Archive of Our Own

"You said I killed you-haunt me, then! [...] Be with me always-take any form, drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!"

― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Harrison doesn’t know how he pulls his father into the truck: he doesn’t really remember doing it, doesn’t know how he dragged his body over the snow, just that it happens, that he does it. Harrison is running in a haze, his mind awash with too much sensory detail. He puts one foot in front of the other. He keeps moving. His father is dead weight in his arms, then he’s in the back of the truck, stretched out, limbs all askew, eyes closed like he might be sleeping. 

It is an early winter morning. December 27th. Christmas decorations are still up. Emergency vehicles drive by on the other side of the road, and if they notice Harrison has his father’s truck, they don’t say anything, don’t flash their lights or pull him over. No one comes for him, and no one follows him. 

A post-Christmas miracle. 

Harrison moves on autopilot, except not exactly, because he’s never done this before. Never moved a body (that wasn’t in pieces.) His mind is still out there in the snow, still with the blood trail on the ground from his father’s—

Eventually, he finds a motel shady enough to take his dad’s credit card and not ask to see his father, just lets him pay and get on with it. He parks the car around the back and manages to drag his dad inside one of the outdoor-facing rooms with no one asking questions about it, hoping his dad looks like a passed-out drunk, hoping the black of his sweater hides the blood, hoping people ignore the blood trail.

Once inside, he drags Dad into the bathroom and switches on the light, then flinches. The fluorescents are ugly and too bright, giving him a headache. The tile is dirty and stained. It smells like mildew in here, like the foster home in Palmetto Bay, in Badgers, in Nettles, all those shitty Miami-Dade county places. Misery has a certain smell to it, familiar and almost comforting. 

(Smells like something died in here.)

Gingerly, feeling his own strength about to give, Harrison lays his father down in the porcelain tub, trying hard to be careful with his limbs, laying him out like he was taking a bath, except there was no water and his clothes were still on. For a moment, Harrison simply stares at him. He cannot think of what to do. There is no ground beneath him—he is collapsing inward, spiraling down. 

His father is in the bathtub. His skin is pale and wan, like he is fighting off an illness. There is still a streak of red over his cheek, down into his stubble. Harrison places a hand there, lightly touching, the way he always wanted to do, the way he didn’t really think about doing anymore except right as he falls asleep. The start of his dad’s coarse beard is scratchy against his fingers. The blood is still fresh. Logan’s blood—the thought makes a pit of horror curdle in his belly, twisting, collapsing and contracting in on itself. Dad’s beard had scratched his forehead when he kissed him the night before his arrest. There was no blood on him then: was it really that recent? Time feels ephemeral, hard to pin down. 

Harrison’s breath hitches, for no good reason. 

He pulls back, clutching his hand to his chest. The rifle he left in the truck, at the bottom of the footwell, like if he could hide it there, keeping it out of sight. Couldn’t leave it on the ground. Couldn’t stand to look at it. 

Harrison stares at his father. His eyes are shut, lying still in the tub. He doesn’t know what he expects: for Dad to get up and move again? Rise from the dead? Does he need to wait three days for that to happen?

He sucks in a breath. Closes his own eyes, reminding himself to breathe normally. What are you doing here?

Why am I here?

You did good, his father tells him. Told him. His hand reaching out to… someone. To him? An unknown ghost? Right at the moment of death.

He can’t think of that. 

Harrison opens his eyes again and finds his father still in front of him. He thinks he can see movement behind his closed lids. Little twitches. Rapid, too quick to pin down.

He reaches forward and pulls off his father’s sweater, blood-soaked and sticky. It’s harder than it looks, harder still to get his arms up. It was hard to drag him here too, and Harrison managed that, so eventually he managed to get it off, then his button-up, then his undershirt, until Dad was bare-chested before him.

The hole his rifle shot through him is small. Neat. Red blood running down his skin, like a permanent mark, a stain. 

The sight of it does something to Harrison, something he can’t name. Heat pulses under his skin, like a fever-flush, making his skin burn, the heat soaking through him. 

Harrison does his shoes next, undoing the laces, bit by bit. He loses himself in the repetitive movements, letting himself just focus on the motions of undressing his father, his knuckles twitching as he takes his dad’s snow-crusted boots off. Socks next, and then he’s met with bare feet—larger, bigger than his own. He takes in the sight of his father’s feet—the sole, the arch, his toes, the spaces in between, pale skin, strong muscle beneath. He's never been allowed this much access to Dad. They’re so much bigger than his own. Harrison can't help but reach and press his fingers alongside the inner sole, as if he were giving his father a foot massage, can’t help but press into the muscle, into the skin.

(maybe he should have done this before)

Harrison gently, tenderly places his father’s foot down on the cool porcelain of the motel tub. He reaches for his father’s belt, his hands shaking as he takes it off. He tries not to look while he tugs his father’s pants off; it’s harder than it looks, having to constantly move and shift his legs, bend his knees, until he pulls the stretch of fabric off. He thinks of leaving him in his boxers, but doesn’t think there’s any point to modesty, not now, so Harrison removes those too, peeling them off and shoving the clothes off to the side. 

Harrison looks back up at his father, and is struck, shocked silent by his naked body, somehow overwhelming to look at, the sight of him too large, too much, eclipsing Harrison. 

He’s never seen his father nude.

He’s never seen him with a chest wound like that.

Harrison reaches forward without thinking, without thought, nudging his thumb against the bullet hole. It fits perfectly, like it was made for him, but wet, slick, warmth still blistering hot, and instead of pulling away in disgust or horror like he should, Harrison presses his thumb against the wound, feeling the soft, wet tissue give under him, almost like he’s alive. Almost like he’s still here.

Harrison is a small child again, touching and tracing the line of his father’s scar down his ribs. He remembers being three and curled up in bed with him, plagued by nightmares, clinging to his father for safety. He remembers the Miami sun bursting through, seemingly enveloping the whole room in golden light, shining on his father, haloing his reddish hair. Remembers tracing the lines of scar tissue in total awe. 

Harrison remembers that like a kick in his belly. His father’s blood is on his hand. Warm. Fresh. His father’s body is splayed out before him. Dead dead dead...

The thought is so distressing that he feels it coil in his belly, curdle in his guts, get stuck somewhere along his throat, choking him from the inside out. He could think about the why, the how, but his rage at his father’s retreating back had disappeared, dissipated, and what’s left is not relief or satisfaction, but a gradual sense of emptiness.

Last night, all Harrison wanted to do was get his father back from the Iron Lake police department and disappear into the world with him. Merge their bodies together, skin on skin on flesh into one, pulsing whole. 

Harrison turns on the water. He turns it up until it’s scalding, until the steam burns off in the air. He is fully clothed in the water with his father, getting soaked as he watches the shower stream hit his dad’s hair and flattening it down. He watches it wash off the blood down his body, down the drain where it belongs. Harrison takes a smaller hand towel and tenderly washes the dirt and remaining blood off his father, wipes his face clean of any wrongdoing, drags it down his chest and through the hair, makes sure the bullet hole doesn’t bleed anymore, turning pink on white. 

It feels a little like worship. Jesus’s followers washing his feet. Harrison went to a Catholic school in Buenos Aires for a brief time before Hannah found a farm to run, and for a briefer time, Harrison developed an interest in all the saints—not out of belief, but something about the concept of suffering, martyrdom, rendering someone pure. That stuck with him. 

When he turns the water off, his father’s eyes are closed and his skin warm again. When Harrison presses his fully clothed body against his, splaying himself on top of his father, throwing an arm around his chest and tucking his head under his chin, it almost feels like he’s alive again. 

It almost feels like his father could raise his arm, run his fingers through his hair, stroke his back like he used to when Harrison was little and believed in him so fiercely, easy as breathing. 

He falls asleep like that, his body shutting down over Dexter, until the world fades to black. 

*

When he wakes up, it’s dark. The sun has gone down. His father is beside him, arm still around him, and it feels like his grip has gotten tighter. Harrison tries to shift and struggles to get out from under him, like maybe his father is alive, clinging onto him, holding Harrison against his body, holding him like he used to do when Harrison was a kid. 

That was all I wanted when I came here. Was that so fucking hard? 

In the dark, he can smell him: a faint, sickly sweet smell, drifting out, the sharp scent of iron. He can still smell faint sweat, clinging to him. Harrison tries not to think about it. 

His stomach growls. He’s hungry. He should eat something. He has money. Not much, but enough for a vending machine. 

He can’t stand the thought of leaving his father behind, can’t see himself walking out that door, his dad still here in the tub, left behind in the dark. 

He manages to extricate himself from Dad, shifting and wiggling out, his own clothes sticking to him, damp and mildew sweet. When Harrison stands, his father is a faint, dark blur, more of a shape in the darkness than a human being, a silhouette in the night. The sun going down has casted the motel bathroom in full darkness. Whatever moon is out did not cast any light in. 

He doesn’t turn on the lights. He just stares at his father in the tub, fully naked, and decides he can’t stay there. 

“C’mon, Dad,” he whispers, like there’s anyone else that can hear them. “We should get out of here.”

It’s hard. There’s a stiffness in his limbs and joints that makes him difficult to move. He’s a heavy man, all muscle and winter-bone stiffness. Difficult to pull him up by under his armpits and drag him out. His bare feet knock against the porcelain edges of the tub. Harrison hears an ankle bone make a hard knock, then his feet are dragging unnaturally against the tile, pointed the wrong direction, toes bent awkwardly, as Harrison tries to pull his father’s body. 

He’s heavy enough that Harrison might collapse under him, and stiff enough that it feels like moving a mannequin rather than a person, arms not moving with him, legs and knees not cooperating. Harrison has him by the armpits, his face in his back as he pulls him away, still dripping water on the floor. This close, Harrison can see the exit wound, smack in the center of his back, punching through the spine, wider than that neat bullet hole in his chest, ragged, bloody edges, like a child’s fist left a mark. It makes him sick to look at, a growing pit in his stomach.

He leans in close, until his nose nudges against the wider hole, places his mouth over it and sucks, like he could seal it shut like this. 

Let me kiss it better, Daddy used to say. 

His blood still tastes hot on his tongue. 

Harrison doesn’t know how long it takes him to move his father. 

But eventually, he pushes his father on the bed, letting him plop down on the paisley bedspread and comforter. It should be a relief to get his heavy weight off him, but it feels worse, losing that closeness. His dad lands facedown on the bedspread, undignified. The position exposes his father’s backside, his ass, his thick thighs, all these body parts he’s never seen this close before, this fully displayed. 

The sight of him like this makes Harrison’s blood go fever-warm, can feel a spike in his own heartbeat, sickening and horrifying, and something much worse than either of those feelings, pounding through him. There’s blood smeared across the skin where it didn’t get washed off, in that open-wide hole the bullet exited through. A drumbeat of panic pumps through Harrison’s body at the sight of it. He wants to throw himself over it, cover his dad up entirely, keep him hidden and secret and safe. He wants to press his body to his body and simply sink in. 

Dad had wanted to go to Los Angeles. Harrison had wanted to stay in Iron Lake. Neither of them got what they wanted, which Harrison supposes is only fair. 

Harrison manages instead to roll him over onto his back, pushing him up by the shoulders, up on the bed. He sits his father up so his head is on the pillow, but his limbs are all wrong: awkwardly placed, not moving. Everything about his Dad is entirely too rigid. He is a stiff and heavy weight now, harder to move still. 

Harrison ends up on top of him, straddling him to press him against the bed properly, the apex of his thighs against his father’s waist, leaning over him. Harrison’s body is so much smaller than his. They’re almost the same height, but Harrison is a slighter, slimmer version of the man before him. Maybe he’ll grow into this when he’s older, or maybe this is the result of starving on the street instead of being with his father, chopping wood and hunting. Maybe—he wouldn’t know.

He lies on top of Dad like this, pressing his limbs, his arms, to his chest, leaning down to pin them against him, where his heart would beat. A strange heat blooms in Harrison’s chest, down his body, shivering and shuddering, so close, barely any barriers between them, except for his own ragged, damp clothes. 

In the dark, he could be sleeping. Maybe he is. 

Harrison leans in until their foreheads are pressed together, bodies aligned against one another, and presses his lips to his father’s mouth. It’s a tender, chaste kiss, but it’s not like the kisses Dad used to give him, when he was a kid, peppering his body with them, the soft nuzzle of his lips against his skin, little pinpricks of affection. This is something else. Harrison mouths into him, flicks his tongue against his chapped lips, runs it over his teeth and gumline, like if he tries hard enough Dad will wake up and kiss him back. 

But Dad continues to lie still. 

Sleeping Beauty does not stir. 

Eventually Harrison breaks away and lies back down on top of him. He can feel his father’s hands under his chest, rough lines and ridges and solid bones pressing into him, as he traps them between their bodies. He can feel his father’s thighs between his legs, feel the shape of his softened cock against Harrison’s crotch. 

He wonders, if he moves his body, if he arches and grinds down into it, if it’ll stir to life, come alive. 

It’s a terrible thought. Instead, he buries his face in his father’s throat, nosing at the veins there—the carotid, the arteries that should be pumping—and bites down hard enough to bruise if he was still alive, as tears stream down his cheeks, hot and dripping on his father’s face. 

Why did you do it? he can hear his father’s voice in his ear.

Harrison does not dare move, doesn’t want to look up and find his father staring back at him, or worse, find him not staring at him. 

If he lays here, with his father’s flesh between his teeth, he can imagine his dad’s hand slipping out between them to stroke his hair, can imagine his father tilting his head into Harrison’s hair and planting a soft, little kiss on the top of his head, the way he did when he was a baby, the way he did when Harrison declared this motherfucker needs to die, too, as if Harrison calling for someone’s death deserved praise and affection. If he lays here, he can imagine his dad’s green eyes blinking up at the dark ceiling, wondering what to do with him. 

Why did you shoot me, if you were just going to do this? Drag me here? Isn’t that counterproductive? 

Harrison’s shoulders shake. He bites down harder, until he can feel skin tear beneath his teeth.  

I thought you wanted a normal life.

“You asked me to,” Harrison whispers, his shoulders shaking, like displacing that responsibility onto his father would somehow absolve him of anything. “You told me to, you wanted me to—”

Did you want to? You pulled the trigger. 

Yeah, Harrison thinks, rage swelled up in full bloom watching him walk away with Logan’s blood still on him, and he wanted to shove his father to the ground and beat his face in. Wanted to break his nose and feel his blood, hot and corrosive, all over his hands and fingertips and under his nails, wanted to cover himself in it, wanted to kick and bite and punch and slash until he could see only blood and bone and nothing else. 

Somehow, the rifle seemed more dignified. Then, at least.

Now, he’s not so sure. 

“I don't know,” Harrison responds, voice cracking like a child. Pathetic. 

Harrison doesn't know what he wants. 

“I came here looking for you. I wanted you. I wanted answers.”

He doesn’t know what to do now. What comes after? He never planned for what to do after finding Dad… for Dad being a killer, for killing Kurt, for killing Logan and—

Harrison lays on top of his father. There is no pulse against him. 

“I wanted you,” he confesses, “and you were going to leave again.” 

His father does not respond. 

*

Harrison needs to eat something. Drink something. Find some form of sustenance. He’s not sure how long it’s been. The room is dark, and his stomach is growling. 

His cheeks are hot. He thinks if he presses his face into his father’s chest, he could give him back some warmth again, bleed into him. 

Shouldn’t you be making your getaway by now? 

“Get away?” he asks the air. Like he needs to go on the run forever for killing his father?

You did it, son, you killed me, just like I told you to. What’s the next step, kiddo, what are you—

“Shut up,” Harrison says, squeezing his eyes shut.

The voice stops. Thankfully. No more voices in his head. Just his own thoughts. 

Harrison studies his father, feeling him out with his hands, running them over the rough stubble on his face. Further down, he runs his fingers over the lines of his chest and the coarseness of his chest hair, the heavy muscle of his thighs. He shifts, just a little, pulling away to the side so Harrison can see his cock—just lying there, in a nestle of curls. He’s soft right now, a pale shine to it in its flaccidness. Like this, his cock looked almost tender, sweet, like Harrison could lean down and press a gentle kiss to it. 

Would it stir to life if he kissed it? If he took it into his mouth?

Harrison tries to shake the thought from his mind, cast it out of his head like he’s done so many times before, but it’s too late now. His hand wanders, can’t help but place his palm over it, finding it soft and tender. Harrison finds himself wishing he could feel it harden. He wants his father’s blood to pump right in his hand, making it stretch and spread out into full hardness. 

The voice chuckles in his ear. How long have you wanted to do that?

“I haven’t,” Harrison finds himself arguing, caught. “I haven’t ever, it’s just—”

Just what? You miss me that bad? 

Harrison looks back at his father’s lips. They are no longer pink like they were yesterday, going a pale, grey color. He stares for a long time, waiting to hear him speak. 

“Yes,” he admits. “I’ve missed you my whole fucking life.” 

His father is dead, again; it should be an easy adjustment, again. After all, he’s been dead this whole time, except for the last couple of years. 

Harrison shifts his weight some, moves his position, ruffling the sheets as he slides down over his father’s thighs. He dutifully avoids looking at the gunshot wound, doesn’t want to look at it right now, doesn’t want the reminder—he focuses on the rest of his father’s body. The scar along his ribs, the shape of his bones against his fingertips, the way the skin here seemed softer, easier to move and push around over bone. Despite his weight, he seems thinner to Harrison, with the way he can count each and every rib. He thinks crazy thoughts about taking some out to keep with him, hoard like a dragon with jewelry. 

Harrison keeps his legs wide, his knees spread around him, as if he could keep his dad right between his legs and nowhere else. He runs his hands down his thighs, feels the muscle there before running his fingertips over the femoral artery, blue vein threading alongside his inner thigh. 

“Maybe I should have done this instead,” he says, running his fingers along the vein, up his inner thigh, dangerously close to where his soft cock lies. Just touching him like this makes him shiver, makes his insides pulse with a sick kind of heat. The thought of his dad spread out before like this: eager and for the taking, the whole of him available to Harrison to do as he wished with him, to touch and kiss and cherish and suck and fuck.

It makes him sick to his stomach. It makes him dizzy, head spinning, like he might gag, so turned on he can’t think. “Killed you like Mom was killed. Would you have liked that?”

Yes, Dad says. Yes yes yes. 

The answer makes Harrison’s cock throb, just as it makes his eyes well up with tears. The two reactions are one and the same. The two reactions live within him, bursting forth, unable to be helped. 

He nudges his nose along the femoral, thinking about biting down, feeling it between his teeth like his father’s throat, but instead he nudges further, until he can feel his Dad’s pubic hair against his chin, gray and wiry curls scratching his face. He rubs his nose against his father’s soft cock, the skin delicate and fragile here, the organ smaller right now when flaccid. Small enough that Harrison could open his mouth and swallow him down, get almost the whole of him in his mouth, his nose pressing against hair and sack. 

He doesn’t smell half bad down here, clean like the soap Harrison used on him, and he finds that Dad isn’t circumcised, not like him. Harrison pushes the foreskin back with his tongue: an interesting sensation, as if spreading folds around, spreading him open, until he could feel a velvet smooth, soft head pop out, sucking hard on the skin and licking into his slit.  

It’s not the first time Harrison has done something like this to an older man. It is the first time with his father. Maybe it should be more special. 

(it wasn’t supposed to be this way)

He wants to imagine his dad’s cock filling up with blood, stretching open his mouth. He wants to imagine the organ hard and thick and pushing against the back of his throat, hitting his gag reflex, wants to imagine it choking him until he can’t breathe and he’s crying. He doesn’t have to imagine that part, can already feel tears stinging in his eyes, can already feel burning all alongside his insides. He wants to feel his dad spurt hot fluid down his throat until Harrison is drowning in it. 

He wants his father to rise up and shove his cock inside him, proof positive that he’s alive. Proof positive that he’s wanted, loved. 

Try as he might, he can’t get his dad hard like this. When he pulls back, there’s a strange, hot warmth in his own groin, his skin warmer there than the rest of his body, but his father remains the same. He looks at Dad: an offering now, a gift horse. Harrison reaches for his hands and gives them a squeeze, like he’s here with him and just needs to be coaxed out.

“You wouldn’t ever let me do this, would you?”

No answer. Dad doesn’t see fit to respond to that. That’s as good a no as any. 

He wishes he could say he wasn’t the sort of person to be turned on by this, that this is some psychological fuckery, brought on by trauma or whatever a therapist would say, but he is. This is real flesh, blood and bone, cock hard, Dad all laid out for him and him alone. He shot him, so he can do what he wants with him now. Right?

Harrison leans down to further down, beginning to spread his father’s legs for him. There’s still stiffness in his limbs, not quite as loose as he would like him to be, but he’s able to push his legs to the side. 

Maybe this is okay? Dad won’t get hard to fuck him, but maybe this is okay. He moves his legs until he’s open wide, until he can see the fleshy globes of his ass cheeks. Lots of tender flesh here, easy to touch, almost fun to grab in his hand and give it a squeeze, as if Dad weren’t Dad, but some older boyfriend to play around with. 

He cannot imagine Dad not being Dad, though. Harrison is only here because Dexter is his father. 

It feels like some sort of violation to do this, spread his ass cheeks apart, look at his hole, in this most private, sacred space, look at a part of his father’s body that he could never see even by accident. He could only look if Dad let him or if Harrison just took. 

There’s wetness on his cheek. “This is okay, right?” he asks out loud and gets no response, not even a twitch, not a sound. Harrison spits into his hand and presses two wet fingers to the hole—tight, squeezing around him, tighter than when Harrison tried to do to himself one time.

Dad does not want to let him in easily. 

(rigor mortis is still here)

“This is okay, right?” he asks again. Dad gives him no absolution, but no reason to stop either. No reason to stop trying. More spit, more build up, drawing as much fluid from himself to fingers to his father’s asshole. He presses his mouth to it, as if that could help, tongues his way inside past the smell and musk, and soft texture of his skin here. Harrison shudders hard, his own cock spurting fluid. 

He pulls back to get his clothes off, all the way off now—something freeing as he rips his pants off, his own shirt sticking to his skin, shoving all the clothes off and letting them fall off the bed, disappearing into negative space. Finally he’s as bare as his father: two twin sets of bodies, one unmoving, and one frantic and needy. Harrison’s cock is hard and heavy between his legs, and he can’t think with all the blood down here, can’t think of anything except getting close, getting inside him. He dreams, wishes, longs to see his own father’s cock just as hard for him. Maybe later. Maybe some other time. Maybe if he hadn’t shot him—

It’s hard to push inside him. Harrison should use something else for lube—the motel shampoo, soap, lotion, anything—but somehow, it feels even more crass, to grab something to ease the way in, feels crude to use some outside source, instead of their own bodies. Harrison finds he doesn’t want anything else between them anymore. He’s spent his whole life separated from his father, with this firm boundary drawn between them, and he’s sick of it, he wants it gone. 

Sick pulses through him as his cock pushes in, some heady, overwhelming pleasure at just the mere sight of his cockhead pushing against his father’s hole; the head of his cock was bright red, almost cherry pink against his father’s waning skin, a blush against pale white. His cockhead is slick too, wet and dripping with a generous, almost embarrassing amount of precome, the kind that would stain his clothes if he was wearing any, but just leaves a slick drag mark all over his father’s skin. He wants to smear it all over his face, push his fingers in his mouth. He’s throbbing all over, tiptoes to temple. He can be alive for them both. 

His cock doesn’t go in.

Harrison presses it against his opening, grabbing his father’s thighs, digging his fingers in until he is all but clawing the skin, but he can’t get his cock in. The spit he used has dried up almost immediately, and as good as it feels to rub his dick against the hole, it’s not going in. Like he’s barred, blocked out. Like he would need to shove in and tear his father apart to go inside. 

Harrison sucks in a sharp breath. He can feel his chest go tight, heavy. Can feel it like the bullet is hitting him, too. 

“No, no, no, c’mon, c’mon,” he pleads—not sure to who, not sure who is listening, perhaps begging his father to let him in. “C’mon, c’mon.” He reaches down and tries his best to hold him wide open. He tries to press his hips to his father, lean back and push in and in and in and only succeeds in rubbing himself against him, the spit not enough. Gasping, aching and panting, Harrison reaches down and tries to open his father with his hands, with his fingertips, as if he could loosen the hole by holding his asshole open. 

It happens then—the tip of the head of his cock pushes in and even that little pressure, barely covering him, barely swallowing him up—feels far too overwhelmingly good, enough to empty out his mind. The friction is almost painfully tight against his cock, but Harrison bucks his hips without meaning to, his body simply seeking pleasure and warmth, and the whole head of his dick pushes inside. He groans, far too loud in the motel room, but there’s no point in worrying about it. 

It’s just him and his father here. 

He can’t quite push all the way in, can’t shove himself inside fully—Dad isn’t slick inside like a girl, not accommodating him as easily, but it’s okay, because Harrison’s body is just arrested, frozen, stuck making little dry humps into his father and gasping each time lightning heat crests in him. 

“Dad,” he cries, needy and desperate like a child, squeezing his eyes shut, his hands still locked on his thighs. He wants to hear his father cry out for him. He wants to see him reach for him the way he did as he was dying, hand stretching out before falling down, as if he had just one more thing to say to Harrison. He wants his father’s asshole to suck him all the way in, as if he could just crawl back inside him, as if it was Dad that gave birth to him and not his mother. “Dad, Dad, Daddy—”

Harrison comes too quickly, like the stupid teenager he is, barely getting half his dick in. Orgasm hits him like a drop kick, shocking and startling and eye-searing, his vision blacking out. It lasts just half a second, hummingbird-quick, as if he was just too worked up to make this last: a quick crash of a wave, unsatisfying.

He collapses over his father, over his chest, head over his heart, over the bullet wound. His cock pulls out of him almost instinctively, like he’s being evicted. Harrison presses his mouth to the hole he made, tongue inside it like it was over his father’s asshole, licking and lapping at it, like he could crawl in through here. That clean taste hits his tongue but something else, too: ragged flesh, metallic tint, something thick and clotted. 

He stays there, pressing his face into the bullet hole. There’s a smell here. He doesn’t know what it is, heavy in the air. It gets stuck at the back of his throat, cloying, thick like a film sticking to his teeth.

When Harrison presses his head against his father’s chest, he swears he hears something. Something moving. Something alive. Something right under his skin, a soft exhale of breath from right over his lungs. 

*

You should get something to eat, his father says. 

Harrison fell asleep at some point. His father’s voice dragged him out of a dreamless rest. His father is still dead. He should have stayed asleep. 

It feels good though, being skin to skin, pressing up so close. If he listens closely enough, lays his ear over his body, pressing tight to the cavity, to the ribcage, he thinks he can hear something. Not quite a heartbeat, but not fully dead. The lungs make a soft sighing noise against him. He thinks he can hear the blood run, rushing through. It’s not supposed to anymore—not after Harrison shot him in the heart—but Harrison knows he hears something. 

Get something to drink. Some water. C’mon, buddy. 

Buddy. That’s what his dad called him, when he was trying to get Harrison to agree, to go away with him. The two of them, alone on the road. Harrison hated the prospect at the time. He hated it then. Now, he wishes he made another choice.

He shouldn’t have stayed at the Tavern. He should have gone to the police station and gotten his father out of that jail cell. Maybe Logan would still be alive. Maybe he and Dad would be halfway to LA by now. 

Harrison doesn’t get up. He reaches for the bullet wound and presses his fingers in, pushing at the rigid, hard edges where skin broke and muscle was pierced. It’s softer now, than it was earlier. The skin just pulls away if Harrison is too rough on it. He pushes one delicate finger in, past something hard—bone? Organ? He’s not sure, he doesn’t know the names of all the body parts; Dad would know. Dad would understand—and then he feels it, squishy against him, tender tissue. His father’s heart.

When he pulls his finger away, it’s bloody. A dark, deep red stain, almost like port wine. Blood didn’t spread all over his father’s chest like he did that day in the snow (yesterday? Was it yesterday? When did Kurt die? Harrison doesn’t know how long he has been here), but it oozed out of the injury, from his back, pooling around his body.

Harrison shoves his fingers in his mouth. The taste is sharp, almost acrid. Not like normal blood, not like hot fresh blood. 

He shivers, as the taste rolls through him. 

“I’m drinking something,” he says, and laughs. 

Harrison lifts his head and feels the world spin all around him. He reaches and grabs on to his father for purchase, to ground himself. He does feel dazed, out of sorts; it’s a familiar feeling, hunger. Gnawing at his insides, stealing every thought and feeling until he can get filled up. He’s been hungry before, on the road, in foster homes. 

He’s been hungry his whole life. 

His clothes are in a pile on the now-wet carpet. The letterman jacket, which he had been so happy to have gotten from Coach Logan, is now discarded in an undignified heap; his pants crumpled up, his shirt torn, and his father’s jacket, the one he gave him, blanketing the entire floor next to the pile of clothes. 

Harrison maneuvers himself down to the floor. He doesn’t go far. He barely makes it off the bed. He doesn’t exactly fall, but his limbs are weak, clumsy, as he reaches for his pants, still damp on the ground, smelling like snow and mildew and something rotten. He pulls out the straight razor in his back pocket, and grips it with the last vestiges of his strength. 

What is wrong with you? Harrison hears in the back of his head—a voice that isn’t his father's, and not his own, but some deranged combination of both. What is wrong with you? The words pulse through him, his own heart racing with what he’s about to do, almost painful in his chest, about to burst out. What is wrong with you? He hears it in Hannah’s voice, in his mother’s non-existent voice, because he doesn’t remember what she sounded like, just that he was born covered in her blood. Isn’t that what Dad said? Born in blood? 

“So many things,” Harrison says, giggling, hoisting himself back up on the bed, now armed. He extends the straight razor and holds it to his father’s chin, pressing against the stubble there that Harrison swears is still growing. He had washed the red from his face but he wishes he left it, wishes he had that reminder of what he’s done, why they’re both here in the first place. 

“Would you let me do this?” Harrison asks, pressing the blade alongside his throat. “You let me kill you. Would you let me do this?” 

Silence. Empty spaces. Empty body cavity. Then—

Of course. Of course I would. You can do whatever you want. 

Harrison slices his throat, one quick cut, sharp and sudden. He wonders if his father would be caught off guard, surprised by that, or if he’d tilt his head up and welcome his blade. He’s not sure what Dexter would want, and he doesn’t seem to want to tell him.

Blood barely flows from the injury. The skin splits easily, yawning open, and Harrison can see red and pink under his father’s skin but the blood simply oozes out, so slowly. Harrison didn’t get the artery. Just like he didn’t cut Ethan’s femoral. He’s sort of shit at this whole killing business. 

This doesn’t seem good enough. It’s not enough. There’s an absence in his own chest, spreading out, an emptiness threatening to consume him and his father both. 

“How about this?” he asks. He pulls the blade down his father’s chest, down the bones of his clavicle, the center of his body, breastbone to ribs, until it’s pressed against the scar tissue lining his body. “Can I do this?” he asks, and doesn’t wait for permission this time. He just slashes down. The skin splits like pulling a stitch, and red oozes forth from the injury, bleeding out ever-so-slowly. The red was yet again oddly discolored, deep dark red, almost black. 

Harrison slashes again, and again, and again, criss-cross work all over his flesh. His blade is not made for stabbing, but he can cut deep, down past several layers of skin, like a hot knife in butter.

Do you feel better? he hears his father’s voice ask. 

Harrison’s hands shake. “No,” he snarls. He drives his straight razor further down, into his father’s belly now, and doesn’t quite cut him open, not exactly, just rips a seam in his father’s body. There’s more blood now, even if it doesn't flow the way it used to flow, doesn't quite pour or splash or splatter. The intestines don’t spill out, the wound not wide enough for that, just as his heart cannot fit through the small bullet hole in his chest, so Harrison cannot reach and grab it and pull it out. 

(there’s no blood pressure, the heart is not pumping throughout the body)

Harrison dumps the discarded razor, lets it fall to the side of the bed and to the floor. Instead of picking it back up, he reaches for his father’s body, running his fingertips down the sides, feeling the spaces between ribs, feeling the way his skin gives easily under him, as he reaches for the wound he gave him in his belly. He doesn’t mean to, not at first, he’s not trying to take him apart, but he sinks his fingers into that injury, just like he did with the bullet hole, pressing his fingers into the wound. He pulls then, tugging at the skin until he can pull skin and flesh apart, rip into him and slip his fingers, then his whole hand within his dad’s exposed body cavity. 

He’s warm. Not very warm—not hot, like he should be—but his insides are warmer than Harrison expected, like there is still life within him. Touching him in this way makes him feel like he could crawl back inside him. Like he could simply slip into his father’s skin and force him to live again, live here with him. 

He’s hard again, cock stiffening as he splays out his fingers within his father.

Harrison doesn’t want to closely examine why he is, doesn’t want to think about how dead bodies and corpses, and blood and guts all go to his cock, doesn’t want to ask himself these questions, just get close to his father and burrow into him. His cock is throbbing as he tears into his body with his bare hands: all he wants is his father inside him, and in the absence of that, he will take the other way around—hard to get more intimate than literally tearing him apart. 

He can’t think, he can’t feel anything, but Dad’s blood and body all over his hands. He runs blunt nails down his skin, digs them into the body cavity he ripped apart, presses them to the edges of the slash he tore open. He humps his cock against his father’s thigh, arching forward into it, chasing that electric heat as he grinds against his father. 

He takes his hand out of his dad and slides his own body upwards, just high enough that he can slip his cock in the ragged, jagged hole he made of him, fucking right into the open viscera. It's a little bigger than his asshole, at least. He slips in easier. Easier to fuck. His blood, his flesh, his guts and organs and muscle—whatever his cock is pressing against, it drags a moan out of Harrison’s throat, needy cries escaping his mouth. He humps the wound, watching dark blood crest and wash over his cock, soaked in it. He wants to go deeper. He wants to get all the way in his guts, all the way in and through. He wants his whole body inside. He wants to fuck his father’s insides until Dad wakes up and does it to him.

“I’m sorry,” Harrison cries out, hips moving on their own, rapidly pistoning in and out, as he feels pleasure pulse through him, so much stimulation that it hurts more than feels good, but he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. It’s too late now. It’s too late for any of this. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it feels so fucking good, I’m sorry,” he whines, high in his throat like a child begging for forgiveness, but he doesn’t know what he’s sorry for: sorry I want you like this. Sorry for tearing you apart. Sorry for shooting you. I’m so sorry I’m so fucked up, too fucked up even for you. 

Harrison paws at his father’s shoulders, clinging on bruise-tight to his body, making much too much noise as he comes inside him. Orgasm punches him in the belly and expands outward, his come filling his father up, pouring inside him. Harrison looks down, watches the white fluid mix in with the dark, red-black blood, pooling in the wound like it was festering, coming together in a hole of his own making. The sight of it makes a queasy, shaking smile spread across his face at the two of them joined together, closer than murder or sex could ever bring them. Exposed. Real.

Harrison presses his finger to the mixture, smears it over his hands, and presses it to the bullet hole that Harrison left in his father. Harrison pushes it inside, like a claim. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, shaking, crying, except he’s not sure how sorry he is, only that he doesn’t know how to describe the thickness in his throat. There’s tears rolling down his cheeks and Harrison finds he can’t stop crying, even as he leans down to kiss him, desperately pushing his tongue in his mouth, desperately trying to lick inside like that will help any. When that doesn’t work, he shoves his head into his father’s throat, and sobs until he runs out of tears.

In the dark, Harrison feels a hand reach for him, just as he falls asleep.

Maybe this way, they can stay together forever, and Dad will never leave him.

*

Harrison.

Harrison doesn’t move. He doesn’t know who is talking to him. It doesn’t sound like his father—the voice is soft, feminine, a low register in his ear. Harrison, it calls out to him again. 

Harrison is splayed on top of his dad. The two of them are naked, wrapped together, legs all tangled up, like they could keep each other warm like this—or, at least, Harrison could feel his warmth seep into his father. He doesn’t know how long he has been here. How much time has passed. Dad’s skin is cool against his cheek. 

He doesn’t want to move and he doesn’t want to open his eyes. He can’t stand to look around. His head feels so heavy. 

“Harrison,” the voice calls out to him again, louder this time, disrupting, stealing sleep and restfulness from him, dragging him out of a pleasant dream. 

Harrison opens his eyes, turns his head. He sees someone standing before him, by the side of the bed, and as he tilts his head up, he tries to place who he’s looking at—a dark shape, police uniform, gun at her hip, gloves and wool hat, and a dark curtain of rich, brown hair—

Angela is staring down at him.

Harrison freezes. He can’t move. He can’t speak. Her gaze is steely, hawk-like, as she looks down on him, like judgement from the afterlife, coming to claim them both. She holds her hands up, palms out, and takes in a slow inhale of breath. 

“Harrison,” she whispers very softly. Her gaze softens, even as her eyes widen—too wide, with horror, so even when her tone seems calm and measured, he knows she is anything but. “Harrison, you have to… you have to come with me.” She outstretches a gloved hand to him, entreating him. 

Harrison ignores it. He wants to slip further inside his father and disappear. 

“I’m not leaving,” he says, digging his nails into his father’s skin.

“Harrison,” her voice shakes. “I’ve called it in. You don’t have a lot of time.” 

Harrison turns back to his father’s face. He stares down at him, and thinks maybe he could shave him, smooth back the hair there, make him look like he did the day he left him for good. Turn back the clock for them both. 

“I haven’t had time in a while,” he says. 

Angela sucks in a lungful of breath. 

“Harrison,” she says, her voice cracking. “I don’t want them to find you like this. We have to—you have to go.”

“I’m not leaving,” he says, turning to glare at her. “Leave us alone.”

Angela pulls her hand away. She drags it up to her face, and for a moment, it is clear she is trying not to see him, not to look at him, face covered as she pulls her hand down, as if she could shake off this moment. 

“For fuck’s sake, Harrison,” she stresses. “You realize he’s dead, right?” 

Harrison doesn’t flinch, but the words land like a suckerpunch. A white-hot curl of rage blooms in his belly, but he has no energy to do anything with that, impotent as it burns through him. He swallows hard and tastes something sour on his tongue. 

“I’m not going.”

Nothing is said. The only sound that fills the room is air in Angela’s lungs, in and out, a little too rapid, a little too fast. If he listens closely, he can hear a soft release of breath from his father’s chest. If he looks too closely, he can see movement behind his eyes, twitching.

Angela gestures to his father with her open hand. “Harrison, he’s bloated. He smells. He’s decaying right in front of you. Can’t you smell that?” 

Her eyes dart down to the blood that dripped from his father’s new injuries, all the stains of blood on his body that have gone nearly black with the exposure. Harrison doesn’t think that’s right. Dad’s face is pale, wan, drained of all color, lips more blue than pink. “He’s literally leaking decomposition fluid. Look at his skin.”

Harrison absorbs the words like a punch. That sour taste in his mouth rolls into rot, nausea turning sharp in his belly and swimming, but there is nothing in his belly to puke. He can’t remember the last time he ate. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. “I’m not going,” he says, his voice shaking. He presses his face back into his father’s neck, hiding like a child, not looking at the ruin he’s made of his body, all the slash marks and ripped open wounds. “You can’t make me.” 

“Harrison,” Angela breathes, her voice wet, increasingly desperate, “if you don’t come with me, someone else is going to drag you away instead. Do you want that?” 

“You can’t make me,” he insists, growling out the words, muffled by his father’s body.

When they do come to drag him away, Harrison does not go quietly. He kicks, he screams, he sobs, he digs into his father’s body with his fingers, leaving ragged claw marks all over him. It does not matter that he’s naked, or that his father’s decomposition fluids are all over him, or that he’s clearly cut him apart, that his semen is still inside him, festering. It doesn’t matter that Angela is staring at him with horror, her eyes wide and her hand to her mouth, looking like she might be sick. It doesn’t matter that she’s seen him like this, completely exposed—none of that matters, except staying with his father. 

But they sedate and subdue him, dragging him away. 

They take his father from him. 

*

Harrison has gotten good at cheeking his meds. The court mandated psych ward is very short-staffed, and no one really checks to make sure he swallows the pills he doesn’t need. When they do, Harrison just makes himself puke it up. They can’t keep him from going to the bathroom. 

The days that followed are a blur for Harrison. He doesn’t really remember details, just a hazy sea of grief and pain. There was a hospital stay for a bit, before he got sent down here, IV fluids and checking for blood born pathogens. He knows that his court-appointed lawyer tells him he’s lucky they’re putting him on an involuntary psych hold, that he likely won’t get tried as an adult, that no one really cares that he killed a serial killer. They’re just hung up on the whole Dad and necrophilia aspect, but he probably won’t see prison time for that. 

Harrison doesn’t feel very lucky.

Angela says he had a psychotic break. He lost touch with reality, so it’s not his fault, so things should be okay. She says that with shaking pity, her eyes guarded as she looks at him—as if now that she’s seen him naked, seen all the things he did to his father, he is no longer welcome in her house. Harrison supposes he can’t date Audrey anymore after this.

Not that she would want to date some mental patient anyway.

It’s only for a few days, Angela reassures him, but Harrison knows that’s not true—it’ll be at least a week. She reassured him of a lot of things, that the circumstances—Logan’s death, all the dead bodies at Kurt’s place, and the clear mental break he had in the days after his father’s death—well, any good lawyer should be able to get him declared not guilty. At the very least, time served. 

You didn’t do anything wrong, she told him. Harrison knows that is not true, and he’s not sure why she tried to mince words. He’s done a lot of things wrong: accomplice to murder, actual murder, improper disposal of a body, desecration of a corpse. Nothing that you can’t come back from. You did the right thing, Harrison, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

He knows she means killing his father.

The Bay Harbor Butcher, they’re calling him. Harrison hasn’t gotten a chance to look it up—he’s not allowed a phone down here, and there’s one lone computer everyone fights over, but only for thirty minutes at a time, fully monitored—but that sounds like a big deal. 

The Bay Harbor Butcher. Some of the other patients stop talking when he enters the common areas, glancing at him nervously. Talking about what he did is a HIPPA violation, but they’ve heard that moniker before. It must be bad. Angela thinks killing the guy that killed Logan is a net good, and maybe it’s true, on some level, that he put a stop to him, but Harrison thinks maybe all murder must be bad, despite his fantasies about being a father-son vigilante team. There must be nothing good about killing his father: it did not absolve him, give him any peace. If anything, it makes him worse. More fucked up. More of a monster. 

Angela spoke to him in soft, gentle tones: not her cop voice, but not her mom voice either. She talks to him like someone who might snap, crackle, and pop, a piece of string pulled so tight it was going to break any minute now. Harrison didn’t feel like talking anymore, so he just stared at her that night she left him here, watched her come in for a hug, hung his arms loose at his side as she held him. He should love this—he misses the way Hannah hugged him, misses being hugged with love—but Harrison can feel the stiffness in her, trying so hard to be motherly, but how do you mother a kid that fucked his father’s corpse, then mutilated the body? That kid doesn’t get a mom’s love. 

It’s fine, though.

He is managing. It’s not so bad here. They’re not supposed to mix teenagers with adults, but Iron Lake county is too small for separate facilities. Most of the patients are older than him, and they leave him alone. He even gets his own room to himself. 

After Harrison finishes puking up his meds again, he makes his way back to his room. The orderlies here force him to spend a couple of hours in the common areas so they don’t worry about him offing himself, but once he’s done with that, he goes back to being alone. The room has two beds, but one remains unoccupied for now. Harrison turns off the lights, savoring the darkness of the room, and curls back into bed, wrapping the blanket around himself. He thinks he should be fighting and kicking and screaming his way out of here, but Dad tells him that he needs to bide his time. Play the part. It’s the only way he’ll come out of this relatively unscathed.

Whatever. When this is all over, he’s going to leave. Take off somewhere, be someone else. Someone who didn’t...

Harrison can’t finish his own internal sentence. His eyes are burning, tears leaking into his pillow, like the pathetic kid he is. He huffs a breath and it comes out wet and heavy.

“If you were going to regret it this much,” his father says, stepping closer, crouching down on the bed next to him so they’re almost equals, on the same level, his voice in his ear, “why would you do it? It didn’t have to be this way.”

Harrison doesn’t pull away, but he glances up from the pillow, only his eyes exposed, red-rimmed and filled with tears. Dad is dressed in the same clothes as the day he died, black sweater stained with dark red blood. His eyes are gentle, crow’s feet crinkling, age turning his features warm rather than sharp, as he reaches forward to stroke a hand through his hair. Harrison trembles. He can feel his father’s touch like it is as real as the sheets under him or the taste of vomit in his mouth. He feels his sure fingers, twirling with the strands of his hair, before he pets the back of his head like something cherished. 

Harrison knows he’s not there. He knows this, but Harrison leans into it the touch all the same. A low whine escapes his throat, like an animal.

“I thought I wanted to kill you,” he confesses. “I thought it would… fix me? I thought it’d be better and you agreed to it. I thought that was the right thing to do. But I just watched you bleed out in the snow… and I didn’t feel any better.” Blood went all over, pooling out over the white, red drag marks as Harrison carried him away. He watched him die. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

When I came here, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to end with you dying.

“I know, buddy,” Dad says, making a soft, pitying sound in the back of his throat. Harrison shuts his eyes again, burying his face in the pillow. For a moment, there is nothing, but the sound of his muffled crying, alone in this room, and then he feels a hand pushing his shoulder, nudging him aside. Harrison makes room for him: there’s not a lot of space on the bed, a twin designed for one, but he moves just enough so Dad slips under the covers with him. He lays on his side, and Harrison lays on his, the two of them staring at each other like closed parentheses. Under the covers together, Harrison feels like a kid at a sleepover, not someone in a psych ward. A little boy, crawling into his father’s bed after a nightmare. 

“Are you mad at me?” Harrison asks, a little scared of the answer. 

“Of course not,” Dad says. “I love you even when you’re killing me. Maybe… especially when you’re killing me.”

Harrison sniffles. He lets that wash over him, hoping to feel some sort of absolution, but there’s none. It doesn’t come. He simply stares at his father’s face, wishing for nothing more but to reach out and touch him again. Fuck him again. Crawl inside him.

“Why are you here?”

Dad’s mouth twitches, hiding a grin. “Why do you think?”

It takes a moment for Harrison to get it. To understand, but of course, he does. He might be the only one who could. “You want me to continue your work?

Dad smiles for real now. All teeth. “Got it in one.”

Harrison feels a weight settle in his belly, something like dread threatening to crawl up his spine.

For a moment, he is back in the bunker with his father, and blood is rushing straight to him, Kurt’s blood, about to swallow him up. His mother is dying in a bathtub. His father is sawing a man’s limbs off. 

“I don’t know if I can do that,” he confesses. He thinks about his father’s reputation now. His own. How to follow the code, while having all the media attention following him around. Thinks about the way the nurses whisper around him, like he might do something terrible again. “I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I can—”

“Oh, I believe in you, buddy. You’ve already done such a good job with your first one, and that’s the hardest. Always a little messy,” Dad explains. One hand slips down the covers, until he feels his father’s rough, calloused fingers circle around his wrist, thumb on his pulse. He feels so vividly real. He can feel his breath ghost across Harrison’s face. 

“The first one sets the tone,” he says, in a voice that chills Harrison, makes cold spread throughout his body, down to his bones. “You always want to recreate the first one.” 

Harrison doesn’t know what that means. Recreate? Shoot another person? Mutilate another person? Fuck another corpse—

Dad gives him a reassuring squeeze.

“Just focus on getting better right now. It’s going to be an uphill struggle for you for a while. It’s hard to pretend to be normal when necrophilia is on your public record, but I have faith in you.”

Harrison nearly flinches, but his father leans in and presses a soft kiss to his forehead, just like that last time in the bunker. A sob breaks out of his throat and Dad shushes him, rubbing a soothing hand down his back. Harrison feels his touch all along his spine like he’s here. Like they never left that motel room. Like, maybe, he never shot him at all. 

“You wanted me to get inside you, didn’t you?” 

Harrison can’t speak anymore, so he nods. 

“Then I’ll be with you every step of the way.”