this is a lie and he’s suddenly infuriated by it. A dark thought snarls in his veins, you’d rather be with her than be with me, huh? 

“There’s just something sick about it,” Harrison says. He catches his father bristling when he says that, sick, as if he knows it too. “About acting like… everything is all okay with her. She’s a cop. You killed someone. You killed Matt Caldwell and she’s been looking for him for weeks. You’ve been sabotaging her.” The words just tumble out of his mouth, like vomit, that sick pit of anxiety in his belly growing, but it’s not guilt that’s consuming him—just a need to scrape off the paint, to rub his father’s nose in it. “And you’re just? Kissing? Cooking dinner together? Sleeping together? Like it’s nothing?”  

“Harrison,” Dad interrupts, frowning in confusion. “I thought you wanted to stay here. That means staying with my girlfriend, despite everything else, that means pretending for a bit that we’re—”

“And you’re just so good at pretending,” Harrison growls. He doesn’t even know why he’s saying this. He grabs the pillow, thinks about screaming into it for a moment, and settles for just grabbing the edges of it so tight, his fingers ache. “Fine. Whatever. You’re right, I guess. Why are you even here?” The words come out like acid, tempered only by the drowsiness still afflicting him. 

“Harrison,” his father says his name gently, and he takes a close step forward until he’s standing by his bedside, looking down on him. He frowns, head cocking to the side. “Are you jealous?”

Harrison shudders. He wants to deny it, protest it. To hide under the blankets and not let his father see him. 

“Yeah,” he says, drawing in a sharp breath that cuts his insides up. He can’t look at his Dad now—he bows his head, staring into his lap, eyes fixed on the comforter drawn up by his knees. His face is burning hot. He lets out another breath like a bull getting ready to charge. “Yeah, I am. Okay?” 

Dead silence. Nothing but the sound of breathing. Harrison squeezes the pillow in his hand. His eyes burn holes into the comforter. He wants to drag it over his head, and slip back under, but that feels like an admission of defeat. Of failure. 

He’s not sure what to expect, but the next thing he knows, his father is reaching out for him, his touch on his shoulder, then up his face. His long, blunt fingers stroking his jawline until Harrison shudders. His dad’s hands are unexpectedly hot, fever-warm against his skin. When his father tilts his head up to meet his eyes, Harrison doesn’t resist, just lets himself be maneuvered, leaning into his father’s touch. 

“Do you want me to stay?” Dexter asks. His eyes are soft. Harrison’s chest goes fire-hot, as his world narrows down to just this: his father and the moonlight outside, barely lighting him up, turning him to a dark shadow. This is what he wanted—you and me, you and me. Now that he has it, it’s almost scary, something close to terror licking up his throat, making his veins hum. 

Not terror. Something else, but just as visceral. 

“Okay,” Harrison says plaintively, no fight in him, no desire to protest or be contrary anymore. 

He scoots over, instead of making his father slip in on the other side—he makes room for him. The weight of his father on the bed is heavy, heavier than Harrison’s smaller body, dipping under him as he slides in. He pulls the blankets over them both, up to their chest, not quite hiding under them, not quite cocooned in their own little world. Harrison turns over on his side, until he’s facing his father head on, tucked in bed with him. He breathes him in, the scent of Dad hitting the back of his throat, but he can’t pinpoint what it is, not blood and not cologne, closer to sweat and musk and earth. 

He scoots closer, inching upwards, until Harrison makes up for their height difference, eye to eye, nose to nose, swallowing up the same air between them. Harrison’s entire vision tunnels until it’s just him and his father. 

“I’m not sure what position you like best,” Dad says. There’s something untoward about the words, or is that just Harrison’s mind? Is he imagining things, looking for something that isn’t there?

Harrison exhales. He feels the pulse in his neck practically bounce. He feels the heat spread throughout his body. He lets his body slide in closer, until their legs are touching, the sock covered pad of Harrison’s foot against his father’s pajama-clad shin. 

“This is fine,” he says. “I like this.”

It’s like he’s a little kid again, like he gets to go back to childhood—the last time he and his father shared a bed, he was six years old, and he remembers being held, arms wrapped around him, clinging tightly. Right now the memory is hazy, wrapped in gauze and he can’t remember who clung tighter, him or his father, can’t remember who needed each other more. He was never really held again after that, not like that. Hannah provided hugs, but she never held him, never pulled into her lap and felt her chin against his head—not that he held that against her. Not that he ever asked her to. He never wanted those things from her. He wanted his father back. He never slipped in Hannah’s bed seeking comfort. She just wasn’t for that. At six years old, Harrison knew she wasn’t his mother, that she wasn’t the adult to seek out if needed, and by the time he finally realized she was the only adult he had left, he was too old to be climbing into anyone’s bed. He didn’t want her to see him cry every night, so he kept it to himself. 

“I think about it a lot,” Harrison says, with his father’s eyes trained on him. They flicker, darken. Not a trace of sleep in them. Harrison stares at the lines of his eyes, his crows’ feet and the shadow of stubble. “That night. What we did. Hell of a Christmas.” 

He avoids saying it directly—Kurt. Killing. All those nasty K words. He shouldn’t say it. He shouldn’t incriminate his father like this. 

“Do you?” Dexter probes. Harrison can’t tell how he feels by the tone of his voice, his vocal inflections—everything about him is so tightly controlled that it becomes bland. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? 

“All those women still left down there,” he manages to vocalize. “Doesn’t feel much like justice.”

“Don’t worry,” Dad reassures him, his eyes softening. “We’ll figure something out for them.” 

The eventually lies unspoken. Harrison chokes down what he wants to say and nods. Not sure if he really believes him. 

“You were different,” he says instead, replaying that night. If he scoots closer, it’s not intentional, not on purpose. His father just seems to take more space. “More… yourself.”

A pause. His father swallows. Harrison is drawn to the movements of his throat, the bobbing of his Adam's apple, the careful steady beat of his pulse. He can’t take his eyes off him. 

“Does that bother you?”

It’s not a denial. The words wash over Harrison like a warm touch, sparking something within his chest, a warmth flooding out within. 

“When I was homeless,” Harrison starts, not sure if he should be saying this, but he has his father’s rapt attention now. Harrison’s cheeks start to burn; he can feel a flush all the way down in his neck, spreading throughout his body. “I was sleeping on bus stops and park benches—wherever I could find. And one time, I woke up because some guy was touching me. Just my leg but… it freaked me out. So I just started kicking him.”

His dad sucks in a breath. He sees him clench a fist and that makes a sick kind of warmth fill Harrison up, the little bits of violence under the surface, the anger underneath. 

“And?” Dad asks. “What happened?”

“I just kept kicking him,” Harrison says. One fucked up bedtime story, coming up, like sitting around a campfire, the sense memory of someone’s ribs cracking under his foot making him shiver, the loud crack in his head like it was happening right now. He tried to tell Audrey this, but she didn’t get it. She thinks their anger is the same, but Harrison’s anger is a forest fire; it’ll destroy everything. “I didn’t stop.”

“Did he live?” Dad asks, making a strange, choked off noise in the back of his throat. He seems to lean closer, be closer, filling up Harrison’s whole space. He doesn’t know if he approves or not. 

Harrison shrugs. “He was alive when I left. His face was just. Red.” 

Dad nods, soft spoken in their shared quiet dark. He reaches out to stroke the sides of Harrison’s face, down to his jawline, like studying him. He shivers under that: the truth, the knowledge, that he and his father do in fact have this in common. That he didn’t make it up, that maybe one day, he’ll be able to keep it as under control as his father does. 

He can feel his cock twitch. Thank god, it’s just a twitch. If he gets hard here when Dad is next to him, he doesn’t think he’ll ever recover. 

Harrison shakes his head. “So no, it doesn’t bother me. I just… miss you.”

Dad blinks, confused. “I’m right here.”

“You’re here now,” Harrison says. The world narrows down, pushes in, his father’s face and body filling up the whole of vision—it makes Harrison dizzy, possessed by a desire to swallow up his father or be swallowed by him. “But you’ll be gone in the morning again. You’re at work, or you’re with Logan, or you’re with her during the day. You’re Jim for everyone else. You’re only mine here.”

“Harrison,” Dad breathes, words all caught up and twisted. He reaches for his hand, wrapping his palm around his. His touch is oddly overheated, sending a jolt through Harrison. Possessed, he lunges forward, closing the meager space between them and presses his mouth to his father’s lips. 

It’s a chaste kiss, all things considered, but Dad gasps, shocked, and almost immediately places his hands on his shoulders, nudging Harrison away, the ultimate rejection. This is a no, this is a hard no, but Harrison can’t think, words just not processing. Harrison is having an out of body experience. He blames the heat, the warmth, the closeness of his father sending him spinning and agog, losing his goddamn mind. 

“I miss you,” Harrison says again, pressing the words into his lips and the skin around his chin, his smooth face against stubble, like maybe he could make his father understand how desperately he needs this, how much he hates the space between them, with his mouth and tongue and swallow him up. “I want you back—”

“I’m here, I'm here, I’m here,” Dad says, equal desperation, pants into Harrison’s mouth, breath wet and tasting like sweat and tears.  Holding him here, and pushing him away at once—too close and not enough. 

Harrison stops trying, takes a deep breath, his chest squeezing too tight around his heart. His eyes burn. He can’t stand to look at his father directly. “I’m sorry.”

Dad shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says, but they both know it isn’t. “You got nothing to be sorry for.”

Harrison wishes he could believe it. 

***

He wakes up in the middle of the night briefly, still half-asleep, the world hazy like he’s underwater. His father is asleep next to him, curled up on his side, facing away from him. 

Harrison whimpers like a little kid, and tries not to cry. He wipes at his face angrily and reminds himself it’s not a big deal. It’s just the way their bodies move around each other. 

He falls back asleep watching his father next to him, staring at the smooth expanse of his back, and thinks killing Kurt with you was the best Christmas of my life. I wanna do it again. 

He doesn’t say it. How can he?

***

In the morning, Harrison wakes up when his father slips away, the bed’s weight shifting as it lightens up, squeaking as Dad steps up and slides out. It’s early, too early, the sun not even fully risen yet, a pale blue light outside in the sky, sun barely beginning to peak out. He slips out of bed like a phantom, a ghost haunting Harrison’s mind, and maybe he was never really here, and maybe he didn’t kiss his father last night. 

Harrison stays under the blanket. The world is silent under Harrison’s covered world, no sounds of life but his own breathing—as his father disappeared from the room, blinking out of existence. 

It’s then he says it. 

“I think about you all the time,” he whispers to the sheets. His mouth is pressed to the pillow, buried in his father’s scent, so he doesn’t expect to hear anything but he does—the barest of a gasp across the room. He feels rather than sees his father freeze in the liminal spaces between them. 

“Yes,” Dad says. He doesn’t turn around, but the words are just loud enough for Harrison to hear, and only for him, no one else in the world. They strike Harrison low in his gut, his belly turning hot with yearning. “I do, too.” 

***

“Things have gotten better,” Harrison tells his therapist. 

It’s not a lie, not really, but it feels wrong on his tongue, sugar sweet, unreal. Things are better. And they’re worse, in a way. Maybe killing someone together isn’t the right way to bond with your dad. Maybe the dreams Harrison keeps having, about blood and body parts, somewhere between nightmares and an erotic dream, aren’t healthy. Better and worse. 

He can’t tell his therapist this part. That probably defeats the point of therapy. 

“But...?” Dr. Cooper asks, leaning in closer. A notepad in hand, attention fully on him. It’s a good thing to have, he knows, but Harrison’s skin feels too tight over him. Like if the therapist looks too closely, he’ll see the blood all over Harrison’s hands. 

“But what?”

“It seems like you’re holding something back,” he says, eyebrows knitted in concern, head tilted. “Like there’s something more you want to ask.”

Harrison swallows hard. He can’t read Dr. Cooper’s expression, a mask of neutrality. He’s better than other therapists he’s had—court appointed social workers, counselors, people assigned to talk to him, no one who really wanted to. 

“I don’t know how to say it,” he confesses, edging and inching closer to the truth, to something real. He clenches and unclenches his hands, drawing his fingers in tight, then expanding out. It’s not violence waiting to explode, but needing something to do with his hands, with his fingers, to keep his body busy so his mind doesn’t spin out of control. 

Last time he was here, Dad was across from him on this couch, and he felt so alone. Now he’s here and he can feel his father hovering over his shoulder, like a ghost haunting his steps, leaving a trail of blood. 

Is this…guilt? he asks himself. It can’t be—Kurt deserved to die. Kurt tried to kill him. No better person to kill, so why does he feel like he might burst?

“I understand, of course,” Dr. Cooper says, “that there may be some things you’re not willing to tell me just yet, and that’s okay. You can take your time. You don’t need to tell me everything immediately. Just—”

“I know, honesty is important,” Harrison says. He sighs, places his palms on his legs, leaning forward and just breathing in. His legs are jittery. He tries not to let it show. 

“Do you want to talk about the boy whose arm you broke?’

Harrison winces. “Not really,” he says. 

School started up the other day. He got benched, which is the same as being kicked off, only still forced to attend practices. Coach Logan approached him gently, like he was a farmer and Harrison was a newborn colt, liable to scare easily, kick off and run. It’s not forever, he tells him, but I have to penalize you in some way. 

Harrison nodded, agreeing, being as placid and agreeable as he could be. Dad says they have to be normal to outsiders, and normal kids don’t break other kid’s arms in front of a gym full of small town parents. 

“What do you want to talk about?”

Something is itching inside him. Everything. Nothing. 

“You know my dad, right?” Harrison says suddenly, not knowing what he’s saying, the words simply bursting out of him, a need to just talk about it, in some way, put it out in the open even if he’s not sure what he wants out in the open just yet.

A low chuckle, a lowering of his glasses. “I remember,” Dr. Cooper says. 

“He’s...” Locked down tight. A cypher. Difficult to read. “He’s not good at being honest,” Harrison says. 

The man nods. “Do you wanna try another therapy session with him?”

Harrison shakes his head because he knows how bad the last one went, and that’s not what he’s looking for. He knows why now his father will never be honest in these things. He knows he won’t get any absolution here. “No, I just want to...” He lets out a long, shaky exhale of breath, squeezing his eyes. “I want to get under his skin for once,” he admits. “I want—”

He cuts himself off, the desires too sick to put a name to. 

“You want him to let you in,” Doctor Cooper says.

Harrison nods, seizing onto his words. It was close enough. “He did, last Christmas.” 

We killed a guy together. It was terrifying. It was amazing. 

Just the thought of it makes his hair stand on end, electric shivers crawling up his spine. His father’s eyes, bright in the darkness, looking for him. Harrison, caught between a shuddering terror and a warm, familiar dark place inside himself. 

“He, like, talked to me,” he says, recalling that night after Kurt tried to kill him, the heat of the fireplace behind him as Dad spoke. The way he looked at him, like Harrison was everything; more than anything, Harrison longs to do that again. “About his childhood. About the way he grew up.”

“Ah,” Dr. Cooper says. “Did you learn more about inherited trauma?”

“Yeah,” Harrison says, barking a laugh. “Stuff like that. Rough stuff. It helped me understand him… how hard it is for him to open up. I get it. I don’t blame him. But for a while, I thought we were connecting, but now it’s like, I can’t breach past him anymore. Not unless...”

He trails off. Not unless...

“How did you make him open up?” 

Harrison sighs. “I guess it was just the situation, but now our house burned down and we’re living with my girlfriend and her mom, and it’s like, there’s never a moment for just us. He’s at work, or he’s with Angela, or we’re all at home together. It’s never just me and him.” 

“Oh, that makes sense. You had space and time to yourselves, last Christmas.” Dr. Cooper leans forward, head tilted to the side as he considers Harrison. “It sounds like you need to carve out time together, away from where you’re living. Just the two of you. Maybe recreate the set of circumstances that helped your father open up. 

It’s then Harrison realizes what he needs to do.

“You’re right,” Harrison says, chuckling as sharp relief flares up within him. “Man, that seems simple, why didn’t I think of that?” 

Dr. Cooper smiles at him. 

Harrison gets it now. 

They need to kill someone again. 

***

Harrison wakes up in the middle of the night, pulled out of his restless dreams by the sound of footfalls. Waking up is instantaneous—instead of stirring slowly with sleep-deadened muscles, he’s immediately alert, ears attuned to the sounds of the house like a watchful cat. 

They’re not Audrey’s footsteps, lighter, softer, her feet always clad in warm, woolen socks. She’s not here tonight, staying the night at a friend’s house—she is getting tired of Harrison always being around and he’s not sure they’ve even dating anymore, if they ever were. 

These footsteps aren’t Angela either. They’re heavier, wooden floors creaking under them. 

His door is closed and when Harrison strains, he no longer hears anything, except for the distant sound of the ticking clock, somewhere in the hallway.

He should go back to sleep, but he flings the blanket off his legs instead, pulling himself out of bed. The hallway is dark when he ventures out, empty, shadows playing across the walls. Nothing here, but Harrison ventures down anyway, like a sleepwalker, moving without purpose, without thought. 

The Bishop home is a beautiful one, life breathing off the walls, pictures adorning the staircases, shades of cool blues and purples highlighting the decor. Angela kept a neat house, even if Audrey added a touch of mess from time to time: jacket on the floor, food left out that Angela (or Dexter now) would put back in. Audrey’s grandmother comes over and brings home cooked meals from time to time, and she always greets Harrison warmly, like he really belongs here, wrapping him in a hug. This could be home, he thinks. This should make him happy, but his skin itches at the thought of it. 

Harrison pads downstairs, angling for the kitchen for a glass of water, when—

“Harrison?”

His father’s voice calls out from the darkness. Harrison blinks. Then blinks again. He can see the living room from the alcove in the kitchen and there’s a figure lying on the couch.

“What are you doing here?” Dad asks.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted water?” Dad says it like a question, clearly sheepish. 

“Did Angela kick you out?” he asks. Maybe that should be a little mortifying, but it makes something kick up in his brain. “Do we have to leave?”

“No, no no, nothing like that,” Dad says, holding a hand up as he moves from his position to sit up. “No one’s being kicked out. We just need some space.” Dad sighs, rubbing the back of his head, then his hand under his chin. Harrison can recognize a restless gesture.

“Do you want to come sleep with me again?” Harrison asks, his voice cracking, throat dry. The thought of his father coming up with him makes something hot flare up in his spine, a warmth coursing through his insides, like excitement bubbling in his chest. Harrison doesn’t know where that comes from; maybe from the same violent dreams. Maybe it’s all a dark passenger living within him.

Dad chuckles, smiles good-naturedly. Harrison knows he’s being rejected before Dad says another word. 

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, kiddo,” he says.

“I promise I won’t kiss you again,” Harrison says, trying not to choke on the words. 

He watches as the words play across his father’s face, his shoulders stiffening. 

“You don’t have to apologize for that,” he says. “I’m sorry,” he adds, and Harrison isn’t sure what he’s sorry for—there’s a laundry list of things to apologize for, and he’s not sure why Dad would apologize for Harrison kissing him. He’s the one that’s in the wrong there. He’s the freak. 

Before Harrison can say anything else, his father smiles—kindly, gently. “I liked your drawing,” he says, whispering it like a secret between them both. “The one you slipped in my pocket. You have a lot of talent.”

Just those words, that bit of acknowledgement, makes Harrison’s face go hot, a flush crawling up his skin and spine. “Really?” he says, trying not to shake. He takes a step closer, until he could touch Dad if he just reached out, standing in front of him.

Dad nods. “I have no artistic bone in my body. That’s all you. It’s… amazing.”

Harrison feels like a blushing school girl. He doesn’t know why. 

“Thanks,” Harrison says with a jerky nod, trying hard not to smile as broadly as he wants to. “Can I sit?” 

“Of course,” Dad says, and Harrison goes to sit next to him on the couch. He keeps a respectful distance, not touching their knees together, but it feels worse than that. Feels like miles and miles of separation, as Harrison finds himself awkwardly sitting down, hands folded upon one another over his lap.

“Something is bothering you,” Dad says, not looking at him directly.

Harrison nods, swallowing around the words he wants to say. Trying not to stare at his father’s lips. 

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he confesses. “I want to go. I don’t want to go to LA, but somewhere else.” 

To his surprise, his father agrees.

“I think we might be overstaying our welcome,” he says. “I’ll figure something out. I promise.” 

Your promises don’t really mean much, Harrison thinks, a harsh and vulgar thought he can’t voice out loud. Not when they’re trying to find their way back to each other.

But Dad scoots closer, so they’re shoulder to shoulder, and Harrison finds himself leaning on his shoulder instead. He feels Dad wrap an arm around him, and it’s almost normal. Almost what a father should do. It feels so goddamn good, he can feel his eyes fluttering shut, limbs like lead, could fall asleep in his arms and stay here forever. 

He sighs, breathes him in deep. Thinks about the rough stubble on his face and what it’d feel like to kiss him again. 

Fuck. 

***

In the morning, Harrison catches Angela before she heads out. He makes sure he gets up early, sitting at the kitchen counter with a bowl full of cereal. 

Angela startles when she sees him—it’s subtle, but it’s there, a shift in her expression, a half step hesitation as she enters the kitchen. He wonders if she wants him out, but is too polite to simply kick out her boyfriend and his kid. 

“Harrison,” she breathes, reaching up, as if to run a hand through her hair, but she’s wearing that Iron Lake police beanie, hair pulled back.

“Do you want us to leave?” he asks bluntly. 

“No,” comes her immediate response, almost horrified with the way her eyes widen and stretch open. “Did Jim say something? Did he—”

“Dad never says anything,” he tells her, spoon clinking against the bowl.

Something like relief spreads out across her face. “Of course he didn’t,” she says, shaking her head, reaching to grab onto the counter as if she needs a moment to recompose herself. 

Harrison chews over the cereal, debating—whatever is going on between Angela and Dad, it seemed like grown up stuff, relationship drama he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a part of. It’s the kind of the thing he’s used to eavesdropping on, keeping a wary eye on the adults around him in foster care, listening in on whispered hidden conversations he didn’t fully understand, just knew that he had to be careful. He shouldn’t get involved. 

“I know you know he’s Dexter Morgan,” he tells her. 

She eyes him suspiciously and for a minute, just holds his gaze steadily. “Did he tell you that?” 

Yes, he thinks, not in so many words. Not in the way Angela is thinking. Not unloading on Harrison but keeping him in the loop, like a partner. He’d like to do more of that.

Harrison shrugs. “He doesn’t have to. I’ve always known my Dad is Dexter Morgan. I don’t know who Jim is.”

“Me either,” she says, softly, speaking to the wind and not to him. Harrison files that away for later. 

She looks at him then, and it’s a familiar look—that social worker look, or concerned foster parent look, soft and motherly and pitying all at once. “That must be hard,” she says carefully, using her words like land mines, “knowing he faked his death, left you alone. I’m sorry—”

“You don’t have to apologize for him,” he cuts her off. He doesn’t want to hear it. He suddenly wants a coffee. Or a drink. Something to burn his insides, swallowing hard. “That’s not on you. That’s between him and me.”

The hot curl of rage about his father’s abandonment has died into embers, one that could easily be stoked into an inferno once more, but smaller now. The anger lives in his chest and his belly but knowing what he knows now, it has no place to go. Dad’s a killer; he didn’t want to make Harrison a killer, too, so he left him with his girlfriend—isn’t that a good thing? 

I didn’t want to pass my demons on to you. 

Harrison doesn’t know. It persists. 

Angela seems unsure what to say. He knows he is keeping her from work, but she pours herself a cup of coffee and takes a long drink of it. 

“I don’t want either of you to go,” she says, but the sentence is unfinished, her hands held out. “It’s just—”

“Weird living with a guy who says he’s one person when you know he’s not?” Harrison asks. He laughs, unable to help himself, but Angela doesn’t seem to find it funny. She looks at him oddly, and it’s not that motherly pitying look that he hates, but something else—a cop sort of look, like she suddenly saw Harrison, like she hasn’t seen him before and she’s wondering what he is, picking him apart with her eyes. As if she could look right through him and see Kurt dead on the table from his father’s knife. 

“You know it’s really not okay that he’s making you cover for him,” Angela says evenly. 

“I’m not covering for him,” Harrison says. It sounds like a lie the moment he says it, and they both know it. His jaw clenches. “And my Dad can’t make me do anything. I’m just saying. It’s weird.” He takes another bite of his cereal. “If you want, we could start looking at other places to rent, at least.”

Angela pauses, turning it over. “I’ll send you some links,” she says and gives him the briefest of nods. She heads out the door, hand on the door knob, when Harrison goes for one last thing—the main reason he got up so early to watch his not-girlfriend’s mom go to work. 

“I have a question,” he asks, then smiles sheepishly when she turns to face him, trying to go for disarming. “I hope it’s not weird.”

Angela raises her eyebrow. “Weirder than we just talked about?” 

Harrison chuckles, and leans forward. “I have this project at school for extra credit—trying to catch up on what I’ve missed in the school year—and I have to talk to people in the community and interview them. Can I come to the police station today and interview you… Logan, Esther, whoever is there?” 

Angela blinks, clearly not expecting that. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to ask more questions—Auds didn’t say anything about this, what class is this for? the standard detective questions—but she sighs instead, hands going to her hips. 

“I don’t know if I have time today, but I’m sure Logan or Teddy or anyone would be happy to help you,” she says. “I’ll give them a heads’ up.” 

Harrison smiles as he watches her go. 

There's no project, of course. He just wanted an excuse to be in the police station. If he talks to enough people, maybe he can find someone for his dad and him to kill. 

***

 

In mid-January, the sky is ugly and grey, the snowfall less magical and more slushy than fluffy, sticking to his shoes. The Christmas decorations have all come down, no more winter wonderland. Iron Lake switches between bouts of below freezing temperatures, too cold to feel his limbs, and a place in between warmth and cold, a grey dullness, wind whipping about his face, sun in the sky, never quite warm enough to make a difference.

The Iron Lake police station proved fruitful, same as the school day. It’s not hard to ask around, find the gossip. Ask Scott where he got the drugs. Ask Zach where he’d buy from, who to go to if he wanted to get something for him and Audrey, and don’t tell her, it’s a surprise. Ask Deputy Teddy if he knew anything about where the drugs he overdosed on came from that one night, feigning concern and worry. Logan didn’t slip him any information he didn’t need to know, but it was easy to get Teddy talking. 

Jasper Hodge makes the drugs sold here and in Moose Creek—hard stuff, like the E pills Harrison swallowed, the accidental fentanyl—but he died a couple of weeks ago, overdosed on his own supply. That just means someone else has to fill the void. Teddy’s face had been solemn and somber, despite his cheerful personality, as he said, “we’re losing the drug war, kid, there’s always someone.”  

From there, it wasn’t hard to track down the guy who sold Scott the pills. 

Miles O’Flynn’s house was a small place, on the edges of town, not quite the outskirts, that’s where Dad lived, but in the part of town with all the industrial buildings stood, a few occasional run down houses lining the edges of woods, as Iron Lake starts to slip away and become only road and snow and not much else. He lived at the end of the street in a single story home, a broken down deck that made the steps to the door look unstable, peeling paint on the sides of the doorframe and frost on the windows. The path to the front door was shoveled, so someone was living here, but otherwise there was no signs of life, no car in the drive way, no lights on inside. 

Harrison walked there from the police station. It took about an hour and by the time he got there, the sun was already starting to set, skies turning a darker grey. He should head back home. Maybe if he’s lucky, he can pull Dad aside for longer than ten minutes, for more than clandestine moments in the dead of night, and explain himself—though he cannot imagine what he could say. It seems as if no words existed for what he wants.

Dad, let’s kill someone together again.

Yeah. Definitely can’t say that. Just thinking about it made him shudder, stomach churning in a strange revulsion-arousal, too many feelings that didn’t quite fit together. The thought of going home and saying that to his father was too much.

He reaches for his back pocket, palming the straight razor he has tucked in there. With his gloves on, it’s not nearly as comforting, the barrier making it harder to grasp. Harrison takes a deep breath, trying to ground himself. 

Here it goes. 

Harrison looks around for a key, checking under the welcome mat, but nothing. He could pick the lock—he’s never had much respect for locked doors to begin with—but he doesn’t want to do it out in the open, doesn’t want to take off his gloves to fiddle with the lock in freezing weather. He keeps waiting for someone to come and ask what he’s doing, some nosy neighbor who surely knows Miles doesn’t have a teenage roommate in his rundown house, but maybe the other houses were empty. Maybe no one cared what happened to Miles.  

There’s no fencing, just an open backyard, which seemed like a bad idea, but Harrison runs around back. The snow is bad out back, higher up to his legs, mid-shin. He slides his legs through it, trying to make sure he doesn’t leave any clear, distinctive footprints. There’s a backdoor here, no deck, just some steep backsteps. Harrison nudges the snow to the side with his foot; it’s heavy, leaving his feet colder than ever, but he shoves it to the edges, leaving the steps bare enough to step on. He tries the door, hoping maybe he could pick this lock and—

It opens. 

Harrison’s heart batters against his rib cage, speeding up. Cold, clammy dread fills his insides, colder than the frozen wind chill around him. 

Shit, man, I’m really doing this, huh? 

He wonders perhaps if an open door means Miles is, in fact, home, but he hears no sounds from inside of the house—no dog barking, or the sound of the television running. Silence, lights off, no signs of life. 

He enters. 

Harrison isn’t sure if drug dealing fits the code, guilt gnawing at his throat; he’s not sure he’d be someone Dad would agree to killing, or even someone he wants to kill. But Dad’s the one who told him about the importance of evidence, of finding proof. Maybe there’s something here that’d make him deserve Dad’s knife. Something Harrison could find and bring back to his father, like an offering. 

And if he doesn’t find anything, he can pretend this never happened. Dad doesn’t have to know he picked wrong. 

The house is dim and dark, white wallpaper faded into yellow staining the walls, wood paneling on the baseboards. It reminded Harrison of a grandmother’s house, moth-ball smelling and mildew soaking into the carpet. The kitchen was dirty, unwashed—floor dingy linoleum, grey checkerboard pattern, and a stack of bowls in the sink. There’s a cereal box left out, and multiple stains of various colors on the counters, sticky residue left behind. It’s gross, giving Harrison unpleasant sense memory flashbacks of his time in foster care; he wants to leave almost as soon as he came in, but he forces himself to stay, looking through the drawers, checking in the freezer, trying to ask himself, where would I hide evidence of a crime?

It needs to be a murder, remember? Not just any crime. 

Harrison ignores that voice. He’ll find something, even if it’s just finding a reason to keep looking. 

The kitchen is fruitless, though he finds a lot of expired food in the fridge. He finds unlabeled pills in a ziplock bag in one drawer that smell like nothing except a vague antiseptic medicinal smell, white and small and round. The living room doesn’t smell as bad, but dust and grime make the air a little cloying, Harrison fighting down the urge to cough and choke. There’s scattered newspapers and magazines, random slices of papers, from receipts to mail to post-it notes with scribbled dates and times on them, just floating around on the floor. The smell of cigarette smoke intensifies as he goes down the hall, finding several closed doors. One was a closet, stuffed to the brim with random shit—towels and bedsheets and boxes and foul smelling clothes. Harrison was starting to wonder if this was a hoarder’s house. 

Maybe he should go ice fishing with his father instead. Try some normal bonding. 

Harrison stumbles upon the bedroom, the door creaking painfully loud as he pushes it open—no one there, thankfully. Bed not made, faint pot smell lingering in the air, clothes strewn all over the floor, including a pile of laundry without a basket tucked in the corner. He doesn’t really want to touch anything—the winter gloves keep him from leaving prints, but also vaguely wondering if he’ll catch anything. He starts first with the drawers of the bureau, finding nothing but old clothes, the strange smell of mildew stuck to them, like there was something wrong with Miles’ washer and dryer. No drugs, or evidence of a crime worse than being gross.

I should have brought Dad, he thinks. Harrison thought about it, before coming here, but the words were alien on his tongue, unnatural. Are you going to kill someone else? Do you want to kill someone else? It didn’t flow. He wouldn’t know how to say that. 

You can tell me anything, Dad said to him, and maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t mean Harrison can say just anything. The words get stuck in his throat, and a certain kind of fear overtakes him, too exposed, flesh pulled back from his bones at the thought of articulating such a thing. 

In the last drawer, Harrison finds underwear, wrinkling his nose. He paws at the wood, something odd about the dimensions of this drawer and before he closes it shut, he shakes it a bit—and it moves. A false bottom. 

Grinning to himself, he moves it and finds a drug stash tucked under it—pill bottles and little ziplock bags of powders, pills, haphazardly labeled, sometimes neat and slick hand writing, sometimes nothing at all, pill bottles with no label, baggies with color coded tags ranging from yellow to pink to purple, a system that didn’t make sense to Harrison. For a moment, Harrison’s heart races, feeling like he hit some sort of jackpot, but he knows this doesn’t mean anything. Drugs themselves aren’t a death sentence. That’s not the kind of trophy he should be looking for, that’s not how this works.  

They’re hard to grab a hold of with his winter gloves, so he tugs one off his hand and just resolves to carefully handle the items, grasping them with his knuckles. He sorts through them, a little tempted when he reaches for the cocaine before putting it back, recognizing the little blue pills from the party, next to some generic looking white ones. 

One of the bags is labeled Rohypnol. The sight of it makes his heart sink, then twist, as a wave of disgust and a hot flash of anger crashes over him, brow creasing as he thinks over the implications.

Is that worth killing for? He thinks it should count. Dad’s code should cover guys who drug and rape women, or help other guys do that. He can’t see how that’s much different than Kurt stealing all these women’s lives for his own sick doll collection.

“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” 

A gun clicks behind him.

Fuck. Shit. Harrison hadn’t been paying attention. He should have been fucking paying attention. 

“I’m...” Harrison is out of words. His heart is pounding very fast in his chest. He holds out his hands, up in the air, as if he’s been caught by a police officer. He wants to move. He wants to stand, he wants to run, but—

“You’re stealing my shit? You’re from—” A beat. He can hear the shake in the guy’s voice. It must be Miles. “Those guys in Moose Creek, aren’t you? Wheeler and Pete and shit? You’re stealing the shit back?” 

Harrison has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. “I just wanted to buy,” he says. The tremble in his voice is hundred percent real. 

“Bullshit,” the guy spits and oh, he feels it, the tip of the gun, the barrel, whatever the fuck it’s called, pressing into the back of his head, hard and painful against his skull. Shit. “If you want to buy, you can set up a meet up like any other person—”

“I don’t know what I’m doing—” Harrison says. 

“Yeah, clearly—”

“I promise, I wasn’t stealing, I just wasn’t sure—”

“You what? You want some roofies for your girl? You're going on a date or something?” Something dark overtakes Harrison at those words, how casual it all is, and for a moment, all he can think is wondering just how many guys he's sold drugs to so they can rape some poor girl.

Harrison doesn’t think, he simply moves—he finds that when a gun is pressed too close to your skull, it’s actually easy to get out of the way.

He shoves his head into Miles’ stomach like a bull ramming a matador, and it’s not the best usage of his body, but Miles lets out a loud oof, like a gust of air escaping him, and he drops the gun, falling to the floor. 

Harrison lands on top and Miles is beneath him, reaching to grab the gun. He hadn’t gotten a look at him until now, hair tied up in a messy, stringy ponytail, gaunt cheekbones like he hadn’t eaten in a while, pale with faint yellow bruising around his eyes, a few inches of height on Harrison, not that it mattered right now.

Harrison reaches for the gun first, wraps his fingers around the handle, and presses the muzzle to his throat. It seems to fit right in perfectly, vein in his throat beating wildly. 

“You’re not gonna do it,” Miles says, drawing in a sharp gasp for air. “Please, you’re what, twelve? Do you even know how to use that thing?”

“Fuck you,” Harrison says. His voice is shaking. His hand is shaking. There’s a nauseating curl of anxiety and fear and rage, all twisting up inside him, clawing at his insides. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Distantly, he knows he can’t just leave now—he can’t just run off. It’s not as if Miles could report him to the police, but it’s a small town. He’ll see him again. 

Miles’ pulse is throbbing, beating at a rapid pace, the vein standing out to Harrison’s eyes, and he finds himself fascinated by this, how close the gun is blowing it out. All it’d take is one press of the trigger.

“I’m going to leave and—”

Miles punches him in the head, one hard swing. 

Harrison goes down hard, crying out, his head ringing, a ring of heat spreading around his head like an angry halo, his vision blurring. He falls, landing beside Miles on his side, awkward and painful, the gun out of his hand. In between tears and spots in his eyes, Harrison can see Miles grabbing the gun, fingers wrapped around the handle. Before he can aim it on Harrison again, before Harrison can even think about it, he grabs the straight razor in his back pocket, and swings it.

The first swing does nothing, just wildly flailing around, no technique, no thought behind it, not even open, blade still tucked in—but it makes Miles startle, gasping, surprised to see Harrison armed. He throws another punch from beneath him, fist connects with his arm, the gun still in his hand, but no longer aimed at Harrison. That fucking hurts but Harrison pushes through the pain, gritting through his teeth as he flings the straight razor open. The metal glints for a split second and then Harrison is bringing it down on Miles’s face. It cuts across his cheek and nose and lip, one long swipe as blood spurts and wells out. Miles screams in pain. 

“You little shit!” he says, dropping the gun as his hand instinctively goes to cover his face, blood spilling in between his fingers, blood welling out between skin and dripping on his clothes, over his hands, on the wooden floors. He leans down so his head is flat on the ground, starting to inch away from Harrison.

God, someone must have heard that. Someone is going to hear him, someone is—

Harrison doesn’t think anymore. He leans forward, places the straight razor against his throat, and slices across in a decisive swoop. It's not the best cut, but Miles is unable to scream, mouth open in a silent gasp, eyes wide, filled with pain and tears. He opens his mouth and a horrible vocal fry comes out, blood pouring from his throat like faucet, getting everywhere. 

As if possessed—by his father, by the dark passenger, by the Trinity fucking killer—Harrison leans down and gives a final swipe of his straight razor over his inner thigh; it cuts through the jeans he’s wearing, just like it did with Ethan. He’s wearing briefs, not boxers, because there’s only fresh skin under that, and blood swells up, pours out even through the fabric, spilling inside his jeans, spilling through the tear he made, turning the jeans a dark, deep red. He can’t stop staring, drawn in, his own heart pounding in his ears with adrenaline and a sick sort of fascination. 

For a minute, all he can think about is his mom. 

Miles reaches for Harrison, grabbing for his face, startling him out of his reverie, but he has no strength, no ability to grab on, his muscles going slack as he bleeds out. All he manages to do is press his palm against Harrison’s cheek. The blood on his hand is shockingly warm and wet, pulling a ragged gasp from Harrison’s throat as he smears it across his face, over his nose and chin. 

Harrison scrambles back like it’s going to burn him, crab walking on his legs, trying to frantically get away from the heat of his blood, sticky and warm, clinging to his skin.

Then Miles dies.

Miles collapses on the floor like paper crumbling, head hitting the ground with a thud. His eyes are wide open, frozen in permanent horror, as if he was dying over and over again, trapped in a loop.

For a moment, Harrison doesn’t move: he sits, his back pressed to the bureau, his heart too loud in his ears, blood red and shiny on his straight razor, fresh blood sticking to his face and fingers. His hand is shaking. The air unearthly quiet, like a ghost was hovering—no street sounds in the distance, no animal noises, not even the house settling, just his own heart beat, sweat dripping off his brow, nothing but him and the body before him. There’s blood on the wooden floor, and the gun had scattered away, off to the side, pointing towards the bed. 

“Fuck,” Harrison says, staring at the remains of Miles O’Flynn in horror, as if someone else did this. As if he wasn’t the one that sliced him open. 

He can’t think of anything to do, mind blank, swirling in a mass of horror, and blood. It doesn’t feel anything like last time, when Dad took Kurt apart—but then again, that was all Dad. Harrison just stood there. When Dad killed Kurt, he seemed satisfied by it, a whole body shiver running down Harrison’s spine, and Harrison had been enraptured by the whole process. Now it doesn’t feel like that; now it’s panic, perched at the edge of his throat, and nausea circling his guts. 

When your dark passenger rises, I’ll be there. 

He shoves down the urge to puke, and pulls out his phone, unsure if he should text or call, before deciding committing what he’s asking for to text would be a bad idea. 

His father picks up on the third ring. 

“Dad? I need help.” 

***

Dad arrives an hour later. He comes through the back, just as Harrison explained to him over the phone, and makes his way upstairs. Harrison should go down to greet him, but he can’t make himself move. He hasn’t moved at all since killing Miles, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up, the straight razor still in his hand, terrified to set it down anywhere and get blood and more DNA all over the place.

Dad enters the room, taking careful, measured steps inside. Trying not to step on the evidence. He’s dressed in winter clothing, black gloves on his hands, and his eyes take in the room fully before they land on Harrison—the gun, the cooling body, the straight razor. Outside, the sun has gone dimmer, low, barely any light in the room. It makes Dad look like a shadowy figure, shrouded in secrecy.

He meets Harrison’s eyes and Harrison wants to look away, hide away from him, but his father holds his gaze like tightening a noose on his neck. He doesn’t look angry, or upset, or even sad: his face is carefully controlled and blank. It makes Harrison feel like he’s been cast adrift, like there’s a wide gulf of space between them, the body between them a barrier. 

It makes Harrison feel alone in this room.

“I parked a few blocks down. I told Angela we were going out tonight,” he says, in slow measured words, softly like not to spook an animal. “That we both needed some space. That I was showing you around Moose Creek and Fort Sam, even though it’s a school night, but she won’t bother us. We have some time.” 

“What?” Harrison asks. 

“To figure out what we’re going to do,” he says. He steps closer, over the body, and crouches down in front of Harrison—close enough to touch his knees, almost close enough that Harrison fights down the urge to recoil. “Tell me what happened.” 

Harrison does; explains the whole stupid plan. Find someone that fit the code. Bring evidence to him. How badly he fucked up with the break in, and probably fucked up in ways he doesn’t even know. He expects Dad to be angry, disappointed, but he just listens with a calm, stoic face. 

Somehow that’s worse. 

“I’m sorry,” Harrison says when he finishes, words out in a gasping rattle, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry—”

“No,” Dad says, reaching for him, his hands on face to maneuver Harrison into looking him right in the eye. “Don’t be.”

“Don’t be?” 

“This is my fault,” he says.

His hands on Harrison’s face burn; they feel grounding, holding him steady, to keep from floating off into the unknown—and yet the sight of him is his whole world. 

“Your fault?” He asks. 

“I’ve been neglecting you,” his father confesses. “I see that now. I’ve done a terrible thing, Harrison.”

“You have?” 

Dad nods. The darkness of his gaze enraptures Harrison, pulls him, like sucked into a black hole.

“It was callous of me,” he says, “to show you how to hunt, how to stalk, how to kill, how to clean up, and then just expect you to go back to normal after all that. That’s my fault. I… I thought I would, I thought I could just… pretend to be normal like I always do. It’s not fair to drag you into that. If I had known you were having urges—”

“I wasn’t having urges—”

Dad turns around, looks at the dead body on the ground. “What’s that?” he asks. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost giddy. Something uncomfortable about it all, as if the sight of his dead boy was a joke, or a good thing. 

“I don’t know,” Harrison says. That answer sounds stupid, childish even. There’s a vague sense of humiliation at the back of his throat, spreading through his insides. 

Dad leans down, peering at the body, completely unphased by the state of it. The opposite of repulsed—he stared at it like he was studying it, head cocked to the side like a curious wolf. He steps away from Harrison to reach forward and touch the sliced open throat, the red like a slip of a choker across his neck—but Dad’s fingers stop just short of touching, hovering over where the skin split. Then his father’s hand goes over to Mile’s thigh, fingers just above that inner thigh slice. 

“You cut his thigh… the femoral,” Dad breathes out. He’s looking at the body with focused, intense concentration—mouth half parted as he mulls over what to say. “Like Ethan, like...”  

Like Mom, Dad has the decency to not say, but it crashes over Harrison anyway, that sick twist in his belly, knowing there is something wrong with him. 

“I-it just happened,” Harrison says. He can’t explain why. I wasn’t having violent urges, Harrison says, but maybe that’s not true, maybe he’s wrong, maybe there’s something broken and wrong with him on some fundamental level and only Dad can see it because he knows exactly what it is. 

Dad turns his gaze back to him, sharply focused. “How fast did he bleed out after that?”

Harrison didn’t count the seconds. “Really fast.” 

Dad hums. “Why the throat then?” His words sound calm, even measured but there’s an intensity to his eyes as he watches Harrison that creeps and crawls under his skin, almost manic as they regard Harrison. 

“I wanted to… shut him up,” he confesses. “He was screaming.”

Dad’s mouth twitches, like he’s trying not to smile. It’s disconcerting to look at, everything about his reaction feels off-kilter. He points to the thigh again. “So this was your killing blow?” 

“It wasn’t about the kill,” Harrison protests, “I just wanted...” your attention, he thinks, and that makes him feel pathetic. Even if it’s what he got. “I just wanted to be close to you again.”

“Oh, buddy,” Dad says, face softening. He comes closer, until he fills up the space in front of him, hiding the corpse behind him. “That’s all I want too—”

“Then why did you—” Go away, Harrison almost says, but that’s not right. “Why did you stop… teaching me—”

His voice comes in hiccups and Harrison realizes he’s crying and he couldn’t be more embarrassed. He wants to wipe his eyes, but his hands are still stained with blood.

“I should have never done that,” Dad says, taking his face in his hands and planting one careful kiss on Harrison’s forehead, as if he’s trying to absorb all of Harrison’s pain. “Let’s get you cleaned up, then we’ll go from there.” 

***

Harrison sits in Miles’ bathroom. It’s mostly clean—it still had that faint mildew smell the whole house did, and the lights above hurt his eyes, but most everything was put in it’s place. He sits on the edge of the bath, next to the sink and toilet, next to a large mirror that took up half the wall. 

Dad finds a clean wash cloth to clean him up. He sets it aside for now, grabbing one of Miles’ flushable wipes for the straight razor.

“I thought we shouldn’t leave a trace,” Harrison says.

Dad winces. “We want to be out as soon as possible,” he says. “But we can clean up after ourselves.” 

Harrison knows he did it all wrong, on every level. No plastic wrap, no plastic sheets. Nothing to catch the blood. 

Dad carefully washes the blood off Harrison’s straight razor in the toilet, not the sink, cleaning it off with soap and the wipe, letting the red go down the drain.

“Are you mad at me?” Harrison asks, bursting with it. 

“No,” Dad says, “of course not. How could I be mad at you?”

“I broke the code,” Harrison confesses, voice raw and sore already. “He doesn’t fit. He doesn’t fit. I don’t know if he’s killed anyone or not. I was trying to learn, but I fucked that all up. I don’t know if he deserves it or not and maybe that means you should kill me—”

Dad sets the now clean straight razor down and grabs him by the head, hands all around him, locking him in. Their foreheads collide, so Harrison cannot get away from him, breathing in his air. His eyes are dark and hungry, pupils swallowing all color up.

“Listen to me,” he whispers harshly. He’s close enough that Harrison can smell his breath, could lick his lips if he tried. “Self defense kills are always okay.”

“But—” Harrison protests, but Dad places a finger to his mouth, shushing him as if he’s a child. 

“He was trying to kill you. It was you or him. I will always pick you.” 

The words pulse in Harrison’s ears, a warmth blooming in his chest just hearing it. He wants to hear it again. He wants to hear it over and over and over, but he makes himself nod instead. 

“Second,” Dad goes on. “I don’t feel bad that there’s one less drug dealer in the world. Especially if he regularly sold roofies to teenagers. So you won’t get any lectures from me on that account.”

“Okay,” Harrison agrees, resolving to try to make himself not feel bad either.  

“Thirdly, yes, it was sloppy work. You have a lot more room to grow. That’s okay.” 

He strokes his hair, the side of his face, carefully avoiding the smear of blood that had dried already, crusted on his skin. 

“Next time you want to hunt someone, come to me,” Dad says, “and I’ll listen. And we can do it together.”

Harrison’s heart is bursting forward in his chest, constricting, collapsing on itself. That raw shame and guilt, that nausea he felt when he watched Miles on the ground dies, disappears, almost evaporating, as if it were never there. “Together?” he asks.

In its place is a firebrand anticipation, heat spreading through his belly, under his skin, his blood going hot. The dark passenger rising, or something else?

Together together together. 

Dad nods and this time, he smiles for real, a vicious baring of teeth that feels infectious. “Next time, I want to watch you kill.” 

Harrison gasps, throat gone dry, and his cock hard, just like that, can feel warmth flood his body and heat go from his ears to his chest, and he recognizes the buzzing thrill of arousal in his belly, whiplashing all around. 

He doesn’t know if Dad noticed.  

“You do?” Harrison stammers out. 

It’s like being back in Kurt’s bunker, watching his father work, sharing this together, and yes. This is what he wanted. This is what he was looking for—not just the satisfaction of ridding the world of another bad guy, or a certain kind of thrill in slicing someone up, but this here: that feeling like they are the only two people in the world. 

“Yes,” Dad confessed. There’s something darker in his eyes, darker than simple vigilante shit, a kind of hunger in his gaze. This went deeper. The same kind of sickness in both their hearts. 

“Do you like that I killed him, Dad?” he asks, a little incredulous, a little uncertain. 

“Yes,” Dad says, same dark hungry look, low voice. He looks at Harrison like he wants to eat him, the center and focus of his whole world. 

“Does that turn you on, Dad?” He asks. His pulse is steady under his father’s eyes but Harrison is hyper aware of it, swallowed up in that terrible beat. The heat is spreading throughout his whole body. “Watching me?”

Dad gasps, like Harrison just said something horribly untoward. Like he is something horrible. “Harrison—”

“You’ve been excited since you got here,” he points out. It’s not an accusation. Just an observation. “You don’t react like… I don’t know, a normal person.”

His father blinks, stunned into silence. 

“I love to watch you grow,” Dad says, fingers on his scalp as he strokes a hand through his hair. Harrison shakes like a leaf, sucking in one sharp breath. 

“Grow?” he asks. His voice shakes. 

“Evolve,” Dad rumbles in his throat. “See what you do, how you kill, how—”

Harrison grabs him, pulls him in closer. He places his still bloodied hand on his father’s face, smearing the remains of red over his cheek; with his other hand, Harrison grabs the back of his skull, in a crushing, tight grip, possessive, as if he has any right to be (maybe he has all the right to be), and then shoves their mouths together. 

For a moment, it’s everything. 

Harrison’s entire brain goes blank, stalling out, his nails digging in, the taste of his father musky and sweet, as he tries to tongue his mouth open, teeth clinking together. 

For a moment, his Dad kisses back: oddly soft and shy, mouth half parted, lips delicate. 

Then his hands on his shoulders push Harrison back, until Harrison is gasping for a lungful of air, his mouth tingling as he meets his father’s dark eyes. 

“Hey, hey,” Dad says, putting distance between them, holding him at literal arm’s length. “What are you doing?” 

Harrison left red on his father’s face, a streak of almost dried blood, but it looked so bright and startling on his skin, almost ghastly, that it makes a sharp tug of shame fill Harrison’s belly. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he fucked this up. He’s fucked everything up, that’s all he does, fuck things up. “I did this for you, I didn’t mean to do it like this, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, I’m so—”

Dad moves forward in sharp sudden motions, like a predator snapping from a hiding place. He claws for Harrison, fingers on his chin and face, over where he got Miles’ blood on him, and pulls him in to kiss again. 

There’s nothing delicate to this. Nothing fragile, no hesitation. Dad kisses him like he wants to swallow him whole, and Harrison will let him. 

***

“Okay,” Dad says, “I have a plan.”

Dad stops the kissing eventually, before Harrison can get too carried away, pushing him back with a hand over his heart. Harrison thinks about simply snarling forward and pushing past him; thinks a lot of crazy thoughts about what he can do with his father, as if that kiss had unlocked something deep and buried within him, some dark hungry beast, and now it was here in the room with the two of them, a different kind of dark passenger eager for contact. 

“Later, later,” Dad insists, cupping his whole head in his hands like Harrison was still tiny, tilting his gaze upwards to him. Dad’s all red, a faint flush over his cheeks, lips slick from kissing and blood still over his face. It makes Harrison feel a little delirious, vision blocking out everything but his father, almost like this isn’t even happening. “We clean up first.”

Harrison is still hard and he can’t tell if his father is or not, jeans doing a good job of hiding whatever crotch bulge, but he forces himself to nod, as if the kiss had stolen all fight from him. “Okay.”

He lets Dad clean him up, hands steady and sure as he uses a flushable wipe to clear his face, his hands, wipe all traces of blood away. Then he flushes it down the toilet. 

“Those aren’t actually supposed to go down the toilet,” Harrison says. “Clogs the pipes eventually.”

Dad shrugs. “That’s dearly departed Miles’ problem.” 

This a multi-step plan and the next part of it was stealing Miles’ cell phone. It’s a struggle to crack it open, but he died with his eyes wide open, and they just stayed that way, so Dad gets his phone open with facial recognition. 

“Thank you, rigor mortis,” he says. He’s completely calm as he crouches over Miles’ dead body, and it forces Harrison to stay calm too, emulating his father’s demeanor, not wanting to freak out and spiral when Dad was being so cool about it all. 

Dad dials the non-emergency line for Iron Lake police department, and his voice when he speaks is nasally, more Bostonian than New York, effecting a panic shake as he reports multiple dead bodies in Kurt Caldwell’s secret bunker before hanging up. 

Harrison gapes, the weight of what Dad’s done settling in over him, and a surge of fondness, warmth, love fills him all up in a dizzying combination as he watches his father. 

“That’ll distract them for a bit,” he explains, “so we have some time. Angela won’t care if we’re home late, she’ll have to investigate this.” He holds the phone up in his hand, sticking it in his pocket. “We’ll throw this out later,” Dad says, and Harrison nods, beaming at the thought. He doesn’t say this, too much going on, but he thinks it’s a good thing if those girls get justice, true justice, not just getting rid of their killer. Feels the weight of his father’s action like a gift extended to him. 

“Now what?” Harrison asks, throat working, letting out a long exhale of breath. “Are we going to cut him up?” The phantom whirr of a saw buzzes in his ear, like last time. 

“No,” Dad says. That should be a relief, but instead it’s almost disappointing—as much as he dreaded the sight of Miles in pieces, Miles turned into body parts and meat—he wanted to prove to his father he could do this. He’s not a fuck up. Or at least, he doesn’t have to be. 

“I thought,” Harrison stutters out, “it always had to be that way. That was the code?” 

“Yes, but think about it,” Dad says carefully. “Matt and Kurt have both gone missing. They’ll never be found. A third person also going missing? It’ll start to look like a pattern. We don’t want that.” He shakes his head, humming low to himself. “No, we want him to be found, written off as a victim of his own crimes. You said he mentioned other people after him? He thought you were here for other reasons?” 

Harrison nods.

“I can work with that,” Dad says, lips pulling up in what Harrison recognizes as a smirk. “Get your gloves back on.” 

Dad’s plan is to make it look like a robbery, a kill out of retaliation, some unfinished business that had nothing to do with Harrison. Harrison wipes everything he touched or went near in Miles’ house, making sure there are no random spots of blood or foot prints, erasing all the prints he can, while Dad gathers up a large chunk of his drug stash—we’ll burn this later, he says. They place the gun back in Miles’ hand after wiping Harrison’s prints from it as well. No needles, of course—and no straight razors either. 

“We don’t want this traced back to you,” he says, by way of explanation. In Miles’ boot, they find a pocket knife that springs open, into a wicked curved edge, sharp and glistening. “We’re gonna use this to redo his wounds so it looks less like a straight razor and more like an average knife.” 

“Could we...just stab him with it?” Harrison asks, voice shaky.

Dad shakes his head. “The wounds would be post mortem. Any forensics guy worth his salt would be able to see that. That’ll raise more questions.” 

“I don’t think they got good forensics here in Iron Lake,” Harrison mutters. Dad cracks a grin, face ducking down. 

“Maybe so, but we’re not risking that,” he says, his fingers tightening around the pocket knife.

Harrison reaches for him, his fingertips over the bones of his wrist, delicate yet solid, then slips them just under the glove, feeling the warm pulse of his body.

“I can do it,” Harrison volunteers, eager. “I can do it, Dad, let me fix it.” 

Dad’s smile is odd, his eyes watery. One hand reaches for him, cupping his cheek and Harrison leans into it, seeking out his father’s touch, the memory of his lips on him still burning bright under his skin. “You don’t have anything to prove to me, Harrison,” he says, voice warm, timber low.

“Dad, please, let me help,” he says. “I already killed him, it’s not like I’m squeamish about it.” 

“Alright,” Dad agrees, and he lets Harrison take the knife from him. He doesn’t take his hands off him the whole time, one on his shoulder and the other on his knife-hand forearm, somehow both sure-handed and gentle as he touches Harrison, his voice in his ear. 

“This facial slash, that was… panicked, wasn’t it?” he says, as Harrison presses the tip of the blade to where he cut Miles across the face, drawing it slowly and steadily through the wound, like coloring inside the lines. He does not bleed anymore but there is a new shade of red on the blade now.

“Yes,” Harrison confesses, trying to keep his arm steady. “I was shit scared.” 

“You’re more confident here,” Dad says, taking his hand off him for a moment to grab Miles by the hair and tilt his head back. His slashed throat winks up at them as Harrison takes the knife and pushes it further in, splitting the wound open wider, more befitting this style of blade. “This is good work.”

“Thanks,” Harrison says, trying not to stutter out the words. He can feel himself getting hard again—it never really went away—a throb of arousal pulsing in his whole body, hair standing on end, trying to contain a shiver under his skin. He’s hot everywhere, and hotter still where his father touches him. 

“That’s good,” Dad says, head cocked as he stares at the wounded throat, a bright-eyed curiosity as he assesses Harrison’s damage. “Last one.” 

Their eyes go to the thigh, where Harrison did his final slash.

“This… you didn’t need to do this.” Dad says softly. “It might actually be better if you hadn’t. It’s too distinctive.” It’s not a question, or a lecture. It’s true. Harrison didn’t need to do it. “Why did you decide to cut here?”

“I don’t know,” Harrison says—he presses the knife in the fine slice he made in his upper thigh, turning denim to ragged ribbons—until it’s no longer a fine line, but wide, pressing the sharp tip in deeper and deeper like he was cutting into meat. “I guess I thought I should try it again,” he says. “Get it right this time.” 

Miles’ body makes a squish noise that turns Harrison’s stomach but he keeps it together, his father’s gaze holding him steady, keeping him composed—can’t disappoint Daddy. 

The hand on Harrison’s shoulder squeezes. “That’s it,” Dad says, his breath hot on the shell of his ear. “You’re doing so good.” 

Harrison gasps, the opposite of calm and settled—his cock throbs in his jeans, his senses on high alert, his body fever-warm. It feels like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff, about to fall over, with only his father to catch him. 

***

They leave Miles where he died, Dad scattering and throwing his bedroom in disarray, mimicking a struggle that was more intense than it actually was. He takes most of the drugs with them. The cell phone he made the call from gets thrown out in the passing woods, wiped clean and the drugs get burned in the incinerator, the two of them bathed in light as they watched it burn. 

“Now what?” Harrison asks once they get back in his father’s truck. Somewhere out in the distance, he knows police sirens are going off, and Angela must be looking into the bunker right now—but that was far away from them. They sat in the cold January evening, a sky that turned pitch dark by four, a darkness to swallow them both up and give them cover—like two creatures of the night. 

The thought almost makes Harrison burst into giggles, feeling a little loose of center. Did we just get away with murder again?

Dad looks at him, hands on the steering wheel, car engine on, warmth from the engine spreading throughout. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel alone.”

Harrison swallows around the lump in his throat. The apology is good, but a little late—and he wants more now. His senses are buzzing, more alive than ever. Feeding the dark passenger is supposed to settle him but Harrison does not feel remotely settled. 

“You like it,” Harrison says. Accusing, if such a thing could be done quietly, but it lacks the bite of an accusation. He’s not angry about it. He’s searching. He wants honesty, just as he always had. “The killing. It’s not just… a release valve for you, or a way to protect people. You really like it. That’s why you wanted to watch me?”

Dad turns his head to look at him, mouth half parted, deer-in-headlights look, almost comical. If he denies it—Harrison isn’t sure what he’ll do. Storm off. Throw a punch. Scream out into the frigid ice and snarled trees.

Dad’s eyes slide shut for a moment, refusing to look at him. “Yes,” he says, whispering it into the air. “Yes, I do.”

Harrison lets out a long exhale of breath; instead of falling apart, it feels like something has come apart and pulled together at the same time. 

“It’s okay,” Harrison says, as if by absolving Dexter, he could make what he’s done a little better. A little less evil. A little less fucked up. “It’s okay. I really like doing vigilante shit with you,” he says. “It’s… fun. Spending time with you.”

It shouldn’t matter if Dad enjoys it, in some kind of sick way. He feels guilty about it, so it’s not like he wants to, and the end result is the same: bad guys die and people get saved. Maybe it’s okay if they both enjoy the process in different ways.

Dad’s eyes open wide and his face collapses, grimacing. “It’s really not,” he says, somber. “It’s not okay. I’m a monster, I’m—I want things I shouldn’t, I—”

“No!” Harrison protests, stricken at hearing his father talk like that. His hands reach for him blindly, two hands over his father’s heart, the beat an up-tempo drum, in stark contrast to his calm demeanor. Harrison can feel it even through his sweater, as if radiating out into him. “You’re not. You’re not a monster. Don’t talk like that. I need you. Just don’t leave me again.”

Dad shudders out a breath, shaking through him. “Harrison,” he pleads. 

Harrison’s throat goes dry, and its like the last few weeks of longing all collapse into one moment, as he launches himself to his father, throwing his legs around him in his seat.

“You’re not,” he pants out, “you’re not a monster, you’re my Dad, you’re mine—”

Dad gasps, grabbing him by the shoulders, Harrison landing on top of him, nearly crotch to crotch, the steering wheel pressing into his back, the two all packed tightly in close quarters. 

Dad looks up at him as Harrison pants above him, holding him back. 

“Harrison,” Dad starts, trending carefully, his breath hitching. There’s a bulge in his crotch, tenting up, so tantalizing, the proof of his father’s mutual desire, that would render any protest null and void. Harrison wants to feel. “Harrison, we can’t—”

“Why?” He asks—as if killing someone for the first time had unlocked something worse in Harrison, driving him this close to the edge of sanity. 

Dad shakes his head. “If you want to kill someone, then tell me, pl—”

“I didn’t want to kill someone,” Harrison growls out. He presses his palm against his father’s cock—even through all the clothes, he can feel the heat of it, inviting him in. “I wanted you.” 

Dad hisses between his teeth and something leaps up in Harrison’s belly, something like pride, I did that, I did that. 

“I guess if I have to kill to get that, then I will—”

Dad’s grip is bruise tight on his face as he grabs his head and pulls him up. His mouth is hot, and Harrison lets his father kiss him like he wants to climb inside him. All of Harrison’s desire doesn’t seem to hold a candle to his own father’s, and he finds himself going slack for him, melts in his arms, letting Dad palm at his face and back and ass, opening wide for his father, letting him show him how to properly kiss someone. 

He’s kissed girls. He’s kissed boys. He’s had adults paw at him at seedy truck stops and during hitch hiking rides. Dad eclipses all of that, into something new, frightening in a whole different way.

He pulls away gasping, Dad’s face pink and his hair mussed up, a raw, unguarded look in his eye as their gazes meet.

“What do you want?” Dad asks.

Harrison doesn’t know. Too much. “You,” he says, pressing his mouth to his chin, then his neck. He licks a stripe along the jugular, the thick muscle and vein there, as if he could lick right under his skin. “You, you, you,” he kisses into his skin and savors the feeling of his father’s pulse speeding up in his mouth, the way Dad shivers all around him, that large hand palming the back of his skull and pressing, encouraging. 

“You always have me,” he whispers and kisses Harrison’s temple—gently, the way he used to when he was a kid. He runs his hand down his back, over his spine, fingers circling over the bones, making him shudder. It’s almost enough to make Harrison settle down, almost. 

Harrison pulls back, looking up at his father—the heat in his gaze makes him look hungry, scorching his skin—but Harrison is starving. 

“I want to move out,” he demands. “I want it to be just you and me. I want a space for us where we can just be and not—” 

“Pretend?” his father offers. 

Harrison nods. 

Dad laughs, low and throaty, and strokes his hair off his face. “Okay.” 

***

They go to the inn above the bar Dad frequents, his father sweet-talking the owner into a discount. Harrison stays out of sight, trying not to vibrate out of his skin. He doesn’t know how Dad does it, staying so goddamn calm, but he’s been hard this whole ride, toying with the idea of just taking his cock out and letting his dad watch him jerk himself off. Dad shot him with a hard gaze and told him to wait. 

Good things come to those who wait. 

The room is nice, much nicer than some shitty motels Harrison has been in—classic, two beds, wooden paneling, dark green wallpaper, Christmas decorations still up, faint smell of potpourri and pine in the air. Dad keeps the bedside lamp on, but not the overhead lights, casting the room in an amber glow, as he sits down on the bed to call Angela, his back to Harrison while he talks to her, his eyes on the window in front of him. He asks about the investigation, offers to help if needed, makes all the appropriate, concerned sounds. 

Harrison gets bored waiting and starts stripping his clothes off—shrugging out of all the layers, jacket and jeans and shirt, until he’s just left in his boxer briefs. His hands go to the hem, hesitating for a moment as he goes to take them off—they feel sticky and tight over his body as he tries to peel them off, but it’s a relief for his cock to be exposed to the cool air, no longer constrained. It should feel cold to be totally nude, but Harrison’s burning all over, throat dry with all he wants to say, to do. Harrison waits there on the other bed, his bare ass on the silky covers, trying not to fidget. He can’t figure out what to do with his arms, splaying them out on the covers, clenching and unclenching his fists, wondering if he should touch himself behind his father’s back or let his cock hang there while he waits for his dad’s attention. 

He watches as his father bids Angela goodnight, says good luck and love you, then turns around to find Harrison. His eyes widen, his expression going immediately slackjawed, like someone hit him with a hammer. It’d be almost comical, if Harrison’s heart weren’t pounding in his chest, if anxiety wasn’t threatening to choke him. Dad says nothing, does nothing, just sits there, taking in Harrison’s naked body.

For a split second, Harrison thinks he’s fucked up—horribly misread the situation, completely embarrassed himself, maybe Dad’s just humoring you, maybe you keep kissing him and he’s trying to let you down easy and now the whole night is ruined.

But Dad stands up, walks over to him. He seems to loom over Harrison at this angle, tall and imposing, and Harrison is almost eye level with his crotch. It seems natural, then, for Harrison to reach for him, lean in close with his mouth half parted—almost second nature to press his palm against the bulge and feel the shape of it, feel it throb at his touch—as if trying to suck your dad’s cock could ever be natural, some instinct wired wrong in his brain. 

Dad shakes his head, puts a finger to Harrison’s lips and presses down with the slightest pressure to push his head back away from him. He nudges Harrison away with his other hand, redirecting Harrison’s palm to the heft of his father’s thigh rather than his cock. Once again, Harrison feels like he’s done something wrong, fucking this all up with his inexperience, and he tilts his head to gaze up at his father, his eyes questioning. 

Dad shakes his head. Harrison whines. 

“Do you want me?” he asks him, the question punching its way out of his body, rendering him so horribly vulnerable, exposed like a carcass in the desert sun, stripped down to the bone. 

Dad lets out a sigh, a low exhale leaving his body, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment before he opens them. 

“Yes,” Dad rattles out. One thumb on Harrison’s bottom lip, parting his mouth. His other cupping Harrison's jaw, hand hot. “Yes. I think you’re all I’ve ever wanted. My sweet boy.”

Harrison shudders at the words, bristling. “I’m not sweet.” That word should be reserved for people less fucked up than him. 

When he speaks, he can taste his father’s thumb over his lips. Clean.

Dad smiles softly. “You’re sweet for me, aren’t you?” 

This position—Dad’s hand on his jaw, Dad’s fingers on his lips, Dad’s crotch in front of him, anchored to his father on nearly every side—would make it so easy for Dad to pull Harrison towards him, until his mouth hits his denim-covered bulge, open wide and ready, drooling on the fabric. Harrison can imagine his father’s cock in his mouth, Dad simply maneuvering his head forward and back with his hands on him to make him suck him, Harrison’s mouth eager. 

The thought of that makes Harrison dizzy with want, a kind of desire that’s so far past anything he’s ever felt before—something that feels deeper than teenage hormones, exposing a yawning, cavernous ache within him. 

“I can be sweet,” he promises. “I can lie down or get on my hands and knees, or—”

“Jesus,” Dad rasps, grip tightening on his jaw, possessive. “Have you done this before?” 

“Would you be mad if I did?” 

He doesn’t want to talk about that now, not here—that’ll be a boner killer for sure—but Dad, moving with a grace belonging to much younger man—sinks down, urging Harrison back until he scoots up on the bed and his legs dangle off, no longer touching the ground. 

“Not at you,” Dad promises, fitting himself in between Harrison's legs like he belongs there. He looks down at Harrison, their bodies nearly aligned, almost equally matched; there’s something soothing about Dad being on top of him, like a weighted blanket. “Never at you, buddy.”

The look in his eyes—bright and entreating—makes Harrison shiver. “Dad,” he cries out, and his father places both palms on his jawline (wide hands, long fingers, making Harrison feel owned), and presses a kiss on his forehead, all gentle and fatherly.

“Dad, please,” Harrison murmurs, pressing his palms to his chest—still wearing his shirt, still fully clothed—and starts mindlessly pawing at him, shoving the fabric up. “C’mon, Dad, I just want to give you what you want,” he tells him, looking him up and down. He tries to slide his hands under his sweater, but there are too many layers of clothes, and Harrison’s palms end up pressed against his t-shirt, yearning for skin-to-skin contact. “Take it off, Dad, please.”

His father obliges him, at least—leans back to shrug out of his sweater, then shirt, leaving him bare-chested. Harrison goes dry-mouthed, looking at him—Dad runs a lot and chops his own firewood and it shows all over his body, soft skin but hard muscle, scar tissue lining his chest, hair from chest to belly that Harrison wants to press his face to, to put his mouth all over. 

His hand moves of its own accord for him, and Dad pushes it away, fingers around his wrist. “I just want to look at you,” his father says, his voice heavy and thick. “Can I look at you, son?”

Harrison isn’t sure what that means. You are looking at me. Haven’t you been looking at me? But he nods. “Yeah, yeah,” Harrison says, baring his throat. “You can do whatever you want to me.”

Dad makes a sound like he’s winded, breathing hard, his eyes devouring Harrison up—his gaze trails across his throat and shoulders and chest, down to his thighs and legs and cock, stripping Harrison down to his bones. It’s like he’s turning him inside out with his eyes and just when Harrison’s about to whine for more, Dad drapes himself on top of Harrison, lying on him. That skin-to-skin contact feels amazing, drawing a gasp from Harrison, their legs and arms brushing against each other, sweat slick and musky. 

Dad presses his mouth against Harrison’s throat, lips and tongue right along his jugular, Harrison's pulse speeding up faster under his kiss. Harrison reaches to wrap his arms around his back, hands against shoulder blades and muscle, clinging to him as Dad does more than just kiss him, sucking in a mark against his skin, biting down for a moment, nipping at him and drawing a moan from Harrison. He thinks about his own father leaving a hickey on him, about Audrey noticing and having no good explanation for it, and it makes his nails dig into Dad’s skin, trying to not to come from the thought alone. His whole body feels like a lightning rod.

“What if what I want is just to make you feel good?” Dad whispers against his pulse, his voice hot like blood. Harrison’s hips buck up of their own accord, meeting his father’s body. It makes Dad chuckle. “What then, Harrison?” 

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says. “You can touch me, you can fuck me, you can—”

“Slow down, buddy,” Dad says, and pulls away. His mouth goes lower, to Harrison's clavicle, nipping at the bone there, while each finger trails down his chest, feeling all of his ribs, slowly pressing into each indentation. His touch lingers, fingertips leaving goosebumps on Harrison's skin. Dad wasn’t even touching his cock and already Harrison felt a little overwhelmed. “We aren’t going zero to sixty the first time—”

‘I—Dad,” he cries out as his father’s mouth closes around a nipple, tongue lavishing attention on it until it stands at a fine point. Then he turns his attention to the other, all hot wet heat and pressure. Harrison lets out a sharp cry, arching upwards as Dad slips further down his body, mouth going down his chest and his belly, as if he needs to memorize every inch of him first. No one’s ever touched Harrison like this, never paid this much attention to his body; it makes him feel like he's going to fly right out of his skin. 

Harrison grits his teeth and tries to think of something not hot, something to keep from coming all over himself, all over his dad, before he’s ready. He grabs his father by the hair, savoring the hiss Dad makes as he tugs him up. “I’m okay with it,” Harrison says. “I want you, I want you, I wanted you my whole life—”

“Fuck,” Dad groans, freezing for a moment, eyes sliding shut like he needs a minute. It makes a sick wave of pride flutter in Harrison’s throat. Look what I did. 

“Yeah, that’s what I want, Dad,” Harrison says. He strokes his hand through his father’s hair, grown out some since he first got here, the strands wet with sweat. I did that. 

Wordlessly, Dad pulls away, rearing back. Harrison worries he’s going to stop, and rises up on his elbows to watch his father pull out lube from his pocket. His brain momentarily sputters out. “You just have that? For what?” 

Dad glances up at him, meeting his eyes sheepishly. “Angela,” he says and nothing more. 

Harrison does not want to hear it, which is fine, because Dad places a palm on his belly and traces the lines of Harrison’s belly hair down to his pubic bone. Then he reaches his cock and Harrison forgets everything else, his mind simply blanking out. Dad’s fingers gently stroke the edge of his cock, the length of his shaft, a feather-light touch that makes Harrison moan and buck up into his hand, like an animal that can’t control himself. His father’s touch is too much and not enough—touching him lightly, experimentally, as if trying to just map out the shape of his cock before he does anything else. Harrison literally twitches in his hand, precome spurting out, and Dad rubs a finger over the head to spread the fluid out, the pressure of just that sending spurts of warmth through his whole body. 

“Dad, you’re gonna make me come,” Harrison whines. 

“That’s the idea, kiddo,” Dad says, chuckling, like it’s funny. He runs his fingers down past Harrison's cock then, cupping the shape of his balls, and then further down still, along the thin skin between cock and ass. Harrison has never felt more exposed, almost wants to close his legs shut in shock, but he holds them open for Dad. 

“Would you settle for me fingering you?” Dad asks. His fingers slide all down, nails raking lightly against the skin of his ass before pressing them in between his cheeks. “We can do the rest later.”

Later. Later. There’s going to be a later. 

Harrison drops his head on the bedspread, unable to hold himself up anymore, all shaky and twitchy. “I think I’m gonna come.”

“Do what you need to do,” Dad says. “We can stop whenever you want.”

“Don’t wanna stop,” Harrison whines, kicking out his feet, nudging the heel of his foot against his father’s side. “Just want you. Take off your pants already.” 

But Dad ignores him. Harrison watches in a daze as he spurts out a generous amount of fluid all over his fingers, as he spreads his ass cheeks open, and then presses one finger to Harrison’s hole, cool and wet, almost startlingly so. He pushes in past the rim with no preamble, and no resistance from Harrison’s body—just one finger pushing inside him, as his father’s other hand wraps around his cock. 

Harrison gasps at the brand new sensation, arching up, pushing his ass into his father’s finger, pushing his body further into his hands. “Fuck,” he says, caught between dueling sensations—hot electric warmth on his cock, and pressure in his ass. He can’t think of more to say, all the words stolen from his mind. He just breathes, in and out, trying to make this last. 

“You’re so hot,” Dad says in awe. He doesn’t even stroke his cock; he just squeezes, as if to remind him he’s here, while crooking his finger inside. “You’re so hot on the inside.” 

“Another,” Harrison manages to say, “I can take another.” 

He expects his father to refuse him, insist on dragging this out, treat Harrison like something breakable, something to feel guilty about—but Dad goes for it right away, pulling out only to push two fingers back inside. The shock of it leaves Harrison gasping, letting ragged breaths as his body stretches to accommodate two. Dad crooks them, lighting up his insides. 

Harrison tries to think of something to stave off orgasm, and his treacherous mind lands on Kurt’s naked body on the table, wrapped in plastic. Dad’s knife going inside him. Miles’s eyes, wide enough to pop as he died. 

“Dad,” Harrison groans, throwing his head back, staring up at the ceiling—he can’t look right now, but he knows his father is flushed and sweaty, clearly aroused as he tries to pretend he’s not. Dad pulls out his fingers, then pushes them back in, the pressure and sensation so weird, like pulling at his insides, while twisting his hand around Harrison's cock, tracing the shape of the head with his fingers. Playing him like an instrument. Like he already knows him inside and out. “Dad.” 

“Is that good?” his father asks, genuinely curious, but Harrison can’t even raise his head to meet his eyes. Dad crooks his fingers again, then splays them out, like scissors, and that makes a new kind of pleasure just soar inside Harrison, burning his insides. 

“Fuck,” Harrison cries, warmth curling up in his belly and spreading throughout. He’s gonna come. He’s gonna come and he hasn’t even seen his father’s cock. Blindly, he reaches for his dad, finds his shoulder and digs his nails in as he tries to haplessly pull him closer, pull him up. “Dad, please, I want you inside.” 

His father lets out a shaking breath. “Okay,” he agrees, just like that, no more fight. “Okay, then. We’ll do that.” 

Abruptly, Dad pulls his fingers out, leaving Harrison's hole twitching, the sensation of suddenly empty even weirder, clenching tightly back up, but Harrison has no time to even process that; his father rears up, leaning backwards, and starts to undo his belt, the clink of the metal loud in his ears. Harrison sits back up in a rush—eager, anxious even, to help—his fingers on the belt loops, trying to tug his jeans down as his father undoes the zipper. Watching his skin over his hips be revealed makes Harrison ravenous with all-consuming desire—all thoughts of morality or shame gone out the window and replaced with want. 

“Easy, son,” Dad says, but Harrison does not care, roughly shoving his jeans down. He freezes for a moment, caught off guard by the sight of his father in boxer-briefs, wet damp stain in front, the proof of his father’s arousal, before Dad tugs those off too, cock springing forward.

“Oh, fuck, it’s big,” Harrison says, filter gone. Dad’s cock is more thick than long, but the head looks wide and blunt, bigger than two fingers, and curved at the edge, a red slick slit that made Harrison think of filling his mouth with it. He almost does just that, thinks about slipping down on his knees to suck, but Dad pushes him back by the shoulders.

“We don’t gotta do this,” he reassures him. Confusing, then, that he’s steering Harrison down to the bed again, maneuvering on top of him, lining himself up in between his legs. “We can stop.” 

“Fuck me,” Harrison demands, hoping he sounds assertive and not hopelessly turned on. “C’mon, Dad, don’t back out now.”

Above him, his father looms, spreading Harrison’s legs, pulling one up for better access. The position leaves Harrison exposed, open wide, his hole in plain sight as his father breathes him in, savoring the smell of him. “Alright,” Dad agrees. 

Harrison bites down on a gasp as Dad’s cock pushes in, stretching him out slowly, too slow—it hurts as it tries to breach him, his rim not quite ready for it. It doesn’t feel anything like Dad’s fingers, or even his own; it just feels like mounting pressure.

“Fuck, fuck,” Harrison gasps out, reaching for Dad to grab on, like holding on tight to him could make it better. His voice is sharp, nearly breaking on a whine; he doesn’t sound anything like himself. 

Dad is still holding his legs open, pulled apart for him, but his gaze catches Harrison’s, dark and sharp. “Easy,” he says, “breathe, breathe. You gotta relax.” 

Harrison sucks in a breath, and another, reaching down to grab his own cock, squeezing it in his hand — he’s not sure if he’s trying to jerk off, or if he’s keeping his dick from flagging, but it helps, as Dad presses further and further, the head of his cock popping in, and then it’s just pure, overwhelming sensation - a burning stretch, skin raw and tender, overpowering heat and warmth and pressure all colliding.

“Aw, don’t cry, kiddo,” Dad says, reaching forward to wipe a tear from his face, rolling down the side of his temple. Harrison didn’t even realize it. “I got you.” 

That cracks Harrison open, doing the exact opposite, crying out for his father in a sob. His breath hitches, his throat hurts, he shuts his eyes because he can’t look at his father just right now, turning his head into the tender touch on his face. 

“Dad,” he groans, shuddering with it, as he feels the rest of Dad’s cock push in—it goes quicker now, once the head has slipped in, the rest of his shaft pushing inside until it’s buried to the hilt, and then both of them are moaning together, grabbing on to each other. It’s a tight fight, it feels brand new entirely—Harrison’s not innocent, he’s done a lot of things, nothing innocent about him, but this is new, with his father’s fingers and his father’s cock. He doesn’t recognize the sounds he’s making, doesn’t recognizes his own body—like Dad fucking him open has made it something else entirely, reforming him into something new. 

“You’re doing so good,” Dad says, his voice gone rough and husky, his eyes darker than night. Harrison doesn’t fully recognize his father either—never heard those sounds from him, never seen that look in his eyes. He wants to look away, but he can’t bear to do it. 

“Dad,” he cries out—not sure what he’s asking for, what he wants, what he needs. But he feels it then, his father pulling out, then slamming back in, and the overwhelming fullness filling him up—then again, and again, and again, until the pain blurs with the pleasure, keeping him on a razor's edge. 

“You’re doing so good,” Dad says again, like he’s saying it to himself more than Harrison. 

Good. Like killing that guy. Like taking his father’s cock. That’s what makes him good. 

Dad maneuvers him around some more, shifting his position like he owns Harrison's body, like he can manhandle him as pleases—Harrison almost protests, but Dad slams back inside him again and molten heat spreads throughout his body, a pleasure so fierce it shocks him, like nothing he’s felt before. Harrison groans, crying out, and it sounds like his father’s voice. Harrison reaches for him blindly, needing to anchor himself, wraps his hands around Dad’s shoulders to tug him closer. 

“Dad,” he gasps out, but his father doesn’t stop. 

“You were great today,” Dad tells him as he fucks him. Harrison’s not even sure how he’s managing to talk. There’s a warmth in his voice, husky and honeyed, that sounds a little like love. “I want to watch you next.”

“Oh, fuck,” Harrison says, nodding, helpless to do anything except grind his hips up and take it.  

“I want to see you kill,” Dad says, and Harrison’s cock throbs, heat unfurling in his belly, Dad hitting some spot inside with every thrust that makes his vision white out. 

It’s too much. He’s going to come and he tries to make it stop, tries to grab the base of his cock and squeeze, tries to think of dead bodies and dead Kurt and his father stabbing him in the heart and the way his face then looked like just now, here.  

“I want to help you make a kill,” Dad says, and Harrison’s guts twist as visions of blood and his father’s hand on him as they cut Miles open flits into his head. Orgasm hits like a shockwave, pulsing through him, his cock spitting out white fluid all over his belly and chest, hopelessly aroused by the sickness in them both. 

“Okay, okay, okay,” Harrison pants—like a mantra, I can do that, I can do that going through his mind. His father comes inside him with a deep moan, burying his cock all the way to hilt as heat floods out into Harrison’s body. 

Harrison whimpers, the sensation of his father’s come overwhelming. He reaches down to touch where they’re joined still—his oversensitive rim, the base of his father’s cock, the coarseness of his hair there, and the dampness leaking out between them both. 

He gazes up at his Dad then, his eyes heavy as he meets his father’s own, Dad staring down at him with a wan smile and wonder in his face.

It doesn’t matter what else Harrison feels; nothing else matters but this. 

***

“Can we do it again?” Harrison asks, about fifteen minutes later. 

They’re in bed, and just sort of maneuvered the sheets around so neither of them would sleep in any wet spots. Dad opted to put his underwear back on, but Harrison was content to stay naked—his body is sore, aching all over, but in a good way, the way it feels after a long run. He crawled into bed with his father, half expecting to be banished to the second bed still, but Dad welcomed him, letting Harrison snuggle against his side, Harrison splaying one hand over his chest so he could feel the thud thud of his heart.  

“Um, not tonight, kiddo,” Dad says, but softly, full of warmth, his arm wrapped around him. Harrison feels like the center of the universe. “I think I’m done for now—but we can,” he says, glancing down at him, his gaze catching Harrison’s as something unsteady flickers in him. He reaches to stroke the hair back from Harrison’s face, still damp with sweat. “If you want.” 

Harrison grins.

He lies back down against his father’s chest, letting Dad stroke his temples, his hair, fingers constantly touching, as if unable to pull away. 

“I used to imagine there was no one else in the world but me,” Dad says.

Harrison almost laughs. That’s a little fucked up, but he doesn’t want his dad to stop opening up. The price of loving someone is you get to know about all the bad stuff too. 

“Yeah?” he asks. 

Dad nods. “Just...me and the natural world. No one left to put on this act for. I could just...be myself.” 

“Is that why—” he asks, stumbling over his words, an old wound that never fully healed flaring up. His fingers twitch. “Is that why you came out here? To be yourself?”

“No,” Dad says. The hand touching him twitches. “That was punishment. Self-imposed isolation.” 

Harrison scoffs. “You didn’t look too isolated.”

“I always am,” Dad says, words unexpectedly cutting. He reaches out and lays his palm over Harrison’s hand, covering his with his own, warm and comforting. “But not anymore.”