Dexter/Harry Potter Fanfiction
I was browsing the net for Dexter fanfiction and stumbled across a forum where they discussed Harry Potter/Dexter crossovers.
And because I just rewatched the whole season one in one go beforehand, this plot bunny showed up and sank its teeth into my ankle.
Seriously, no amount of kicking and running made it let go, so I gave in and wrote this in one go (which means there are probably a couple of typos in it).
It's not my best work, it has no dialogue at all and since I'm way, way behind on my Dexter-watching it's probably uncanon as hell.
Despite that I hope some people enjoy it.
Title: The Code of Harry James Potter Morgan
Author: TTF
Word count: 2931
Pairing: Mentioned Harry/Doris and Harry/Laura
Rated: M (description of a crime-scene and dark thoughts)
Summary: After Voldemort's defeat, Harry Potter leaves England and moves to America, changing his name into Harry Morgan. And becomes the person who shapes Dexter Moser Morgan into the killer we all know and love.
Disclaimer: None of the characters used belong to me. They are the property of their various creators.
Notes: It's an introspective piece and I wrote it while extremely tired and while listening to Howard Carpendale's 'Hello Again'.
Please don't expect too much.
After Voldemort is defeated, Harry thinks about staying in the wizarding world.
There are the Weasleys - who need every support they can get after Fred's death.
There are Ron, his best friend, who stayed with him and helped him destroy the Hocruxes and Hermione, who is already thinking about how she can repeat her last year at Hogwarts and finish up school.
There is Teddy Lupin, who needs a parental figure in his life now.
There are Neville, Luna and the rest of the DA members and also the rest of his teachers.
And of course there is Ginny.
Beautiful, lively, stubborn Ginny, who had loved him since before she had really known him and whom he had grown attracted to.
But in the end he finds that the bad memories he has of the wizarding world overwhelm the good ones.
The faint memory of his parents being killed.
Losing Sirius.
Losing Dumbledore.
Losing Remus and Tonks and Fred.
Even losing Snape.
Being hounded and hunted down by the Media, the Ministry, the Death Eaters and Voldemort.
Being hated by most of the people who had been supposed to support him had left a much deeper impression on him than he had thought.
And so he leaves the world into which he had fallen as a child and moves to America.
He takes evening-classes and the joins the police academy. He had once told Minerva McGonagal that he wanted to be an Auror and even though he had left that world, he still wanted to do good.
When people still hound him he decides to move and change his name.
He chooses Miami as a new starting-place and the name he takes is 'Morgan' - Harry Morgan.
He is content there.
*+*+*
He meets Doris during a murder-investigation.
She was a witness, shaken up but pretending to be fine and he was enchanted.
He is ecstatic when he asks her for coffee and she says yes.
*+*+*
When Debra is born Harry can feel his heart pound in his chest. It is both the most joyous and the most frightening event in his life and his hands are trembling with both anticipation and nerves when he first holds his little girl in his arms.
Doris just looks on, smiling almost amusedly as her usually composed husband looks at their baby like she is the most miraculous thing he has ever seen.
He doesn't tell her that she is.
*+*+*
Harry has always had a strong sense of justice. Even at Hogwarts - a place he never speaks of or even thinks about - he had never been able to stomach cruelty and unfairness and he had always thought that it was important for a cop to have such a sense.
He is only now finding out that such a thing might not be true and wishes he had fewer morals.
It's killing him, to have to watch murderers go free just because they have a good lawyer and the police too little evidence.
It's killing him, that his superiors care more about looking good than they do about getting results.
But most of all, it kills him that his partner's - his partner, his friend, his confidant - murderer gets off scot-free just because he had a girlfriend who lied and gave him an alibi.
It's at times like these that Harry wishes he could take back the vow he had made after leaving the Wizarding World. He had vowed to never use magic again, unless he was attacked by a wizard.
He yearns to - just once - take things into his own hands and just once strike back against the overwhelming filth he battles against every day without getting results.
Because for every criminal they put away, three worse ones show up.
But he can control that impulse.
He's not that desperate yet and even if he hates the people who are so much like Voldemort that it makes him want to throw up, he still had Doris and Debbie to go home to and that makes it almost worth it.
*+*+*
He met Laura Moser when he busted her for drug-dealing. She had been clean though and when he asked her for information in exchange of going free without having charges raised against her she agrees without hesitation.
It's surprising and intriguing until he finds out that she has two little boys at home and something in him softens at that, something that recognises traces of 'Ginny' in her.
When she first makes advances towards him he doesn't refuse her.
He loves Doris and would rather die than hurt her, but there is a part of him that had never quite been able to move on from Ginny and while he feels guilty for cheating on Doris and for using Laura as a substitute for his first love (Cho was more a crush than love) he can't get himself to stop.
He has already denied himself so much in his life, he allows this single selfishness once in a while, careful never to let on to Doris what was going on and secure in the knowledge that once they arrest the drug-ring they're after, he will be able to break up this 'thing' they have with each other.
The his world comes down crashing.
*+*+*
Harry Morgan - formerly Harry Potter - had never thought of himself as a naïve person.
He had had to live without his parents, had had to endure the Dursley's abuse, had had to fight for his life for more times than he could count before he had even been old enough to drink and after Voldemort he had always thought that he had seen the worst humanity had to offer.
Then he had become a cop and he had seen even more of the ugly side of humankind and he had thought that while there were evil and bad people, they were still essentially people. That it sometimes wasn't even their fault that they were the way they were.
But what he had seen in that container had made him realise that he had been naïve.
Some people weren't people, they were simply monsters in disguise.
Never had he felt such disgust, such horror, such helplessness and despair as he had when he had opened that container at the haven and seen what had been inside.
He had seen Laura's head - separated from her body and staring up at him almost accusingly - before he had even realised that her two boys - Brian and Dexter - were there too.
At the first heart-stopping moment he had thought that they were dead, but then he realised that they were still breathing.
And his horror had risen as he realised that they were unharmed and conscious.
That meant that they had witnessed the slaughter of at least three people - the blood made it hard to count the heads and something in him recoiled from looking at the rest of the body-parts in detail - including their own mother.
He hesitantly walked towards the boys, noticing that they stared at him with large empty eyes and he felt tears rise in his eyes and bile rise in his throat as he looked at them.
And then the older one, pale-skinned and dark-haired tilted his head, his gaze sharpening and suddenly Harry couldn't breathe, because it was a look he had seen once before in a memory Dumbledore had once shown him, of a young dark-haired child with brown eyes who would later become the most horrifying Dark Lord in the history of the Wizarding World.
They were the eyes of a killer and the fact that they looked at him from the face of a boy who was barely five years old chilled him to the bone.
With his heart again pounding in his chest he looked at the younger boy - only three years old - and found himself praying that he wouldn't find the same eyes there.
And he didn't.
Instead of a killer, a hurt, broken soul looked at him and made his chest constrict because he had once seen such eyes every time he had looked into a mirror.
Swallowing thickly, he quickly grabbed the unresponsive boy, doing his best not to look at the older one and bolted from the container, again feeling bile rise in his throat when he accidentally stepped on a chopped-off hand and broke it in the process.
He was more than glad when he saw the back-up he had been requesting arrive since that meant that the other, older boy wasn't his problem anymore.
Vaguely he noticed that a female officer offered him to take the boy, but he felt his arms tighten around the child instead, politely refusing as he thought about that broken look in large brown eyes, so very much like Laura's that it made him feel like crying.
Even before consciously thinking about it, he had already decided that he was going to take the boy home to Doris and Debbie and try to make that raw, hurting, vulnerable look vanish from these eyes.
*+*+*
Doris had been concerned about his sudden decision to take the boy in, but she was a mother and the obviously hurting and traumatised child tugged at her heartstrings.
And when Debbie, dear, innocent Debbie, childishly asked if he had brought her a big brother home like she had always asked him to - because Sarah next door had a big brother and she was always bragging about him and Debbie wanted one too - Doris quickly gave in, one childishly demanding, one hurting and one desperately pleading look convincing her.
And so Harry started the legal proceedings to transform little Dexter Moser into Dexter Morgan.
After a while he was able to put Laura at rest, knowing she would be content in the knowledge of her baby's safety - and deliberately didn't think about Brian.
But he could not put to rest the knowledge of monsters in human guise.
It sometimes made him want to laugh. He had seen werewolves and centaurs and other magical beings, all in the guise of monsters, but very human underneath that guise.
Only now had he realised that the opposite also existed.
Some people said that humans were the worst kind of monsters there were, but Harry had come to realise that some humans just weren't human at all.
*+*+*
And Dexter grew up.
At first he had thought that maybe he and Doris and Debbie could heal the wounds Laura's murder had left in the boy, but then he had come to realise that it was impossible.
Dexter rarely smiled, never laughed and seemed to be completely empty of emotion, something which Harry knew often worried Doris, something which she didn't need with her health already weakening.
And when the neighbourhood-pets started to disappear, he knew that he had a problem and he knew what he should do.
He should take Dexter to the same institution which his brother had been sent to or give him to his father - who would probably love to take the boy in - but he couldn't bring himself to do it.
Not when he loved this boy as though he were his own.
Not when he saw how attached Debbie and Doris were to him.
Not when he saw the self-loathing and quiet despair in his son's - because that's what he was - eyes, the only emotions which would show in them and regardless of Dex's claim that he never felt anything other than the need.
When he saw how badly his boy was hurting and didn't even feel it, the trauma having sedated his soul to the point where no feeling registered, no matter how powerful and present it was, he couldn't bring himself to do it.
And when he tried to deal with this problem, a tiny thought occurred to him, one which he immediately recoiled from.
At first.
He had sworn to never use magic against a non-magic-user.
Even though most didn't deserve that oath.
He had sworn to protect people.
Even though many didn't deserve to be protected.
He had sworn to never hurt or kill a person except in the defence of himself and others in need of protection.
Even though that often meant letting rapists and drug-dealers and scum go because the prisons were too small and they needed the space for even worse people and what did that say about humans when a rapist was one of the lesser evils.
Often he chocked on the injustice of the system which let murderers roam free just because they had money or connections which they used to get rid of the charges and just continued on as if nothing had happened and people were too spineless and corrupt to do their jobs right.
It was in these moments in which he wished he could just go back to the Wizarding World, because at least there his word had some weight and killers went to Azkaban or got the Kiss and sometimes got killed.
And he knew it was unhealthy to think that way, he knew that there were still plenty of people worthy of being protected, but whenever he tried to think about them he always had to think about that damned container with Laura Moser's body-parts in in and the fact that their suspect had simply bought his way free.
And he didn't have his oasis anymore, what with Doris being sick and Debbie and Dex suffering because of it and Dex' little problem of wanting to kill people.
Because if he wasn't alert and stopped watching the boy, then he would turn into the one thing which he had always tried to prevent him from becoming.
A monster.
And then he thought of fighting fire with fire, fighting monster with monster and the thought sent a chill down his back.
At first one of horror that he even dared to think of such a thing and of despair that he was becoming just like Voldemort and that the Hocrux which had been connected to him had soiled or stained him in some way.
But the more he thought about it - and he thought about it often - he realised that the thought had merit.
The the chill became one of anticipation.
He loved Dexter.
Of course, he loved Debbie too, but he had never been able to connect with her as he had with Dexter.
The most traumatic experience Deb had ever had, had been when he had explained to her about Doris being sick.
He knew that later - after Doris had died - she would grieve and hurt and be devastated, but she would - hopefully - never have to experience the sudden, violent death of a parent in front of her eyes.
As he had with his parents and with Sirius.
As Dexter had with his mother.
And while Dexter didn't remember it happening, it had still instilled a sense of loss in him that spoke to the part of Harry's soul that had always yearned for a parents' affection.
Yes, he truly loved Dexter, who was his son in every sense but blood, and he would rather die than let him be hurt.
And he knew that Dexter would be hurt if he was caught by the police for killing a person.
And then he thought about how to help his boy, how to keep him safe and he thought about fighting fire with fire and then he decided that he would have to do what he had to do.
And so he started Dexter's training.
*+*+*
It didn't really surprise Harry when he got sick.
It fit the irony of his life, of surviving insurmountable odds just to be struck down by an illness.
Neither his friends on the force nor Debbie and Dexter appreciated his humour.
Especially Deb took it hard and he often felt guilty that he hadn't been the father to her he was sure she had wanted him to be.
He knew that he had probably neglected her horribly, but he had been so caught up in training Dex, realising his dream of protecting his boy and of shaping a weapon to fight against evil that he simply hadn't had the time for her.
He regretted that now.
And Dexter, his boy, his gift to humanity, his tool to ensure justice was done, he often looked unsure in their last talks before he knew his life would end.
He had taught Dexter everything the boy - now a young man - would need to survive as a free man and as long as Dex adhered to the 'Code of Harry' as Dexter had dubbed it, nothing would go wrong.
And then Dexter showed him the results of both their work.
And it broke something in Harry, who had thought himself already too damaged to be broken again. And as it turned out, that was the straw that broke the camels back.
His life really hadn't been an easy one and he remembered that there had only been brief flashes of happiness throughout it, bright, shining moments that enabled him to go on through the darker times.
And at the end he realised that while he had created a tool for justice, he had also created an undefeatable monster and he wouldn't live long enough to make sure that Dex would keep using the 'Code'.
He had created another Voldemort, another Death Eater, another tool for destruction and he knew that he had paid for the material and then paved his own way straight into hell.
*+*+*
As I said, it's not all that great, but I hope it was enjoyable nonetheless.
Greetings,
TTF