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His blood is a fluid dark on her fingertips, the holes impossibly deep in his chest. Her fingers are slimmer than the wake left by the bullets, full of torn, mangled flesh that will never heal.
She looks into his eyes every night in the space between insomnia and blissful sleep. Most of the rest of him has faded in her memories, and now only recipes and laughter and the blood remain.
There’s plenty of Frank Lundy left in the world, should she care to look: photographs, newspaper articles, video on YouTube, a book or two. There’s his daughter, who she’s only met once, at his funeral. But it all hurts too much to bear. All she has now is his FBI badge, which should be in evidence, but she’d known the Feds would just uncaringly lose it, or stash it away never to see the light of day again.
It had seemed so important to keep at the time. But in the moments she takes it out and smoothes a thumb over his scrawled signature, his blank stare in his personnel photograph, she remembers just how much it can never compare to his arms around her when she wakes up in the morning, when days were bright and new, and challenges were to be met together.
Finding that peaceful place has been so difficult lately, on the occasions she’s even had the time and presence of mind to try. Making lieutenant, confronting the Doomsday Killer, finding herself isolated from all of her friends, and with Dexter seeming even more withdrawn and inconsiderate than ever… If only, she’d found herself thinking. If only he were still alive, a friend outside Miami Metro, but someone who always understood what drove her. Quinn had been too close, Anton too far away.
Frank…
He’s always sitting right there when she comes home, relaxed as relaxed can be on her couch, a smile she can’t see on his lips. “Hello Morgan,” he says, and she can feel the tension go right out of her at the words.
It’s not real. He’s dead as dead can be, and she’ll never be able to curl up with him and watch old movies again.
So the night she comes home and he’s sitting there the way he always does, saying exactly what he always does, she has her gun out before the door clicks shut behind her, because she knows that this time it wasn’t only in her head.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” Not that she really cares. She’ll have the department check out every inch of the place once she gets this fucker on the floor with his hands behind his back.
A slight pause. “Your landlord let me in.”
“Let me see your hands!” she barks almost before he’s finished speaking. “Do you have a weapon? Is there anyone else here?”
He puts up his hands in the darkness. “Debra…”
She knows exactly what his voice sounds like, what his silhouette looks like… but there are things that are impossible, and Frank Lundy being alive and talking to her in her living room is one of them.
“Shut the fuck up and keep your hands where I can see them.”
There’s her phone, and there’s the light switch. Really she should switch on the lights, ascertain the situation in case this guy tries to get the jump on her, or there’s someone else lurking in the shadows…
But holy fuck she really kind of doesn’t want to switch them on without someone else being here to tell her whether or not she’s crazy.
She clenches her teeth and almost punches the switch.
He winces from the sudden glare more than she does. Her apartment looks about as clean and tidy as it had been when she’d left it. No muggers or axe murderers or dead bodies. Just… Just a man she really, really shouldn’t recognize, wearing a gray suit and shielding his eyes against the light.
Her stomach tightens. If she hadn’t been through ten hells worth of crap lately she’d probably be throwing up. “What the fucking fuck?” she demands, because saying his name would make this real, and she’s not sure she can deal with that.
He moves his hand away from his eyes, and it’s the very fact that he doesn’t look exactly as he had two years ago, that he’s a little skinnier, his hair a little thinner, that makes her just about start to believe it.
“Can I put my hands down now?” Frank Lundy asks, smile almost as blinding as the light bulb. “I’m not armed, Lieutenant. Congratulations, by the way.”
“Jesus…” She’s doing her very best to crush the butt of her gun, but she manages to make herself holster it somewhere between convincing herself that clones and mysterious twin brothers only happen in the movies, and… “Frank?”
The smile vanishes. “I’m so sorry,” he says, earnest and sincere as ever, hands bunched in his pockets. “I had no idea… By the time I woke up, by the time they told me what they’d done, you’d already had my funeral… It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Debra makes herself take a breath because that has to make sense, because there has to be a rational, logical, calm and clear explanation for all this… None comes. “What the fuck?”
There are tears in her eyes, and her lungs are burning. She can see him breathe too, can see all of him for the first time in years. He reaches out a hand to her. “Come here.”
His voice is somehow warm and sad at the same time. She’s wanted him to say those words every night she's been here alone. But she stands her ground, as if she can just argue him out of existence. “How can you be alive?”
It's not possible. It just isn't. But even if she's finally cracked from the pressure, even if he's just a mirage, she wants it to be true more than anything.
“I shouldn’t be. I know.” Frank is looking at the floor between her feet, regretful in a way she hasn’t seen since he told her about his wife. God, that seems like a lifetime ago. “We were both shot. Unconscious. The Bureau found us, spirited me out of there. I didn’t wake up fully for weeks. Then they told me one of my old cases had reopened, a killer they needed me to catch. Someone who was probably going to try to kill me. It just so happens Christine Hill got to me first.”
“But I saw you… There was an autopsy, a funeral…”
“You saw me get shot. You never saw a body. The Bureau pulled a lot of strings to fake my death. It’s not as if they haven’t done it before.”
“Jesus…”
“The case finally closed about a week ago. So I get to be me again. I just came from my daughter’s place…" He gives her a sheepish smile. "Honestly I think you’re taking it better.”
“The fuck I am. I haven’t even started yet!”
Her detective’s brain has already started picking apart his story, the impossibility of it, the number of people who would have to be bought off or threatened, the sheer unlikelihood of anyone saving him. She’d been hurt herself, in shock, but she had seen the blood seeping out onto the tarmac, his lifeless stare…
But here he is.
She swallows and takes four quick steps, enough to fling her arms around him, expecting him to dissolve into nothingness or for her morning alarm to go off… Instead her arms meet solid, warm flesh that holy fuck smells like him as she buries her face in his chest and lets him hold her.
If this is a fantasy, it’s one she really, really fucking needs right now.
“It’s okay,” he’s saying, his breath hot on her neck as he rubs her back, but there’s a crack in his voice and she looks up to see the tears in his eyes too.
“Jesus fuck,” she says, thumping his chest. “You really are you.”
He winces, rubbing the spot. “Debra, I might be me, but I was still shot. Twice.”
“Oh fuck. Sorry.” Oddest. Fucking. Conversation. Ever. “Um. I have aspirin? Somewhere?”
"No, I'm fine, really…" He seems about as interested in the idea as she is, those dark, warm eyes of his fixed on hers, fingers stroking her cheek as though he can't quite believe any of this either.
She's seen him like this before, far too many times, caught between what he wants and whatever dumb thing he thinks might be “appropriate”. And for a long, long moment neither of them says anything. Then he flexes his shoulder and seems to remember what he might have been about to say. "I, uh… There was some nerve damage. I lost a lot of blood. But that was two years ago. Still doesn't look very pretty, but…"
She grabs the back of his neck and kisses him. He might have had two whole years to rehearse this moment, but she's had two minutes, and honestly she thinks she's got the better end of the deal.
Two fucking years since she kissed him in a parking lot, his body warm through his shirt, and lost him forever. But he's just as warm now, just as vibrantly alive as he kisses her deeply, desperately, while she pushes his jacket back off his shoulders, needing to feel just how real he is.
"Debra…" She can feel his heartbeat thudding under her palm. "Are you… Are you seeing someone?"
She actually giggles at that, and tugs on his tie, working the knot undone. "You really don't change, do you? You come back from the dead and you're seriously just going to fuck off back to the middle of nowhere if I say I have a boyfriend?"
He doesn't even blink. "Well, I'd offer to fight him for you, but I think you can make that decision yourself."
"Damn straight." His tie goes on the floor too, and she starts work on his shirt. "No, I'm not seeing anyone. I mean, there was..." She makes herself stop. "Do we have to talk about this?"
"Not tonight."
Fuck this is just too easy, but it had been that way before, when she had spent two years convinced she was never going to see him again, let alone sleep with him… and then she'd kissed him and everything had seemed so ridiculously perfect. The kind of perfect that might actually lead to some kind of fairytale happy ever after. He'd been too good to be true twice, and she'd lost him twice. The idea that he's here, that she might have another chance...
Her hand slides under the open lapel of his shirt, and what should seem intimate is tinged with the fear of what she might feel, as fragments of familiar dreams creep back into her mind. But there’s no blood, no bullet holes, just skin puckered and healed, just the warmth of his body, and the feel of each breath he takes.
She breathes in, unnaturally deep, needing every last drop of air.
Frank’s always been good with silence, had been the first and only person to show her that it didn’t have to scare the living daylights out of her. Now he takes her hand in his, squeezing, and steps back to undo the rest of the buttons, dropping his shirt on her couch and showing her. Making her see.
She only remembers the deep red of far, far too much blood. That dead, glazed look in his eyes. She’d seen the medical examiner’s report too, including sanitized pictures she knows now must have been meticulously faked. Two years… There must have been ugly stitches, bruises black and blue, IV drips…
Now there are scars and twisted, cratered flesh. Not pretty, no, but whole.
Wordlessly, she slips out of her own jacket, unbuttoning her blouse with her eyes on his. Her own scar is pitiful in comparison, barely a scratch, impressing no one. But he winces when he sees it, and then his hand is warm at her hip. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there,” he murmurs.
“You’re here now,” she says, and really does believe it. But with believing comes the problem of what the fuck she does with a resurrected lover standing around half naked in her living room. “Do you want to… I mean, maybe we should talk, I could… I probably have tea here someplace…”
“You don’t.”
Maybe he’s been through her entire kitchen. Maybe he knows her too well. Maybe he’s just done with talking.
She wraps her arms around him and thinks maybe she’s done with it too.
Once she'd tried her best to forget everything about him, tried to shrug him off as if their weeks hunting the Bay Harbor Butcher together had never happened. But his smile and jokes and the feel of his mouth on her throat had crept into her mind at all the wrong moments, making her miss him when she wanted to hate him.
After she'd been to his funeral, when his name had been scrubbed from the Miami Metro case board and everything about his life had been neatly filed away to be forgotten forever, she'd sat and tried to remember everything, as though she could inscribe every touch and word and breath on her brain forever. But she'd felt it all slip away no matter how hard she tried.
Now she just wants to hold onto him, to grab him so hard she leaves bruises like fingerprints on his arms, to feel everything and seize all the memories, all that lost time, and make everything right somehow just by having him and keeping him.
"Debra…"
She knows what he's going to say in that gentle tone of his, and makes herself release her grip.
"Maybe we should talk…" he starts, and she presses fingers to his lips instead.
The sheets are cool against her back when he presses her down, and he’s more focused and needy than she’s ever seen him.
Two years, she thinks as he strips off the rest of their clothes with the kind of care and precision that was once second nature and just might be agony now. In two years she’s done so much, been through so much… But at least she had Dexter, and her job, and friends, and Quinn, even if that worked out about as well as all her relationships do…
He could’ve found someone too. Could have. But he’s pale in the reflected light from the beach, and she knows he never would have. Cover means cover, and explaining bullet wounds to random women he might meet in Nebraska bookstores just isn’t worth the risk…
“You’re beautiful,” he tells her as she curls her legs around his hips and pulls him down, holding him there.
Fuck all the logic. She needs a little romance.
“Did you think about me?” she asks, grinning, whispering into his ear as he kisses her throat. “All those lonely nights…”
Neither of them needs any answer but his mouth on hers, the hard length of him rubbing her thigh.
They were never together long enough for this to become anything less than exciting: a few weeks when he was her superior and everything felt too illicit to be true; one stolen night in a hotel room… After the shooting, after his funeral, she’d thought far too much about how she would have loved for their relationship to be mundane and ordinary, how much she just wanted him to be there, even if they never looked at another serial killer case in their lives.
Tears trickle down into her hair as he eases inside her, and she squeezes her eyes closed, feeling him stop. “I’m hurting you.”
He’d said the same thing on their first night together, full of concern. That first night, before she’d ever conceived that she might lose him at all, first to his job, then to bullets.
“You’re not. Fuck, it’s just…” She can’t ruin this, what should be a perfectly happy, blissful moment of love between them. “I need you to stay. I need to know you’ll stay.”
Frank smiles, the light from outside seeming to go right through his eyes. “You can handcuff me to the bed, if you like.”
“Yeah, and then the house would burn down.”
But she’s laughing as she arches up into him, making him move again as she nips at his bottom lip, trying to think of bruises and blood like she might once have conceived them – just tiny reminders by day of a night filled with passion and need.
"Mm, god…" It's not hard at all to remember the way things once were now that he's here, now every movement of his body over and inside of her brings floods of memories along with pleasure. "Fuck… so fucking good when you're deep like that."
She can't help thinking, though, that the occasion should call for a bit more Shakespearean poetry and a little less swearing.
Frank laughs as he kisses her. "I saw you on the news, you know. YouTube."
"Oh fuck." Only he could bring up probably the most embarrassing moment of her life at a time like this.
"You're still the most adorable girl in the world."
She'd poke him in the ribs as retribution, but he's already suffered a lifetime's worth of damage. So she kisses him instead and hooks a foot around his thigh to flip him over. "I'll show you adorable."
He really does feel absurdly good inside her, his hands firm on her hips. Maybe it's just emotion and hormones... but fuck she loves his body and the things it does to her.
Frank swallows, one hand straying up her stomach, over her breasts. Her nipples already hard, the barest touch of his fingers only intensifies the aching need of her clit, so that she pushes his hand down. He's usually so slow and easy in bed, fluid and unhurried, drawing out every moment to deepen the experience. And she loves that. She does. But now…
Now she's so fucking glad he just gets it, stroking her with the pad of his thumb and pushing up harder, faster. They can do slow later. He can make her beg and scream with anticipation all he likes. But now, right now, they both just need this.
It's still pretty fucking mind blowing.
Her body is still pulsing heat afterward, and she has a dim idea that she might simply be dazedly repeating "Oh fuck, oh fuck" while snuggled up on Frank's chest as he pulls up the covers over her and smoothes hair from her face.
"Is this okay?" she mumbles into his shoulder, remembering what he'd said about his injury but still not really wanting to move even an inch. Ever.
"It's perfect."
She's going to fall asleep… No, fuck, she is not going to fall asleep, not if there's any chance in the world that he might not be here when she wakes up. It might feel real now, he might be a real, live, breathing human being underneath her, his heartbeat powerful enough that she can feel it as if it were her own, but…
"Debra…" He just might be the most beautiful thing she's ever seen: eyes closed, blissed-out smile. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm here to stay."
The last time he said anything like that, she'd watched him die seconds later. But now the gunshot never comes. There's just his arms around her, and the steady rise and fall of his chest as she realizes, hallucination or not, he's fast asleep.
Fuck.
She presses her cheek back against his chest and closes her eyes, fucking daring him not to be there when she wakes up.
She wakes up.
The sun is in her eyes, and she knows it's later than it should be. Her alarm hadn't gone off, fucking thing, but then she hadn't set it, had she? Hadn't even had anything to eat last night, first with work and then with…
Frank. She barely mouths the word, afraid to say it out loud. She's lying on her side, at the edge of the bed, and if she says it, if she rolls over, she'll know for sure that it was all just a dream, that he's been ripped away from her yet again, all the old wounds bled dry.
But she has to get up. She should already be in the shower. She's a lieutenant now. There's a serial killer tearing through Miami. They need her.
She needs him.
But she can picture the bare, cold sheet better than she can his body. She can imagine rolling over, her arm bouncing off the mattress…
For a moment she holds her breath, just begging him to come strolling out of the kitchen with orange juice and a plate piled high with eggs and bacon, telling her she needs to eat, because she still weighs about fifty pounds and he can’t figure out how she doesn't just faint on that kind of diet.
Nothing.
She bites her lip and takes a breath and smacks her arm over onto the other side of the bed, and…
"Ow! Jesus, fuck, Morgan!"
There he is. Frank Lundy, very real and very dazed, staring at her in wounded confusion. She’s never been happier to find a naked man under the covers. "Are you going to do this every morning? Because I can look into wearing body armor to bed…"
All she can do is kiss him.
"Thought you'd be awake," she murmurs moments later, snuggling up to him once he's relaxed again and stopped bemusedly rubbing his sternum. "You used to get up early early. Make breakfast…"
"Mm, jetlag." Her head fits so perfectly against his shoulder it's ridiculous. "And you'd be lucky if you have half a stick of butter and a tomato in that fridge."
"You went through my fridge?" She shouldn't be surprised.
"You were late home. I was hungry. And you can tell a lot about people from their kitchens. Well, most people. People who actually eat once in a while."
"I eat! Fuck."
He's so absolutely real in the daylight that she can't doubt it, or herself, any longer. It's not just the broader strokes of his personality, his voice, his body… but the feather-light touch of his fingertips on her back, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the roughness of his scarred shoulder… She slips a hand down over his stomach, fingers circling the erection she'd hoped would be there. Fuck yeah morning wood. Not even fazed by getting smacked by a girlfriend who thinks you're a daydream.
She should be getting dressed and tearing out the door now… But not one part of her body wants to move from this spot. She just wants to lie back and enjoy him: the way he swells and stiffens in her hand, the kisses he plants so tenderly at her throat, his moan of satisfaction as he deftly parts her legs and slides home. She's never just appreciated life so much.
"I love you." She feels weighed down by sheer happiness afterward, facing him across a pillow, doing nothing but kissing and touching and breathing. She'd almost said those words before, long ago, but this time there's no lump in her throat or fear in his eyes. It just feels so finally right.
"I love you," Frank echoes, and now it sounds wrong. Not because of all his sweet sincerity and honest love for everything about her… but because of her, of everything that's been broken inside her for so very long.
She touches her fingertips to his lips, shaking her head, silencing him. "No… I fucked up, Frank. You don't know how much I've fucked up."
He kisses her fingers instead. "Why don't you tell me?"
"Fuck I've told you so many times. You just weren't really here."
He smiles with his eyes closed. "One more time, then."
"I slept with Quinn. I mean, I lived with him. For a year."
"He must've been good to you."
"Not really. I mean, yes. Okay. He was. But then he proposed and I ditched him and now he's become a complete whackjob... And I got promoted because of some stupid YouTube video…"
"I saw it."
"You and everyone else on the planet. It should've been Angel. I just don't know what I'm doing and no one respects me – I mean, why should they? I couldn't catch Trinity. Couldn't catch the guys responsible for the barrel girl murders. And now there's some fucking psycho running around reenacting Bible scenes. Not the cute ones, either. And I've lost all my friends, and Dexter's acting like a complete nutcase because Trinity's back, and fuck…"
Frank's eyes are open now, clear and non-judgmental as ever. Which is probably why she'd run this stuff over to an empty room more times than she can count. He doesn’t even get pissed at her in her dreams.
"I don't think it's Trinity. Not his usual pattern. Honestly I think he more than likely is dead. Given what happened to Dexter's wife, I think he's probably due a little nutcasery, don't you? But that's not your fault. As for Quinn, sometimes relationships don't work out. It doesn't mean either one of you is a serial killer. And I think more than likely you're doing an incredible job as a lieutenant. You've always been your own harshest critic, Debra."
She pouts, all her self-doubt and insecurity shot down in a few sentences. "Yeah, well. I have a therapist. She thinks you're unavailable and inappropriate."
“Well. To give her the benefit of the doubt, I was dead.”
“Fuck it.” Best therapy she’s had in weeks. “I had to watch you die? You can give everyone who’s ever pissed me off a heart attack. I’ll make a list.”
Frank’s laughing, and it is so fucking good to see him smiling again, to see him do anything again, that really she just wants to lie here forever and watch him fucking exist… and that’s when she remembers.
“Oh fuck. What time is it? Shit! I’m the goddamn lieutenant. I have a briefing to do… Fuck. Fuck!” She sits up, flailing amid pillows and blankets.
Frank watches her for a moment before leaning down and picking up her phone from the floor. “Here. No messages. The world hasn’t ended.”
“Yeah, you joke…”
“I’m taking you out for pancakes. No solving murders on an empty stomach. Then you can bring me up to speed on these Doomsday killings. See if I can help.”
Deb steps down from the bed, caught between dressing and sprinting into the shower. Even if she stands still her head’s spinning. “Wait, what? No. You can stay the fuck here and stay inside and be boring. Make scones or something. Last time…”
“Last time a very unbalanced woman decided to shoot me. It’s not going to happen again. Also, I have a gun now. The Bureau won't let me walk around without one.”
“Oh.” Maybe she should just focus on how good it is to even have these problems. “Well. Okay.”
His grin is wide enough to intimidate actual killers. “Okay. Do you have a spare t-shirt or something? I need to run out to my car, get my suitcase.” He finds his shorts on the floor. “And then I’m all moved in. One of the benefits of being dead is you don’t really accumulate possessions. My kid gave most of my things to charity.”
Moved in. Once she’d have freaked out about that. Now the bar on what freaks her out has been raised pretty fucking high. “Um. No… oh, wait, there’s one of Dexter’s. Bottom drawer. Took it by accident when I moved.”
Or not entirely by accident and more to make sure some of her breakables didn’t actually break in transit. La la la.
She takes the fastest shower on record, and when she gets out, throwing on clothes, he’s padding barefoot around her kitchen in boxers and a very dusty t-shirt, making tea. Because of course his suitcase is probably 2% underwear, 98% teabags.
“You know I have your FBI badge…” The words are out of her mouth before she can wonder if that’s at all obsessive or creepy. But she finds it for him, and he’s busy shaking out his suit from last night when the doorbell rings.
Dexter. Jesus fucking Christ. Did her apartment suddenly become the Bermuda Triangle for lost souls?
She flings the door open, fastening the last of the buttons on her blouse. “Where the fuck have you been? I said the day. As in, singular.”
But Dex – coolheaded, unflappable Dex – is looking right past her. It’s amazing he doesn’t drop his peace offering of coffee and donuts.
“Hello Dexter!” Frank says brightly. “How are you?”
Dexter opens his mouth and, instead of saying anything at all, offers his donut box. Frank takes one dotted with chocolate sprinkles and hums at it appreciatively.
Deb looks between them. “Seriously? Tell me you can see him too.”
“Um.” Dexter frowns. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen dead people. But, uh, is that my shirt?”