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It's ass o'clock in the morning and Dylan's still awake, perched on the stuffy couch in the ugly living room, nursing his third whiskey and waiting up until Norma returns from her latest date with Deputy Creepy. It's become a habit recently, both Norma's long nights out and Dylan hanging around, waiting for her to come back home. He should go to bed and let her do whatever she pleases, but he figures if he stayed up until now, he might as well wait until she actually returns. If she returns at all tonight.
He pours himself another drink and watches the closed front door, the incessant ticking of the clock loud like a second heartbeat in the empty room, edging on the headache the drink has already caused him.
The difference between Dylan and the rest of his family is that Dylan knows how fucked up he is. Norma and Norman are stuck pretending that this is normal: their messy codependent relationship, the way Norma clings to her son like a jealous, overbearing girlfriend and Norman will put his entire life on hold for her, a vicious cycle that goes on and on until one day Norman will wake up and figure out that he needs to get out and he'll steal away like a thief in the night.
Dylan known this, because he's been there. He's been the good son until he wasn't, until he realized that none of this was normal, none of this was healthy, and then he left and never looked back.
Except, that's not true because he's here, isn't he? Followed Norma halfway across the country and made himself at home under her roof with some bullshit excuse that he was broke and had nowhere left to go, like there weren't any barely legal jobs for him to take in Arizona, or shady friends with ratty couches he could have crashed on. But he's not in Arizona, slumming it with his buddies and selling coke for a living. He's with Norma and his sociopathic little baby brother in Bumblefuck, Oregon, where Norma bought a fucking motel and apparently killed a man within a week of arriving.
She's a crazy bitch and she's clearly losing it, but Dylan isn't sure what that makes him, because he was the one who followed her. He's the one who's couldn't stay away, the one who's sticking around even now.
His glass is empty again when the door opens and Norma comes in, looking content and… well-fucked as she kicks off her shoes and shrugs off her coat to reveal a dress too short and flimsy for this time of the year, and something about it makes Dylan's stomach churn and his anger flare up like a torch.
Norma walks into the room, and her smile slips from her lips when she spots Dylan. He raises his glass to her in a mock salute.
"You're home late. Had a good time?" He puts a grin on his face that he knows she finds absolutely infuriating. It works every time, even when he's faking it.
"It's none of your business." She frowns at him. "Why are you still up? It's four in the morning." So condescending. As if he was the one slinking inside at this time of night after a booty call.
He shakes his head, laughing softly at her nerve to act all holier than thou even now. "I don't know, Norma. I guess I wanted to wait and see if you'd come home at all tonight." He pushes himself up from the couch. It takes a moment until his legs are steady enough to move, and once they are, he advances on Norma, crossing the distance between them until she's close enough to touch. She takes a step backwards, trying to evade him, and that little display of fear from her makes him more light-headed than the alcohol has. It gets him high faster than any drug he ever tried – and he's tried most of them. He grins, satisfied. "What I can't stop wondering is, do you actually enjoy this? Do you like spreading your legs for him like a whore or are you just letting him fuck you because he can help you cover up the fact that you killed some poor sod and dumped his body in the ocean?"
He watches the shock flare up on her face, getting too caught up in the sight – how she pales and her eyes grow wide and her lips part in a way that's positively sinful – to stop her when she slaps him, hard enough to make his head snap around at the impact. She pulls her arm back again, but this time he's faster, his fingers clamping around her wrist, halting her motion before she can hit him again.
"How do you—" She doesn't finish the question. She doesn't need to.
His smile spreads as he chuckles. "Yeah, Norman told me all about your dirty little secret. Explains why the police are so interested in you. And why you're so interested in a certain deputy."
When Norma tries to pull away, he tightens his hold on her wrist.
"You're hurting me. Let me go," she says, halfway between a plea and an order.
His grip doesn't waver. "What if I don't want to?"
He feels the bone moving beneath his fingers, her skin and flesh chaving against it. She seems so fragile now. Like it wouldn't take much for him to snap that bone, to really hurt her, with more than barbed words and half-serious threats. He wants to. Wants to make her hurt for all the things she's done to him (and Norman too – except he doesn't really give a fuck about Norman; he's not and has no interest in being his brother's keeper). Wants to make her see that things are different now; that she can't order him around anymore. Wants to push her down on that ugly rag and tear off that stupid dress and –
Doesn't matter what he wants. Norma may look fragile and helpless and easily overpowered, but she's not. There's a dead body in the ocean that can attest to that, and another one in a grave back home under a stone that reads 'loving husband', and Dylan knows better than to underestimate Norma.
He lets go of her arm, holding up his hands in mock surrender at the murderous look she shoots him. He smiles when he watches her massage her sore, reddened wrist, a soft wince escaping the lipstick-smeared mouth.
"What do you want?" she asks, like she doesn't know what a loaded question that is. When he doesn't respond – can't begin to think what to say, really – she scoffs. "Oh, don't look at me like that. You know what I mean. What are you going to do with what Norman told you?"
Now that his anger has burned out, for the moment at least, he's too weary to continue playing games. He shrugs. "I'm going to help you make it go away. That's what you do in a family, Norma. You stick together."
Says it like it's obvious, and gets a look of disbelief bestowed on him, suspicion and bone-deep loathing in her eyes that would scare him if it wasn't so familiar. "Don't pretend like your concept of 'family' isn't some fucked up mess that has nothing to do with what family really is about."
"Like yours isn't? All I know about family is what I learned from you, mother." It's the first time he called her that in… he cannot remember quite how long. Sometimes, he has to remind himself that this woman is his mother, and even when he does, something inside him rebells against the idea. It doesn't feel like she's his mother: nothing about the way she's treated him – now and in the past – is maternal, and the way he feels about her is certainly not how any sane man should feel about the woman who gave birth to him.
And maybe she knows that, because for all her display of aversion against Dylan calling her Norma, now that he actually says the word 'mother', it makes her flinch. Her hostile demeanor gives way to weariness.
She sighs and runs a nervous hand through her hair. "Please. I can't do this tonight. I'm tired and I have a headache and I just want to go to bed and sleep, so can we just pretend like we're normal people who have a normal relationship and don't hate each other."
"Sure," he says. "Let's pretend."
It's anything they ever do, so what's one night more or less. His eyes follow her as she walks up the steps to her bedroom. The aftertaste of the 'mother' is still in his mouth, bitter and stale and wrong, and he knows he can't drink enough to wash it away.
"Goodnight, Norma," he calls after her.
She pauses at the top of the staircase and turns around. It's too far and too dark to make out her expression from where he stands. He's had a dream like that, not too long ago – or perhaps it was a nightmare (hard to tell them apart, these days) – and in it she turned to him and said, 'Come to bed.' He doesn't know if he went or not because he woke up then, Norma shouting at Norman in the kitchen, loud enough that her voice carried up to his room.
This is not a dream, though, and if it's a nightmare, it's not one that he's going to wake up from. Norma nods stifly, once, and then she disappears wordlessly into her room.
The door falls shut behind her and Dylan is left alone, standing in the dark with only his treacherous thoughts for company.
End.