NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Thought I'd try my hand at a Wybrose fic. Bray and Dean have this odd, twisted chemistry that works really, really well! And speaking of Bray, Angel In The Dirt, Book Three will be updated within the next week. This story just has me by the throat at the moment!
DISCLAIMERS: This story is part of my Angel series, so it's definitely AU. The Wyatts in my universe live outside a small town in Louisiana named Crowley. The series was inspired by and based on the Wyatt/Jay series by theytalktome, and the concepts are used with permission from the author. Dean's spiel about his life on the streets was gleaned from numerous Jon Moxley promos. Cover art is a pencil sketch by lonessiea, and you can find her work on Tumblr. Characters are not mine, except for Anna and the Pollards.
In case you're confused about who Anna is, she's my OC, and her profile is on my profile page. It gets tweaked depending on which stories she appears in, and in this series, she's Abigail's younger sister. You may also want to read the previous stories in my Angel series to bring yourself up to speed with the characters and situations mentioned here. This story will also have some spoiler-ish content for my newest series, An Army Of Angels, which should debut in October.
Also, a huge THANKS to HarlemMarxx for her story Dismantle, Repair. It was the concept and idea upon which this story was based, and some turns of phrase are from the story. Dismantle, Repair is an AWESOME story that's worth a read if you're into Wybrose like I am! Thanks again, and I hope I do your ideas and concepts justice.
Angel With a Broken Wing
By Debwood-1999
Chapter One
It was a beautiful late fall morning. The scenery was resplendent in one last costume change before the end of the year, with the sunrise casting golden lights and shadows across the trees and hills and bushes in the Louisiana backwoods. In the distance, trees rustled as a flock of birds took flight. The morning was crisp, just cool enough to see one's breath, but not so cold that it made one shiver.
On the porch of a big, weathered house in the middle of this wild countryside, Dean Ambrose sat in a patio chair, puffing away on a vape pen. A soft-side suitcase, fully packed, lay at his feet. An empty coffee cup sat on a small table in front of him.
Inside, the house was bustling with activity. Dean could hear heavy footsteps, breakfast sounds (plates and silverware and pots and pans clinking and clattering), water running, a television tuned into the news. The faint scent of toast and bacon and coffee tickled Dean's nose, mingling pleasantly with the fragrance of the vapor that escaped the pen.
Dean chuckled to himself. Months ago, you had to drag him out of bed in the mornings, and he was the one who kept everyone waiting after ️they'd packed their bags. This morning, he'd been the first one out of bed, with his luggage already packed. Hopefully, he, Bray, and their traveling companions-Jay and Luke-could get to the airport three hours before their flight like they'd all planned.
He took a pull off his vape pen and let his mind drift back. Dean's arrival here had been far from pleasant. Now, he wasn't sure he wanted to leave...
~~~ANGEL~~~
If you stripped this story down to its bare bones, Dean Ambrose was kidnapped and chained up in a cold, dark garage in the Louisiana backwoods because Seth Rollins had chosen to sleaze his way up the FCW/WWE ranks, and because Dean had paused for a moment to find a cigarette on the way to his car.
In spite of all the pretty words he'd said, Seth never really loved Dean.
All Dean was to Seth during his stint in FCW was a means to an end. Somewhere along the line, however, Seth developed feelings (it was impossible to tell if they were guilt or love, or both) towards Dean, but at the same time, he started seeing Roman Reigns on the sly. Dean was furious and heartbroken after learning of Seth's indiscretion and selfishness.
Anyone with a healthy self-esteem would have given Seth the heave-ho and found someone better. But Dean's self-esteem was non-existent, and instead of tearing Seth a new one and kicking him to the curb like he should have, he blamed himself for Seth's affair. Obviously, there was something wrong with Dean (at least Dean thought so), so why else would Seth chose to stray? That made it easy for Seth to convince Dean to work things out, going so far as to create the Shield as a means for them all to work together and try to fix their complicated relationship along the way.
An uneasy peace existed between the three of them, which didn't go unnoticed. The tension between Dean, Seth and Roman could be sensed by Bray, both in WWE and in FCW. Since he wasn't personally involved at that time, he could see the situation for what it really was-a relationship based on lies. It was a fact that he could easily exploit, and it gave Bray the eventual way in. He wanted Dean in his family, so that he could take the broken parts of him and make him whole.
Bray saw a lot of himself in Dean. Dean wasn't a saint by any stretch, but then again, neither was Bray. He was a monster just like Bray.
When Seth betrayed his Shield brothers to join the Authority, it solidified the truth in Bray's mind. Seth had only used Dean-and now Roman-to better himself. The words Rat, Weasel, Traitor, and Backstabber fit him perfectly.
Following the breakup, Dean became a lone wolf, while Roman got it in his head that it was him against the world. And when Roman left for emergency surgery, it was a good enough reason for him to escape the dysfunction and leave Dean and Seth in the dust.
Without anyone watching him, the Lunatic Fringe, the crazy force of nature that was Dean Ambrose, began spiraling. His fixation on Seth-getting revenge on the little rat-had consumed him. It wouldn't take much effort on Bray's part to make Dean descend below everything.
Dean was a little lost sheep when Bray found him, with nowhere to go, no one to follow, and nobody to show him the way. He was provoking wolves, directionless but unwilling to quit. He had a head full of rage, and no outlet for it. He was just the kind of man Bray was looking for.
And all Bray had to do was capture him. All it took was a moment when the Lunatic Fringe reached for a cigarette to smoke on his drive back to his hotel room.
Hell In A Cell was the perfect time for Bray to make his move. He waited until Dean had emerged from the arena, dressed in his street clothes, and his hair still wet from his shower. He sneaked up behind Dean while he was fumbling through his pockets and grabbed him before the lunatic could so much as blink. A cloth soaked with starter fluid was pressed against Dean's mouth and nose, and Dean was out in seconds.
The drive back to Crowley from Dallas took six hours. Dean was stuffed in the trunk of Bray's car, with a pillowcase over his head, and his hands and feet cuffed behind him.
~~~ANGEL~~~
Bray had been forced to chain Dean to the floor of the garage after it was determined that he was a danger to others on the compound (he'd thrown an empty plate at Anna and lunged at her; only Erick pulling Abigail's sister out of harm's way had prevented physical injury). His objective had been to break through Dean's defenses and expose the parts that had been broken and hurt by his life on the streets. Those parts were the parts that Bray wanted to fix.
So, like he'd broken Jay down eighteen months earlier, Bray attempted to break Dean. He returned to his unique brand of tough love. He figured that he could get away with it once more. Dean was taking time off after Hell In a Cell to deal with nagging injuries anyway, so he wouldn't be missed for a while. The Pollards, the family who watched his compound while he and the boys were on the road, were in Mississippi, attending an Evangelical All-Stars Prayer-a-thon and Miracle Revival Picnic. Luke and Jay were on the road with the WWE. Erick was recovering from minor surgery and was able to assist, and he knew to keep quiet. Anna, with her part-time job, would be occupied with that, as well as watching the Pollard's place while they were gone. And, if push came to shove, Bray knew she'd have his back.
She was Abigail's sister, after all.
Besides, after seeing the cuts and marks on Dean's body, Bray decided that his tactics were warranted:
~~~ANGEL~~~
"So you don't need any help, you're handling your business?"
Dean fixed Bray with an icy gaze. His voice was like chips of ice. "I've handled my business pretty well all my life, I don't need you freaks."
"The marks on your body say otherwise," said Bray, point-blank.
"They're nothing," Dean scoffed.
Bray sank to his knees in front of his chained-up captive. "Nothing? Highly doubtful. Scars from fights and hardcore death matches I can understand, but these cuts on you?" He lifted up one of Dean's arms; chained up as he was, Dean could offer little resistance. The well-muscled arm was covered with scars, both new and old. "They look way too symmetrical and straight to be something out of a fight." Bray's eyes widened in curiosity. "And are these burn scars?! What is this? When the going gets tough, the tough self-harm?"
"I can't take all the pressure. Gotta find some way to cope with this," Dean shrugged.
"Not like this! There's other ways to deal with your trauma, and many of them don't involve sharp objects-"
"You have no idea about the hell I had to go through growing up!" Dean snarled. "You didn't get stabbed in the lung with a screwdriver while trying to get home from school. You weren't the one who crawled out of his bedroom at twelve years old one morning to find that the TV, the furniture in the apartment, and all the money that his mother (he put mother in air quotes) made from whoring around had been stolen the night before. You didn't get expelled from school for shoving the stick from a candy apple down a classmate's throat. He poked fun at my Halloween costume, what was I supposed to do? Why was I the one who got treated like street trash? Why am I the one who always gets in trouble?
"They called me dangerous. Dangerous? Me?" Dean snorted. He began to gesture wildly with his hands, the chains dangling from them swinging and clinking in accompaniment. "Ha! Nobody wants me around because they think I'm gonna cause problems. Nobody wants Dean Ambrose around because he's gonna do a whole bunch of stuff that's gonna be bad for everyone.
"Did you ever have to run a gauntlet after school, Bray? I did. There was a big scary dude named Lavon that I had to run really fast around to make sure he didn't see me. 'Cause if he did, he'd give me dope and make me sell it, and then he'd beat me up and take the money. I couldn't have anything valuable because if I did, the crazy crackhead hobo named Jack would beat me up and take it. And I had to look away from the street corner where my mom worked, because if I saw how food got put on our table, it would make me wanna jump in the river and drown.
"If that's not bad enough, did your daddy decide to put you on the street for extra cash? Because my mom did. Thirteen years old, Bray, and she made me peddle my ass on a street corner, the same one she worked, for money. If I didn't come home with enough, she'd take what I'd earned and beat me."
Dean's voice dropped to a snarl. "She wasn't a mother. She was a bad breeder. A junkie. She was a pimp… and I was nothing but a whore."
Dean's eyes had a twisted gleam in them as he stared at his captor. "So what do you think of me now?" he sneered. You still wanna save me? You still wanna bring me down to very dust and then build me back up?"
The silence that followed was so thick, you could slice it. Bray stood up and paced for a while, and Dean fiddled with the chains that bound him.
Finally, Bray spoke. "Thirty dollars a throw."
Dean turned and stared at Bray like he'd just sprouted an extra head. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"You asked me if Daddy put me on the street for money. Thirty dollars a throw. That's how much he charged.
"When I was working on his boat, my daddy did things to me that a daddy should never, ever do to his son, and then when he finished, he... he called it Keeping the boys company. I won't go into too many details, but long story short, my daddy passed me around to his friends for thirty dollars a throw. Not just on the boat, but on shore as well. For three years, for lack of a better word… I was a whore. I felt disgusting. I felt cheap. I felt dirty. I felt like all I was good for was sex. Sex and money and unpaid labor.
"It stopped only after I stabbed my daddy on his boat when he tried to rape me. I was never charged with killing him. His DNA was all over me, and inside of me too. Justifiable homicide, the DA said. And in spite of what everyone's heard, the fire that night was coincidental. The investigators determined it was an electrical short circuit. I think it was God striking my daddy down for how he treated me.
"I'm not much different from you, Dean. But I'm different from the rest somehow. Blind to the wind, the news and the culture. And in that aspect, so are you. But do you see me slicing myself all to hell?
"I have a confession of my own. There were times after Daddy's death when I felt so filthy and slimy that I wanted to tear off my skin and die. I didn't, because I had family who loved me and did what it took to save me.
"My Uncle Waylon was a second father to me, and my Aunt Del was the mother I never had. Aunt Del taught me to read. She got me caught up in school enough for me to get a GED when I was just fifteen years old. Uncle Waylon put me to work on this farm during the summer. Helped me take out my aggression. And they both taught me about the Lord.
"Both my aunt and uncle taught me something that's been the most important lesson in life. They both told me I was special, because God don't make no junk." Bray fixed his captive with a fiery stare. "God never, ever makes junk," he said softly, carding his fingers through Dean's hair. "You aren't junk, Dean. God created you for a reason. And if I have to break you into little pieces to make you understand that... then I will."
And with those words, Bray climbed to his feet and quietly left the garage, leaving Dean chained to the floor in the dark with his racing thoughts.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: *FACEPALMS* This was SUPPOSED to be a one-shot! However, it got away from me, and now it's a multi-chapter. It reads better this way anyway. I'd say about two more chapters before this one's finished.
As you can see, Bray returned to his brutal ways. If you've read the first book of my Angel In The Dirt series, you'll know that Bray was quite brutal in his methods to fix someone. He mellowed out in Book Two and Book Three, but now he's switched back. The reason will be explained later.
I needed to find a way to make Bray the way he is while keeping him sympathetic. The backstory (in my head) is that his mother died giving birth to him, and his dad blamed him for her death. He pulled Bray out of school at the age of eight so that he'd work on the boat, and then passed him around to his buddies for extra money. Bray killed his dad in self-defense, and then the boat caught fire. Two separate events that happened at the same time.
Okay, enough rambling! Onward and upward to the next chapter!:)
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