"You know what the problem is, Dean," she said, tapping her pen on her tablet and smiling at him with a touch of severity. "We've been talking about this practically since day one. It's almost self-sabotage, at an unconscious level."
"At least you're not accusing me of deliberately shooting myself in the foot this time," he said, joking in an attempt to lighten the mood.
"This time," she agreed, latching onto the part of the joke he'd not really meant to attach. "Sometimes, it is about your self-worth difficulties and your struggle to believe you can have good things. Today, though, I think what you've been describing is probably more attributable to bad habits and inertia. When you get so used to doing things a certain way, making new habits can be difficult. Particularly when you aren't entirely in command of yourself, as when you've been drinking or when your hormones are at their peak."
Dean cringed inwardly. A part of him hated the assumptions, whatever truth they might have, that whatever actions he took were not always solely based in what he intended to do. It was a little too close to the archaic beliefs that body chemistry was an excuse for whatever terrible shit people wanted to pull, as well as a reason to shove some people into the gutter while popping a silver spoon between other people's teeth. Hell, why not just put "imbalance of bodily humors" back into the DSM? Dean believed firmly in free will; if he screwed up, it was his fault, not his biology. Or the fault of the alcohol that he chose to drink - it hadn't crawled out of the bottle and into his mouth.
On the other hand, blaming his body sure did make an easy excuse when he was too embarrassed to admit the magnitude of his screw-ups.
"Here's what I don't get," he said, trying to change the direction of the conversation toward less scary ground, which never worked with Dr. Bradbury but had never stopped him before. "Some other guy has a bad day, he's bummed. So he goes into a bar, has a drink, maybe flirts a little. End of the night, he goes home with a new friend for some fun, or maybe he doesn't, and either way, he wakes up the next morning with no harm done. The bad day is over, and he moves on. But I try the same thing, and every damn time, it feels like, I flirt with somebody who turns out to be evil incarnate - or else they came in with them. Or if I don't flirt, because I don't always need to go there, then somebody's coming after me, and I wind up in the same freaking dogpile, because it's never the nice, sane girl or guy who wants to buy me a drink, nope." He rolled his eyes dramatically.
"We've talked about avoiding the bar itself when you're having a bad day, you know."
"But, see, that's what I'm talking about! Other guys don't have to hide in their bedroom under their blankets every time shit hits the fan! Why can't I just do the normal thing, like everybody else? Why do I have to operate as though I'm cursed to always wind up in the worst case scenario?"
Dr. Bradbury sighed. "You're not cursed. I hesitate to even call you 'unlucky,' because even that plays into your idea that it's the world that's out to get you. You know it's not."
"History seems to disagree," he grumbled.
"Think it through a little more," she coaxed. "This past weekend - it wasn't a simple 'bad day,' was it? You were dealing with very specific triggers. The guys who came into the body shop, their unjustified and harmful remarks about you and your biology?" Dean shuddered and wanted to protest, but she raised a hand and kept talking. "It put you directly into an emotional tailspin of negative self-talk. That part was unavoidable and completely out of your hands. But we've talked about what you can do when you feel that coming on, haven't we? Channeling it into positive physical exertion, writing in your journal, going to spend time with family and friends who love you and can help build you back up? Going drinking in a bar is nowhere on that list. Even your hypothetical 'normal guy' - who doesn't exist, by the way, because everybody has problems - should probably find better methods to cope with his emotions than drowning them, but there are particular times for anybody when they should avoid that path."
"Okay, I get it." Dean hated it, but he knew that he had stepped in it with that choice. "But everything after that - "
" - was related to and affected by the setting and your impaired ability to handle it. You were hating on yourself, and you made it harder to handle by imbibing and by being in a location where you'd have to interact with strangers. And, Dean, as much as you hate to admit it and I hate to mention it as a factor…"
"Then don't?" he suggested half-heartedly.
"Sorry, it's relevant." The psychiatrist put down her tablet and looked at him with sympathetic eyes, which made him close his own in defense. "You knew you were heading into your heat. The guys at the shop scented it on you, which prompted their initial remarks that put the whole catastrophe into action. You were angry and defensive, and you had to know it was going to come up again at the bar. So why on earth would you go in there in the first place? I am not saying you asked to be harassed - nobody deserves that. But you knew your ability to handle social interaction was impaired even before you took your first drink."
"So you're saying it was my fault."
"A person with animal allergies doesn't deserve the sneezing and hives, and it's understandable that they might choose to go into an animal shelter and feel sad, even while they react. I'm less sympathetic if they shout at the animals, call the volunteers names, and punch the people who are there adopting pets."
Dean couldn't help chuckling at his own expense, even while he was still feeling sorry for himself. "Not exactly the same as an allergy," he protested. "And what if the volunteers were calling the dude names for sneezing?"
"I'm not defending your attackers, Dean. Do you disagree that you've dealt with them in better ways before? You threw the first punch, and you admitted being so drunk that you almost missed."
"Yeah, okay. That was bad."
"You're lucky the bartender knew you and was sympathetic, or you might have had to deal with your heat in a jail cell, instead of just having your brother called to escort you home."
Dean sniffed. "Yeah, to what might as well have been a cell."
"Dean." She frowned at him.
"Hey, you've never seen that moose act as a warden," he said with an eyeroll. "I'd have stood a better chance of escaping the jail cell than of getting out of my apartment again for those next few days."
"Your brother worries because he cares about you." Dr. Bradbury glanced at her watch. "Look, we're obviously still working on this, but I just want you to keep trying to remember what we've discussed. You argue so much about being in control of your own fate, and that's a good mentality to carry. Now you need to remember the flip-side: you're responsible for your own fate. That means that both your decisions and the consequences are yours, along with the way you choose to react to situations and the actions of others."
Dean stood, smirking. "Just like kindergarten, right? Make good choices?"
She smiled back, wagging her head a little. "Well, perhaps a little beyond kindergarten. How about this? Make grown-up choices."
"I think I might be a little offended by that," he said, wincing at the implication.
"Don't be," she said. "God knows, there are days when all I want to do is skip work, stay in my fuzzy pajamas, and eat Lucky Charms cereal in front of cartoons. Nobody wants to be a grown-up all the time, Dean. It's just important to remember that if we consistently choose the other path, we've got nobody to blame but ourselves when the mortgage is due and we have nothing but cereal box prizes with which to pay it."
Later, standing in the middle of the grocery store and staring at the shelves, Dean laughed under his breath. "Hey, doc, I'm choosing to react to your analogy. My own free will and everything." He grabbed a few boxes of Lucky Charms and tossed them into his cart. "Not my fault you got me craving them," he muttered with a shrug.
His cart was heavy with boxes and bags, all needed to replenish what had been a fairly empty pantry and fridge even before he'd been trapped at home and unable to get out for a diner burger or a pizza. Sam had been appalled at the selection he'd had on hand and had insisted that Dean promise to hit the store and restock ("With real food this time, Dean! Not just ramen noodles and Pop Tarts!") after his appointment today. Dean was just happy he'd made "parole"; he hadn't been joking about Sam's adamant refusal to let him so much as open the door for Chinese delivery over the past few days.
"It's not that I don't trust you, Dean," he'd said, planting himself on the sofa with an air of stubborn finality. "It's that when you get like this, it's almost like you start doubling down on daring the universe to come at you. Just wait it out, get your head back together, okay?"
It was almost as though every weird quirk of their upbringing had manifested one way for Dean and the opposite for his baby brother. Sam was perfectly suited to channeling his negative thoughts into journaling or a run - if he even had any negative thoughts, which Dean sometimes doubted. The dude meditated by choice. That was certainly nothing their dad had ever instilled in them. On his very best days, Dean might have privately wondered whether Sam's level-headedness had anything to do with Dean's own protectiveness toward the kid during Sam's formative years, but that was just a fleeting thought, and it usually made him blush. More likely, it was just a fluke of genetics.
Paying for his groceries (which may or may not have included a few boxes of Apple Pie Pop Tarts, because grown-ass men pick their own groceries), Dean headed home and unloaded the bags into his kitchen. For a moment, staring balefully at the piles on his counter and floor, he was tempted to leave it for later, but his appointment was too recent in his memory for him to be able to ignore the nagging voice in his head telling him that "adults don't leave the groceries all over the place, even if most of them are dry stuff that doesn't need refrigerated." Grumbling a bit, he put them all away.
And then he glared around, realizing that, while he was hungry, he wasn't hungry for any of that.
A burger at the Roadhouse, he thought. And, hey, he still needed to apologize for that scene from last weekend, which he hadn't been able to do before now. So going over there was actually the responsible thing to do, right? Of course it was, he decided, smiling and happy that his rationalizing enabled him to do what he really wanted to do, anyway.
Hopping back into the driver's seat, Dean pulled out his phone and dialed. Honestly, now that this hell of a weekend was over, and after being able to process it with the doc, he was feeling much more clear-headed and, truthfully, a little embarrassed and guilty, particularly about how Sam had gotten roped into the mess. There was no way Sam deserved to have to play guard over his older brother like he had; closer to forty than thirty, now, it was ridiculous that Dean should need a babysitter for this sort of thing. God, it had to have been mortifying for him; Dean flushed hot and squirmed, thinking about it. And it was a stupidly new dynamic; when Dean had first presented as an omega as a teenager, their dad had promptly put him on suppressants so strong he'd felt tranquilized half the time. By the time John died and Dean decided that a life spent half-zonked was no life at all, Sam was off at college and didn't have to witness the hormonal roller-coaster as things tried to level out.
And now there was no choice at all, since doctors had decided that those earlier suppressants were actually dangerous enough to be made illegal, and Dean's having used them for years meant that no doctor wanted to risk prescribing him even the most gentle suppressant now. Instead, every couple of months, Dean got to deal with the whole freak show: wild emotions, almost uncontrollable urges, and smelling like a delicious little princess birthday cake to any alpha walking by on the street. Fuck his life, seriously.
Honestly, he didn't think he would have even minded most of the hassles of his biology if it weren't for how absolutely out of his hands so much of it was. Back to having no choice about his heats, no choice but to put up with other people's opinions about who he supposedly was. If it were just sex, hey, at least he saved on lube, and he'd never had any real convictions about being a bottom or a top, anyway, so long as everybody walked away satisfied. Sex was something you did, not the sum total of who you were.
"Sam!" he said when his brother picked up. Bite the bullet, he thought. "Look, man, I owe you an apology. How about a burger on me tonight?"
"A burger?" Sam sounded incredulous. "Dude, I helped you out because you're my brother, not for some kind of payment, but if I did need repaying, you think a burger would do it?"
"Well, I was thinking one of Ellen's, so...maybe?"
Sam paused. "All right, maybe. But that's not the point! And anyway, you were supposed to go grocery shopping today."
"I did!" Dean protested.
"So why are you going out for food? The whole point of groceries is to be able to eat at home."
Sighing, Dean said, "None of it looked good."
There was a long moment of silence. "Dean, you're like the worst kind of nineteen-year-old. Your oven probably has dirty dishes in it, doesn't it?"
"No." That would imply I've used dishes any time recently.
"Well, I happen to be near the Roadhouse now, anyway. I was supposed to meet a colleague at the deli across the street. Would you mind if I asked him to join us for dinner?"
Hesitating, Dean considered. "You guys gonna talk lawyer stuff the whole time?"
Sam laughed. "Nope. We agreed to leave that at the office. Strictly casual conversation only, or else we'll end up arguing. It's an occupational hazard, and there aren't enough people at the office either of us can tolerate, so we're not taking chances."
"Okay, fine, bring the guy."
"Oh, but Dean?" Sam said, sounding serious. "Could you not piss him off? Like I said, I want to keep Cas as a friend, not have you scare him away."
"Dude! I can behave!"
They hung up, and Dean drove the rest of the way feeling affronted, but knowing Sam's worries were at least couched in current evidence. "New day, better decisions," he promised himself. He heard Dr. Bradbury in his head, advising him: Make grown-up choices. "'Nineteen-year-old,' my ass," he growled. Slamming the car door, he steeled himself to go inside...and beg forgiveness for the less adult choices on recent record.