Yuletide fic: Blood Will Out (Deb/Rudy, Dexter, R)
So for Yuletide this year I wrote a Dexter fic. I was really thrilled with the response I got - I haven't replied yet, but I cherished every single comment! I'm posting it here because I'm a completist.
Title: Blood Will Out
Fandom: Dexter
Summary: Deb just wants her brother to meet her boyfriend. (Set during Season One's Father Knows Best)
Characters: Deb/Rudy, Dexter
Rating: R
AN: Written for Yuletide '07, originally posted here
It isn’t that Rudy reminds her of Dex, because that would be fucking creepy. It’s more that...
She feels comfortable when she’s with him, the way that she does with Dex, only here there’s sexy times and Rudy doesn’t, like, awkwardly hit at her arm when he says something complementary, or know what a trainwreck her junior prom was, or any of the Dex-stuff that is really only acceptable because he’s her brother.
Rudy is hers.
*
It was Rudy that suggested dinner. He wants to get to know Dexter better - Deb’s beginning to get a little suspicious, really, because what guy wanted to have fucking dinner with his new girlfriend’s brother when he could be at home screwing her goddamn brains out, anyhow?
She doesn’t want to think the answer that her father would have given her, because it freaks her right the hell out. Debra Morgan just isn’t the type of girl who attracted nice guys. She attracts married losers and deadbeats, as her entire dating career suggests, but here was this doctor - a fucking doctor! - who asks about her childhood and wants to meet her family and is, as judged by all the questionaires in the Cosmos that she bought specifically for this purpose, a genuinely nice guy.
And she can’t convince her brother to just meet him, because her brother is a dipshit who doesn’t get that this is potentially huge.
So when attacking him at work doesn’t work, she insists on having lunch together. She’s not above begging if it comes to that, but she’s set on badgering her brother until he caves and sees how massively important it is that he meets Rudy.
Dex shows up late.
Her brother comes in two flavors: annoyingly hokey and unerringly odd, and judging from the fidgety way he was jingling the change in his pockets, tonight’s an odd night. Which was good, because really, what if Rudy decided he likes Dex more than Deb when faced with someone who isn’t a neurotic mess? It had been known to happen before, even if there was no way in hell Deb is ever going to tell Dex what really happened with Jake.
Sh really shouldn’t be this nervous just asking, as it wasn’t like Dex and Rudy would hate each other or anything, but things just didn’t go good for her, like, ever, and without Dex’s approval the whole thing might fall flat. She wonders briefly if her father had maybe somehow brainwashed her in her sleep back when she was a kid, but the thought of Harry Morgan doing anything that subversive was a fucking joke.
“Jesus, why don’t you call when you’re going to be forever late?” Deb gripes before Dexter can even sit down.
“Well, I would have, but seeing as I’m only three minutes late...” her brother says smoothly as he makes a show of checking his watch and raising an eyebrow at her. The fucker.
“Whatever, you loser. You are going to meet my boyfriend, and I wanted to lay down the ground rules.” Her brother was sometimes a moron and she thought it was best to remind him of all the things he wasn’t supposed to do.
“I haven’t agreed to that,” he says, taking a sip of his water. “I told you, I’m real busy.”
“Don’t be an asshole! This is important, I already told you.”
Dex’s face doesn’t change. She knows her brother well enough to recognize when he’s just humoring her and pretending to care about whatever she’s ranting about. Usually, it’s something trivial enough that she’s okay with him spacing - it’s not like she listens when he goes on about his goddamn bowling team or whatever it is besides Rita that he spends his spare time doing - but this is about possibly the best thing to happen in her love life since, well, ever.
“You and Rita are alright, right? Nothing wrong there?” she tries.
“What? No, we’re fine. Same as ever,”he says quickly.
“Then why are you being such a freak-face weirdo about meeting my boyfriend?” she demands. She’s a big believer in directness.
“Um.” He looks taken aback. Good.
“Come on, big bro! You’ve got to come with me.”
Dexter mumbles something about prior commitments - bullshit, Deb knows, because her brother was the most boring person on earth and besides, she’s already told him he should bring Rita along.
Deb isn’t going to let her brother weasel his way out of this one. Not when Rudy feels so important to her.
*
There’s this way that Rudy smiles at her, like he knows her every secret but isn’t repulsed, that makes butterflies flutter in her stomach in a way Deb hasn’t felt since she was in high school gazing at Charlie What’s-his-face in biology class and scratching their initials into her lab table’s scarred surface.
She can’t say it out loud, because there’s now way for a grown ass woman to say something like that without sounding retarded, but that’s the best part of this whole thing.
“Do you remember not having a brother?”
Deb squishes the pillow over her face and says loudly, “Can’t this wait til morning?”
“Of course,” Rudy says, but she’s a cop’s daughter and she knows how to hear disappointment in someone’s voice. She rolls over and peeks out from under the floppy corner of the pillow case.
“Not really. I mean, I was tiny when Dad brought Dex home, so it’s like he’s always been there. I can’t imagine life without him.”
“I’d say that would be difficult to picture,” Rudy said, words measured oddly.
“I mean... you’re an only child, right? So you don’t know what it’s like having a big brother. He drives me crazy and is always doing stupid things that he thinks is supposed to help and never do, but he’s my big brother and God, I couldn’t sound more like a fucking greeting card if I tried.” Deb smashes the pillow back down over her face, taking a deep breath of hot, thin air.
There’s this pause, and for a second she thinks this might be it, this is when it all falls to shit, but instead he just laughs.
“That’s sweet, really,” Rudy says, and he’s totally fucking mocking her, and she hits him with her pillow.
“Shut the hell up, cocksucker,” she says, not able to keep the smile off her face. “You’re the one who asked stupid fucking Hallmark questions.”
“I was just... curious. About you. Him. Your lives,” he says, and it’s completely unguarded and open and he’s staring at her with this intent expression that she hasn’t really seen before.
“I’ve already told you. I don’t have any weird childhood trauma, so you don’t have to worry about me cracking like a nut,” she says, grinning and miming stabbing at his heart. “Like the freaks we sometimes deal with at work. They make anyone feel better about themselves.”
Rudy laughs. “Anything that gets you through the night, right?”
“That’s right,” Deb laughs.
“You know what else gets me through the night?” Rudy says, leaning in for a kiss.
“Well, I mean, we’re already up,”Deb says, running her hand down the smooth muscular planes of his stomach. “Might as well do something about that.”
She’s a little surprised to find him already hard, and he grabs her wrist, pulling her hand away as he kisses her and twists on top of her, pressing her into the mattress.
Rudy does this thing, sometimes, that Deb thinks probably has to do with his job so she doesn’t really bring it up. Since she doesn’t really mind, since she’d had weirder boyfriends by far, and it isn’t even really a kink....
He would touch her in measured, precise strokes. Her legs, her arms, all her extremities would get these reverent strokes with his fingertips, in straight lines all the way around. She wonders if he’s sometimes surprised, given what he sees everyday, that someone could have unmutilated flesh, the same way she sometimes forgot that there were people in the world who aren’t just criminals or victims.
She doesn’t tease him about it the way she does everything else, because there’s something unguarded and unconscious about the actions that made her feel like Rudy was showing her a bit of his soul, fucking stupid as that sounded, and she isn’t about to fuck that up.
*
The funny part is, she spends all this time trying to get Dex to meet Rudy, and here they all are, staying in Dexter’s fucking biological father’s house and she’s in such a fucking snit that she doesn’t care if they say three words to each other.
Because Dex - after all that shit she was telling Rudy about how they were family no matter whether or not he’d been adopted - had gone behind her back and ordered that DNA test. He’d doubted their father’s word, and hadn’t even whispered a word to her about it.
And the worst part was that he’d been right.
Their father had lied to him, and Dex had somehow known, and here she is, angry like a spoiled little brat because Dexter had family outside of her.
Family that is dead. Dexter is an orphan fucking two times over and she’s somehow the one screaming in front of everyone.
Rudy tells her that her reaction is natural, that she’s going through an understandably emotional time, and that so is Dexter. He tries to play Dr. Phil, and Deb hates that she finds it so reassuring.
Rudy keeps watching Dexter, looking around this house like it somehow holds some strange key to who her brother is. To who she is.
And somehow she convinces herself to stop being angry at Dexter because their father (theirs, dammit, not just hers) lied about an ex-junkie who may or may not have been murdered for, judging by the boring-ass contents our his house, no reason or gain whatsoever.
Harry Morgan had a reason for everything he did, Deb knows. Usually because it’s the right thing, like when he brought Dexter home and made him part of their family and gave Deb someone to lean on. (If he hadn’t adopted Dex, she’d be alone.) And sometimes she wonders if that was on purpose, if Dad maybe thought that she wouldn’t be able to find someone to lean on herself.
Maybe she’s never found anyone because she has someone so secure to lean on.
She isn’t used to having Rudy just yet. Isn’t used to feeling safe and loved by someone who wasn’t a Morgan.
By someone who chose her for her, not because of blood.
*
Deb spends a lot of time holding her breath and trying to not fuck things up, it seems to her sometimes.
The rest of the time she just keeps hoping that she is somehow succeeding.
Title: Blood Will Out
Fandom: Dexter
Summary: Deb just wants her brother to meet her boyfriend. (Set during Season One's Father Knows Best)
Characters: Deb/Rudy, Dexter
Rating: R
AN: Written for Yuletide '07, originally posted here
It isn’t that Rudy reminds her of Dex, because that would be fucking creepy. It’s more that...
She feels comfortable when she’s with him, the way that she does with Dex, only here there’s sexy times and Rudy doesn’t, like, awkwardly hit at her arm when he says something complementary, or know what a trainwreck her junior prom was, or any of the Dex-stuff that is really only acceptable because he’s her brother.
Rudy is hers.
*
It was Rudy that suggested dinner. He wants to get to know Dexter better - Deb’s beginning to get a little suspicious, really, because what guy wanted to have fucking dinner with his new girlfriend’s brother when he could be at home screwing her goddamn brains out, anyhow?
She doesn’t want to think the answer that her father would have given her, because it freaks her right the hell out. Debra Morgan just isn’t the type of girl who attracted nice guys. She attracts married losers and deadbeats, as her entire dating career suggests, but here was this doctor - a fucking doctor! - who asks about her childhood and wants to meet her family and is, as judged by all the questionaires in the Cosmos that she bought specifically for this purpose, a genuinely nice guy.
And she can’t convince her brother to just meet him, because her brother is a dipshit who doesn’t get that this is potentially huge.
So when attacking him at work doesn’t work, she insists on having lunch together. She’s not above begging if it comes to that, but she’s set on badgering her brother until he caves and sees how massively important it is that he meets Rudy.
Dex shows up late.
Her brother comes in two flavors: annoyingly hokey and unerringly odd, and judging from the fidgety way he was jingling the change in his pockets, tonight’s an odd night. Which was good, because really, what if Rudy decided he likes Dex more than Deb when faced with someone who isn’t a neurotic mess? It had been known to happen before, even if there was no way in hell Deb is ever going to tell Dex what really happened with Jake.
Sh really shouldn’t be this nervous just asking, as it wasn’t like Dex and Rudy would hate each other or anything, but things just didn’t go good for her, like, ever, and without Dex’s approval the whole thing might fall flat. She wonders briefly if her father had maybe somehow brainwashed her in her sleep back when she was a kid, but the thought of Harry Morgan doing anything that subversive was a fucking joke.
“Jesus, why don’t you call when you’re going to be forever late?” Deb gripes before Dexter can even sit down.
“Well, I would have, but seeing as I’m only three minutes late...” her brother says smoothly as he makes a show of checking his watch and raising an eyebrow at her. The fucker.
“Whatever, you loser. You are going to meet my boyfriend, and I wanted to lay down the ground rules.” Her brother was sometimes a moron and she thought it was best to remind him of all the things he wasn’t supposed to do.
“I haven’t agreed to that,” he says, taking a sip of his water. “I told you, I’m real busy.”
“Don’t be an asshole! This is important, I already told you.”
Dex’s face doesn’t change. She knows her brother well enough to recognize when he’s just humoring her and pretending to care about whatever she’s ranting about. Usually, it’s something trivial enough that she’s okay with him spacing - it’s not like she listens when he goes on about his goddamn bowling team or whatever it is besides Rita that he spends his spare time doing - but this is about possibly the best thing to happen in her love life since, well, ever.
“You and Rita are alright, right? Nothing wrong there?” she tries.
“What? No, we’re fine. Same as ever,”he says quickly.
“Then why are you being such a freak-face weirdo about meeting my boyfriend?” she demands. She’s a big believer in directness.
“Um.” He looks taken aback. Good.
“Come on, big bro! You’ve got to come with me.”
Dexter mumbles something about prior commitments - bullshit, Deb knows, because her brother was the most boring person on earth and besides, she’s already told him he should bring Rita along.
Deb isn’t going to let her brother weasel his way out of this one. Not when Rudy feels so important to her.
*
There’s this way that Rudy smiles at her, like he knows her every secret but isn’t repulsed, that makes butterflies flutter in her stomach in a way Deb hasn’t felt since she was in high school gazing at Charlie What’s-his-face in biology class and scratching their initials into her lab table’s scarred surface.
She can’t say it out loud, because there’s now way for a grown ass woman to say something like that without sounding retarded, but that’s the best part of this whole thing.
“Do you remember not having a brother?”
Deb squishes the pillow over her face and says loudly, “Can’t this wait til morning?”
“Of course,” Rudy says, but she’s a cop’s daughter and she knows how to hear disappointment in someone’s voice. She rolls over and peeks out from under the floppy corner of the pillow case.
“Not really. I mean, I was tiny when Dad brought Dex home, so it’s like he’s always been there. I can’t imagine life without him.”
“I’d say that would be difficult to picture,” Rudy said, words measured oddly.
“I mean... you’re an only child, right? So you don’t know what it’s like having a big brother. He drives me crazy and is always doing stupid things that he thinks is supposed to help and never do, but he’s my big brother and God, I couldn’t sound more like a fucking greeting card if I tried.” Deb smashes the pillow back down over her face, taking a deep breath of hot, thin air.
There’s this pause, and for a second she thinks this might be it, this is when it all falls to shit, but instead he just laughs.
“That’s sweet, really,” Rudy says, and he’s totally fucking mocking her, and she hits him with her pillow.
“Shut the hell up, cocksucker,” she says, not able to keep the smile off her face. “You’re the one who asked stupid fucking Hallmark questions.”
“I was just... curious. About you. Him. Your lives,” he says, and it’s completely unguarded and open and he’s staring at her with this intent expression that she hasn’t really seen before.
“I’ve already told you. I don’t have any weird childhood trauma, so you don’t have to worry about me cracking like a nut,” she says, grinning and miming stabbing at his heart. “Like the freaks we sometimes deal with at work. They make anyone feel better about themselves.”
Rudy laughs. “Anything that gets you through the night, right?”
“That’s right,” Deb laughs.
“You know what else gets me through the night?” Rudy says, leaning in for a kiss.
“Well, I mean, we’re already up,”Deb says, running her hand down the smooth muscular planes of his stomach. “Might as well do something about that.”
She’s a little surprised to find him already hard, and he grabs her wrist, pulling her hand away as he kisses her and twists on top of her, pressing her into the mattress.
Rudy does this thing, sometimes, that Deb thinks probably has to do with his job so she doesn’t really bring it up. Since she doesn’t really mind, since she’d had weirder boyfriends by far, and it isn’t even really a kink....
He would touch her in measured, precise strokes. Her legs, her arms, all her extremities would get these reverent strokes with his fingertips, in straight lines all the way around. She wonders if he’s sometimes surprised, given what he sees everyday, that someone could have unmutilated flesh, the same way she sometimes forgot that there were people in the world who aren’t just criminals or victims.
She doesn’t tease him about it the way she does everything else, because there’s something unguarded and unconscious about the actions that made her feel like Rudy was showing her a bit of his soul, fucking stupid as that sounded, and she isn’t about to fuck that up.
*
The funny part is, she spends all this time trying to get Dex to meet Rudy, and here they all are, staying in Dexter’s fucking biological father’s house and she’s in such a fucking snit that she doesn’t care if they say three words to each other.
Because Dex - after all that shit she was telling Rudy about how they were family no matter whether or not he’d been adopted - had gone behind her back and ordered that DNA test. He’d doubted their father’s word, and hadn’t even whispered a word to her about it.
And the worst part was that he’d been right.
Their father had lied to him, and Dex had somehow known, and here she is, angry like a spoiled little brat because Dexter had family outside of her.
Family that is dead. Dexter is an orphan fucking two times over and she’s somehow the one screaming in front of everyone.
Rudy tells her that her reaction is natural, that she’s going through an understandably emotional time, and that so is Dexter. He tries to play Dr. Phil, and Deb hates that she finds it so reassuring.
Rudy keeps watching Dexter, looking around this house like it somehow holds some strange key to who her brother is. To who she is.
And somehow she convinces herself to stop being angry at Dexter because their father (theirs, dammit, not just hers) lied about an ex-junkie who may or may not have been murdered for, judging by the boring-ass contents our his house, no reason or gain whatsoever.
Harry Morgan had a reason for everything he did, Deb knows. Usually because it’s the right thing, like when he brought Dexter home and made him part of their family and gave Deb someone to lean on. (If he hadn’t adopted Dex, she’d be alone.) And sometimes she wonders if that was on purpose, if Dad maybe thought that she wouldn’t be able to find someone to lean on herself.
Maybe she’s never found anyone because she has someone so secure to lean on.
She isn’t used to having Rudy just yet. Isn’t used to feeling safe and loved by someone who wasn’t a Morgan.
By someone who chose her for her, not because of blood.
*
Deb spends a lot of time holding her breath and trying to not fuck things up, it seems to her sometimes.
The rest of the time she just keeps hoping that she is somehow succeeding.