Deadly

Disclaimer: Supernatural, like Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and the new Mercedes SLS, does not belong to me.

Rating: I'm going to make it M, because of language and themes. But there's nothing graphic.

Spoilers: I'm only in Season 3. This is a season 3 fic – set right after SEVEN.

Pairings: None – Just a Dean centric story. I like his psyche.

Warnings: Just the swearing and references. I would also like to apologize for tense switching, if it happens. I think I caught most of them, but grammar.

A/N: I tried to keep with the actual deadly sins, but some of them veer off a bit, so apologies for that. I happen to find these idea of the sins fascinating, but if you're looking to learn more about them this fic is not the place to do it. In any case, hope you enjoy!

Deadly

I. Lust

It made sense, Dean realized hours later, as they sat in the diner, that lust was the sin to come after him. Lust was about so much more than sexual deviance; though God only knew he was a fan of that. But it was also about giving into temptation, picking the forbidden fruit, driving too fast and hitting too hard.

Yeah, he was all about lust, all about fucking the consequences and hoping he made it through the night. Didn't matter much if he did, really. He had 362 days and counting, cutting that down by his own accord almost seemed more appealing than waiting for a demon to come knockin' for his soul. If that meant letting go of whatever minor restraints that had been on his inhibitions and eating burgers for breakfast and beer for brunch then so be it. He liked having control over his life, heart palpitations be damned.

That sure as shit didn't mean he wasn't lustful. These days his eyes seemed permanently glued to the expanses of collarbone and heaving tits and pouty lips. He was going to miss the sins of flesh, he realized. He felt delirious and dirty and in and out of control when he was sliding flesh on and in flesh and groping and biting and sucking and devouring the glorious skin that had caught his attention, the glorious flesh.

There were a lot of shitty things in the world, Dean knew. But God had just about made up for all of them with the glory of the female form. His lips chapped just thinking about it. He licked them; biting the inside and wishing he could get his mind off lust. He'd been kissing a lot of demons recently; maybe Hell wouldn't be so bad.

II. Sloth

Sam may've been surprised to know that Dean had done his research. Sloth wasn't just lazy. Dean had never been good at lazy. Living on the road and driving from bar to bar, diner to diner, motel to motel, made it difficult to really be lazy. No, sloth had the hidden traits no one ever thought about, mainly that it focused on rejecting the abilities you had naturally for a life of ease and solitude. Dean wondered if he could honestly feel guilty about wanting to reject his skill. Lord knew he had them; man couldn't spend his whole life doing something and not get good at it. But Christ in a catacomb he was tired.

Sammy had been right when he'd said that Dean was being selfish in selling his soul. But it was so much more than just wanting not to be alone, so much more than not being able to handle his brother's death. Selling his soul was his way of surrendering without giving up. He was going to hell, hardly a life of ease, but he wasn't going to be fighting anymore. He had 362 days and there was that light at the end of the tunnel. Hellfire, Sam had said, but Dean saw it as the finishing line. All he had to do was hang on one more year.

He should feel guilty; he knows he should. But he's damn tired, the kind of tired that a person can't sleep out of their shoulders or wake up from with a double espresso. He knew it was wrong, in all kinds of fucked up ways, but he almost looked forward to it.

Hell meant he'd be in the same place for a while. Sounded nice.

III. Wrath

He wasn't that old, thought sometimes Dean lost track of the years on the road with the countless highways and countless diners and countless motels and countless birthdays. Regardless, though, a man couldn't do what Dean did for as long as he'd been doing it without getting hardened. He was like a pier, right on the edge of the angry ocean salt water. It was a matter of getting weathered and stronger. Adapt to survive.

Sometimes Dean felt bad. He had, after all, grown a ruthless ability to kill, blindly and without guilt. That scared him. What scared him worse were the nights when that didn't bother him at all. He could just as easily slice off a demons head as he could a child's. Once involved with the supernatural the distinction between human life and evil disappeared.

Sam tried to keep him in check that he knew. He also knew that his brother thought he was a hypocrite. He never tried to kill Sam, hell, he sold his soul to bring him back to life, even thought he was supernatural, even though he had the freaky dreams and sometimes woke up not knowing where he was.

The thing with Sam, though, was that he didn't feel the same kind of fire Dean did. Sure as shit it screwed up his life, but if Dean were being honest Sam was enough of a real person to make it through. Dean was all consumed by the hate. He hated everything. He was full of hate in a way he knew his brother had never been. He was consumed by the electricity of it, the ball of burning guilt and sadness and exhaustion that whirl pooled in his brain and soul and heart. The only time that hate went away, not when he was fucking some girl against a dirty motel shower, or drinking a night away or driving too fast down an empty highway, only time was when he was stabbing some demon through the heart, cutting some bastard's head off, channeling all that impossible fucking fury, anger pounding mother fucking anger into some son of a bitch who deserved it.

Maybe that mean he was angry. But he didn't care. Sometimes he wished they could bleed.

IV. Envy

Dean didn't understand how even though he had two dead parents he was still the rebel child. He loved his leather coat, loved his muscle car, loved his rock music and ability to drink. But they weren't just was he was now. They weren't just a run away from home or a beat break up break down. They were the only way Dean knew how to act.

Sammy had half a dozen years of civilized life under his belt He knew how to sit in a classroom, how to date a girl, how to cook a meal. Sometime Dean hated the way Sam acted, hated how comfortable his brother appeared in a suit, how seriously he took everything. But then there were those day, those rare days when he had been drinking too long and angry too much, some days his charm didn't work or his smile got him too near to an out of nowhere black eye, some days he wished he could be like Sam.

He'd look at his brother, all 6' 5" and dorky and calm and he'd fucking feel it in his blood, that out of reach life, that normal, civilized 9-5 day to fucking day that Sam had gotten for six whole years and Dean never had.

Dean knew the difference between jealous and envy. He'd learned a lot of things doing what he did and he knew that if he'd just been jealous than he would've asked Sam asked about, asked him to share his stories of that once upon a time life. But envy was about wanting something so another person couldn't, and on his really dark days, when Sam's real life experience pisses Dean off a little too much, he wishes for that. Not often, but some days.

Dean knows that Sam misses that life, at least he used to, but Dean doesn't care. He'd rather have that long distance look in his eye of better times than to never have had them at all.

V. Gluttony

Dean can't sleep. He's tapped out at four hours most night. It's not nightmares, though he doesn't envy Sammy's, but he can't seem to keep his mind shut. On nights like these, when the dark isn't dark enough, and how could it be when he's seen everything that hides within in, nights where his minding is realizing in tiding count down and frantic images, nights where he's lucky that the motel has a bar, he drinks the hours away.

It always starts easy enough, one beer to calm his thoughts, another to calm his nerves. He'll have a third to make him sleepy, a fourth a fifth, a sixth to make him sleepy, then he'll order a whiskey.

The problem with whiskey, though, is that he needs it. But the time he's gotten there in the night it's far past want. He downs them pretty quickly once he's at drink eleven or twelve, starts pouring doubles into chipped tumblers, half and two over, three. He can never find the counter by the end of the night, draining Jack like the Impala drains motor oil, he need it to run to flow, to move out of his own head.

The floor stops hurting on those nights and usually he'll buy the rest of the bottle, if they'll let him. Hell, by the end of those nights he'd suck cock for the rest of a bottle of whiskey. The taste, hell it tastes like acid and sacrifices, but it also tastes like freedom and the ability to forget and he'd keep drinking forever if there was any hope of that.

VI. Greed

Dean had won his first Benjamin in a pool game when he was eight years old. Baby hustler, he always thought of them as, though he supposed he was in no position to judge.

He watched the other guy, third round tat night, pockets lined with cocaine bills and other people's credit cars. Biker man, Dean always wished he knew how to ride a motorcycle, was at least a head taller than him and a shoulder width wider. While he seemed to be made of less muscle and more fast food he was certainly more than solid enough and Dean was really in the mood to test it out.

But sure as shit he's not going to lose this game because he's chicken. They've got $500 riding on the eight ball, double or nothing, since the big guy doesn't seem to like losing, and Dean knows his wise cracks and slicking moves are sending him on the path for a black eye and a fat lip, but he damn wants those $500, like treasure in the forefront of his mind.

He gets so hung up on money. It's a symbol of his success. He never had A+ report cards, not like Sam, but he had those piles of fresh green money, had those credit cards burning in his pockets, had those poker chips in his trunk. Money was all he needed sometimes to feel good about himself. A goddamn green star was worth the black eyes.

VII. Pride

Sammy was the smartest person Dean knew, and he'd met professors and doctors and lawyers and hunters. But this wasn't about smarts at all. Dean couldn't sit tight and let his brother save him. He couldn't. He was the big brother, always the title, never the follow through. But damn if he was going to let his punk ass baby brother save his sorry ass. He couldn't seem to reconcile the idea of not controlling his own future and his potential eternal stint in hell certainly counted as a future, however shitty it seemed.

But damn he couldn't help flipping things up when he got angry, tossing tables and chairs. He had gotten himself into another fucked up situation, but he'd been cleaning up his own messes long before he'd picked up Sammy from school, long before they'd had each other's backs.

Somewhere deep down Dean knew he needed all the help he could get, but admitting that he wanted Sam to dig and research and ask, was admitting that he'd fucked up so hard that things weren't ever going to be right. That was just something he couldn't do.

Maybe it was one of the stupidest, most ass hat things Dean had ever done in his whole stupid life, but he was willing to look down the barrel of hell just to avoid admitting he was wrong.