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Will had a dark, sarcastic sense of humour. He liked dogs better than people. He lived an hour’s drive from anywhere and another three hours by plane from the closest anywhere to Miami. He barely showered. He got so wrapped up in other people’s heads that he took on their mannerisms - spoke like them, walked like them - and most of the time those people were murderers. He acted like a dog that wanted to be pet but expected to be hit. He didn’t trust anybody, but he trusted Dexter.
Dexter liked him so, so much. It was a shame this was probably going to end with one of them dead.
Dexter was awkward and standoffish. He was bad with emotions, terrible at comforting people, had never once managed to tell his wife her loved her before she died. He was a widower with a small child. His favourite hobby was serial murder, and his second favourite hobby was bowling, which Will hated. He wasn’t good with animals, and dogs especially usually hated him. But Will seemed to like him anyway.
The first thing Will said in front of Dexter was a truly horrific joke about the poor dead teenage girl. Even Masuka cringed. Will – Will’s eyes bugged out of his head as he heard the words coming from his own mouth. He grit his teeth, shook himself like he was trying to shake the comment off of him. He looked down and away from everyone else in the room.
Not that he’d been looking them in the eyes before.
Dexter, who had been thinking something pretty similar, and who always made sure to keep those kinds of comments in the privacy of his own head, expanded on the joke in a way that made Masuka stare at him with disgust mixed with admiration and call him a sick, sick man.
It also made Will look at him.
When they caught the guy – well, when they caught him, Dexter had been pretty annoyed, to be honest. After all the legwork he’d done finding the guy himself. But also, he said the exact same thing about the girl that Will had. The inflections were so similar it was scary.
And fascinating.
After, Dexter invited Will out on the boat. Will stared at him for the longest minute of Dexter’s life. Then he said OK.
Next time, Dexter invited Will over to the apartment for steak. Will stared at him. Then he stared some more. Then Dexter, fighting the urge to slap himself in the face, said, “Uh, we could go and get the ingredients together first, maybe? You could come with me to buy the steak. And then supervise the steak, all the way to the grill. Or is that still… maybe we could order pizza?” and he held his breath, desperately hoping that Will would say OK again.
He knew this was dangerous territory. He knew that everything about this was reckless and stupid. But still. Something inside of him, something that lived in a place right next to his Dark Passenger, wanted, needed, to feed this man.