My thanks to Wegman's, on a Saturday morning right before Mother's Day, for inspiring this piece. Never again.
Not mine, don't own. Any mistakes are mine. As far as I know, this is a one-shot.
Trigger warnings for dissociation & panic attacks.
Cross-posted at Archive of Our Own.
A third shopping cart rammed into his knees. Dean whirled to face a young teen. The boy started at Dean's ferocious expression.
"Sorry, man," the kid said with a shrug. "It's crowded today."
Dean closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Flames seared his knees, another flick of Alastair's whip. The demon would continue breaking him down, strike by vicious strike, until...
"Mister, you okay?" The boy had apparently finished his phone call. He studied Dean, head cocked, as if the other man was a zoo exhibit.
Dean swallowed and spoke gruffly. "Yeah, fine, just watch where you're headed."
Flames licked the boy's face, his protruding skull shrouded in a wreath of smoke. Dean shook his head and the image cleared. The boy beat a hasty retreat. Dean wished he could follow.
Grocery shopping had been Sam's idea. What could be more different from Hell than the produce section, Sam had argued. Fresh, healthy food in every direction. They even have kale!
But Sam apparently hadn't taken the Saturday morning crowd into consideration. People were everywhere, hemming Dean in from all directions. There was no way to keep his eye on them all. He kept getting pinned by the sheer volume of other shoppers. Dean fought the urge to use his shopping cart like a battering ram.
Breathe, Dean, breathe. He heard Sam's voice in his mind, followed by Dad's. You're better than this, Dean. You're a Winchester.
Without conscious thought, Dean had apparently wheeled his cart to a less crowded section of the store. He now stared hopelessly at an aisle devoted to oral care.
How many kinds of toothpaste do people need, anyway?
Thinking of teeth devolved into a mental landscape of fangs, incisors, claws. Those gruesome pieces and fragments of Hades had crawled and clawed their way after the older Winchester brother, following Dean through the aisles of Food Cow.
He could hear the screams now, loud and wailing, pleas of "No, don't!" unheeded. Dean covered his head with his arms, using his biceps to cover his ears, as he drowned in the noise, burned in the raging inferno. The crying and beseeching continued until a pink blur appeared in Dean's line of sight.
He blinked. The crying had stopped.
No sulfur, no ash, no burnt flesh. A faintly pleasant fragrance met his nose.
"Here," a small voice said.
Dean forced his mind to focus. A child was present, he couldn't hurt a child. He needed to protect her from...
A hot pink daisy, waving in his face.
Dean swallowed hard and the curtains of fire parted. He was in a grocery store, weekend rush. God only knew where his brother had wandered off to. And a little girl had offered him a flower, her sticky hand still clutching the stem.
Reluctantly, he met her gaze. Intense blue eyes focused on his, reminding him of a certain angel. The toddler sat in a shopping cart, kicking her legs and sucking on a lollipop. Her light blonde hair tufted in all directions like a fuzzy halo. A rainbow of Gerbera daisies, artfully arranged into a bouquet, sat on the seat beside her.
"Chelsea, don't bother the man," her mother admonished.
Dean flinched. Looking into the basket of the lady's cart, he saw a baby in a carrier seat, surrounded by groceries, chewing on a biscuit. Presumably, he had been the source of the wailing in Dean's mind.
The harried mother began to steer the shopping cart away from the strange man when Dean found his voice.
"No, wait," he croaked.
He watched the little girl as she studied him, wide blue eyes meeting troubled green. Slowly, he reached for the flower. She handed it over with all of the seriousness a toddler could muster.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"Have a good day!" the mother said, not looking in his direction as she pulled the cart away.
But the little girl continued to regard Dean solemnly, and he waved to her until her mother's cart had rounded the aisle.
Dean inhaled deeply, holding the flower to his nose. And that was how Sam found him, alone in the toothpaste aisle, a pink flower in his hand and tears in his eyes.
"Hey, Dean, sorry I was gone so long, the line at the deli counter—"
The older hunter looked up and Sam's knees nearly buckled.
"Hey," Sam said. He gripped his brother's arm and squeezed gently. "You're okay, Dean."
Sam threw a small container of potato salad and two bags of freshly sliced cheese into the cart. He waited until he had the majority of Dean's limited attention. "Let's go. The Impala's waiting."
I had a lot of trouble naming my fictional grocery store. Save-A-Lot, Sir Save-A-Lot and Foodies are apparently all real stores. There's a Food Lion near my house, which was the inspiration for Food Cow. :)