title: and i'm trying to enjoy it (but i'm missing all the fun)

A/N: This is a season finale post-ep that to a certain extent is just fandom therapy and is uncommonly short for me. But this is how I deal, and it feels like it might be the prologue to something larger. I'd love to know if anyone would want to see that something.

Dexter doesn't stay to watch her pack.

In the end there's really not much point. All she has is the one suitcase and absolutely none of it is important. She wouldn't even bother were it not for the fact the one thing she wants to take is the one thing she can't carry on.

It's only after she's gone through the trouble that she realizes she doesn't know where Dexter put her knife.

He'd told her he'd found it, but he'd never given it back. And it's no longer her place to go looking for it. So she takes something else (somehow she knows he won't mind).

She sits on the edge of the bed for a long time and asks herself the same question over and over—

Is this the only way?

Keeps hoping the answer will be 'No.'

It never is.

Lumen winds up renting a car, instead.

A plane is too fast, too final. Two hours to Atlanta, an hour layover, three more to Minneapolis, forty-five minutes in traffic and then what? Walk into her house? Rejoin her life? Pretend the worst thing that happened in the last four and a half months was running away from her wedding?

The thought makes her nauseous, so she turns away from the ticketing counters and heads to the rental desks, pays the exorbitant fee for driving out of state with a credit card she's ninety-five percent certain will be declined for non-payment until it amazingly goes through.

And for the first time in a long time Lumen thinks of her mother. Thinks of herself as even having a mother, of being someone other than the creature born in that cage. She has a mother, who doesn't know where she is, who opened her mail and paid her bills, who took care of her from afar.

She breaks down in the rental car parking lot.

Harrison's birthday party is perfect.

She hadn't intended to come, but somehow here she is. Standing halfway down the beach watching Dexter surrounded by his friends she doesn't know, his stepson she never met, a life she doesn't fit into. And it doesn't matter that she knows he would have made space, would have rearranged his world to keep her, because one part of him is fixed, immutable, unchanging. The axis around which everything else revolves.

Lumen got a glimpse of how easily it could become her axis too, and she can't let that happen. Not now, not when she has a chance, however small, to get out.

So she stands on the beach and says her goodbyes, thinks of Dexter's promise to carry her darkness, to keep it with him, and whispers, "I'll carry your light. Whatever happens, whatever you do. Know I'll keep it safe with me."

She's always been one to leave the important things unsaid until it's too late.

Lumen reaches the state line around sunset, pulls over at the last Florida rest-stop and pitches her suitcase in the dumpster.

After a moment's hesitation, she pulls out her phone and deletes the video-file of her rape without watching it. They left her enough to remember them by without this too.

Which is how Lumen Ann Pierce leaves Florida with the clothes on her back, leather gloves on her hands, two blood slides in her purse, and the shards of a broken plate tucked against her breast.

Dexter draws blood all the way to Alabama.