Aeger
Disclaimer: You know as well as I do that I don't own Supernatural or any of it's characters. If I did, Dean would not be available for public use and abuse.
A/N: This was inspired by my rat dying. (which rekindled memories of my grandfather's unbelievable suffering on his 7hour death-bed, at least I could find it in my heart to forgive his killer, my dad never did...) Yeah I know it's stupid and it's happened before and it's just a rat, but that doesn't make it any easier. She's still suffering. I just figured the best way to deal with it is writing. Even if I do to Dean what's being done to me. Sorry Dean, I still love you. (I'm not a Sammy kinda girl, sorry). Hope you enjoy reading it more than I enjoyed the circumstances under which it was created.
Sincerely,
Ariel.
PS: Aeger is Latin for Sufferer.
How should have seen it coming. He should have been able to stop it. Fucking vampire. Now he was sitting here, watching his baby brother burn from the inside out. Dying, slowly, nothing that he can do to stop the pain, nothing that can save him.
If only he could make the pain go away, even if it mean killing Sammy, anything to stop this torture.
Dean watched as his brother lay on the bed, clutching the sheets, drenched in a cold death sweat. He shuddered as Sammy's rasping breath caught in his lungs and he visibly fought back the urge to scream, for the hundredth time in three days. For three days he's been dying.
The stab of excruciation faded slightly from his brother's eyes and he reached down and took Sammy's cold hand. He hoped he was close, God he felt like a monster for wishing his baby brother dead, but rather dead than this. What he hated the most was his inability to stop this. He was supposed to protect him!
Sammy rolled over painfully onto his side and faced Dean.
"I can't take this anymore Dean." He whispered. His voice barely audible. It tore Dean to shreds...
"I know Sammy. I'm sorry! It's almost over. I promise." He choked the words out, dying with the effort of controlling his own voice.
He sat on the bed and took his frail little brother into his arms. Sam was shaking badly and he was cold as hell, exhausted and in unimaginable pain. The two little wounds in his neck had gone black and were draining away his life ever so slowly. If only the bastard had killed him or turned him, but instead he had to poison him like this.
Not even the hope of revenge could satisfy the pain inside of Dean. Nothing would ever make this okay.
He sat there, cradling his shaking brother for what seemed like hours. His hand so tight around the silver dagger at his side that his knuckles were going numb. But he knew it would only make more pain, it wouldn't kill Sammy.
That's the bitch of being poisoned by a vampire. Nothing can kill you but the venom itself. And fuck alone knows how long that takes.
Bobby was in and out of the room, passing by unnoticed.
He had tried for hours to stop the venom from spreading, but to no avail. Now it was just the waiting. Waiting for Sammy to die. Waiting for this god damn pain to stop. The panic and desperation to drain from his baby brother's beautiful eyes. That's all Dean wanted right now. He knew better than anyone what kinds of pain the world had to offer.
Sam shuddered in his arms again and he held him closer, riding out the grip of white fire. This was the story of Dean's life. His mother had been first, at least Sam never had to live with those memories. Then the only friend he had ever had, to a fucking car accident of all things in life. After that his own father had died because of him, and gone to hell. He clasped his eyes shut and buried his face in his brother's neck. All because he'd failed them.
Now, it was Sammy's turn. Sam was all he had left and now he was dying, ever so slowly, in his arms. Little by little Dean was coming closer to being ultimately alone. But he didn't care, as long as Sam's pain could be gone.
He should have never dragged Sam into this. It's not fair that he should pay the price for John and Dean's life. This was too much, too far.
The worst was that Dean wasn't even mad. He didn't have the strength or the will to angry, at anyone. Not even at God for doing this to him. Not that anger would solve the problem. Sammy would still be in pain, and he'd still be helpless. Whatever God did was out of his hands, what did questioning it help? It only made his life harder.
After a while the shaking got less, he knew Sam was losing the fight. A part of Dean was relieved that it would be over soon, but another part of him was panicking, terrified of being alone, of the thought of losing Sammy. He was all Dean had left.
How long he sat there he will never know, he would never care. It felt like forever.
At some point Sammy had told him he loved him, and that he was gonna be okay and that Dean had always been there for him. He said he loved him too. There was nothing more to say, nothing more to do, but wait.
"Dean." Bobby's voice dragged him back to reality. He didn't move. "He's gone."
"I know." Dean said, still clinging to the lifeless body of his baby brother. Now there truly was nothing left.
"Dean," He laid Sam down softly, and left the room, not looking back, not letting Bobby speak, just leaving, walking away.
It has been a year since Sammy died, a year since Dean had anything to anyone, aside from driving full speed down the highway, screaming at the top of his lungs, begging for the pain to stop. His once lively eyes had gone dull and distant. He was now the most feared hunter in America, the Angel of Death. He killed whatever and whoever he was sent out to hunt, with no mercy and no sacrifice.
Everyone knows that a man with nothing left to lose, is a dangerous one.
Dean no longer recognized people's faces, they all looked the same. He didn't look for anything, didn't stop for anyone. He had nothing to fight for, nothing to live for, no one to care for, and he preferred it that way. This way he couldn't lose anyone else.
He walked a dangerous road, and he walked it alone. Or so he thought...
The first time he saw her she was just like everyone else, just another unrecognizable face, but the more he saw her the more he looked at her.
"Who are you?" He asked. His own voice sounding strange, distant and scratchy to him.
"Ashley Cortel. But everyone calls me Anastasia."
"Why are you following me?"
"You're broken." She said simply. Her blue and black eyes sparkling with the evil inside of her, her raven black hair cascading down to below her waist. A perfect body caged in milky white skin, black painted lips parted slightly to accommodate her fangs. Her hated, cursed fangs. A vampire.
Breathtakingly beautiful, dainty, gothic, vicious, heartless, brutal, little Ashley.
Dean snorted and looked down.
"I wonder why." He said bitterly.
"Because my brother killed your brother." She said softly, taking a step forward.
He looked up at her, not expecting that. "Why are you here?"
"Because I am not like Michael. Because I hate suffering more than anything else in the world, and trust me, I've seen my fare share. Because I believe you deserve to be happy, and because I believe that death is meant to be easy and quick, not dragged out and painful."
"And that's supposed to mean what to me?" Dean demanded calmly, unable to stress himself out.
"Whatever you'll have it mean."
"Why didn't he just kill Sam? Why put him through that?" Dean asked, while he still had the chance.
She looked down then up again at Dean. The hazy gray light of the early evening creating a clichéd mist over the darkening parking lot.
"Because Michael fears death. He's never killed anyone outright. The moment of death is unbearable to him. He carries on creating all this suffering in his own fear, despite what it does to others, including me. But I don't believe that the answer truly makes a difference to you."
Dean shook his head bitterly, fighting back the tears. So that's what it was, an act of random, senseless, violence.
"What do you want?" He asked.
"I don't know. I thought about offering to you to take from Michael what he took from you, but that would be using you and your brother as an excuse to commit suicide, and that would not be fair. Then I considered offering you what was given to me, it kills most of the pain and the emotion, but it never quite goes away, but I doubt you would become what you kill. I would offer you the end to your own pain, which ever manner you want it, but you don't strike me as the kind of guy who would chose death above salvation. So I guess I don't know what I want. But it doesn't matter, does it? What matters is what you want, Dean."
He hadn't told her his name, not that he cared how she knew it. He was too shocked and conflicted by this. Killing her was useless, yet inviting. Becoming a vampire was out of the question. Suicide was overly inviting but completely unattainable since she had read him right, he wouldn't die to ease his own agony.
"I want Sammy back. But I don't want him to ever suffer again." Since they were being honest. By now she was leaning on the window if the impala, three feet away from him. She pulsed with perfection and absolute raw beauty. For the first time in a long time, Dean saw beauty, even if it was sick and twisted beauty, he couldn't deny it.
"I would give it to you if I could. The closest to reality I have to offer are dreams." A dream-casting vampire, no wonder she was so unreal.
"I don't want anything."
"I want to end your suffering." Her words hit him like an iron wall. The sincerity in her cold, dead, unreadable voice was undeniable.
Dean didn't know what to say. He didn't quite know how she would ever do that anyway.
"No one can end my suffering." He said, choking on his words again.
"That doesn't make it any better."
A single tear escaped his eye and cascaded down his cheek, defeating his need to let it out. Crumbling the walls around him. Walls of ice and steel.
"Why do you even care?" He whispered bitterly. Vampires are apathets. Unable to care, unable to feel, unable to laugh, unable to cry...
"Does it matter?"
"Yes."
She looked away, her icy mask slipping, making his heart pound faster and harder. How could a vampire show anything? Not to mention that kind of absolute agony that crossed her face for a split second.
"Because no one else does. No one else knows what it's like to be a sufferer. To see the pain of others and to be helpless against it. To feel it to such an extent that it tears you apart until nothing else is left." Her voice was unwaivering, but the odd, sick, sincerity was still there.
"You're a vampire. You don't feel anything."
She looked away again, turned around and shuddered. "Maybe so, but it wasn't always this way, was it?"
A manifestation of human emotion in a creature sculpted to kill? But yet, once, she, too, was human...
"If you still feel, why don't any of the others?" Dean asked.
She said nothing. They ended up in his room, still silent, tears unshed. He lay down on the bed, and for what seemed like an eternity, fell asleep. When he woke up it was near midnight. The first thing he was saw was her. Sitting in the windowsill, her arm draped over her pulled up knee. The nightly breeze licked at her hair. Her eyes, not dead as he had first perceived them, but alive, sparkling hauntingly in the light of the full moon. The sight was haunting, breathtaking. Then there was something more in her eyes, something far too familiar. A brokeness, an agony, deep down, hidden behind her own walls, behind her own mask of stoic reserve for which her kind was known. For a moment he could see it, he could see the remnants of humanity in her, in them all. The pain of their past and their present, a fear for the future. The unending future. Did they truly still feel?
"Mortality is unthinkable." She said. Her voice enveloping him in a sense of calm he could not place, nor fight. Her mere presence was making the pain, just a little more bearable.
"Why?" His voice was becoming less distant. More the way it used to be. Intoxicating.
"When you have it, you take it for granted, when you face it, it's terrifying and cripplingly painful. When it's no longer there, you long for it with all of your being. Even if you would have given anything to give it up."
"How old are you?"
"334." She answered. Still not looking at him.
"You're not as apathetic as your kind presents itself, are you?"
She sighed.
"There is no other way to stop from breaking, hunter."
Once again her words left him cripple.
"Why not give in and let me kill you?" He asked.
She looked at him for the first time since he woke up. "That would leave you alone again."
"Why are you doing this? It's not your problem."
"It wasn't yours either. Michael had no reason to kill your brother."
"Shouldn't you stand by your brother?"
She got up off the windowsill. "Standing by Michael means standing by senselessness. He is not what he used to be."
"Isn't that what vampirism is about?"
"Vampirism is about much more than bloodlust and mindless killing hunter. Few of us asked for this. Michael never wanted it. I was turned to save my life." She laughed bitterly. "Funny, isn't it? They kill everyone I know except me. Michael himself at the front of it. I suppose he did them a favor in the end."
"Who did he kill?" Dean asked, sitting up, suddenly interested in her past. Wanting to know what had broken her so deeply, wanting not to be alone in his pain.
She looked at him confused. Then away again. She stood by the open window. Her naked back white as snow. She left little to the imagination with her choice of attire.
"Our parents, little brother, his fiancé, my husband and our unborn child. He had his sire turn me to save my life after he ripped the child from my body. My own brother." She turned back to him. For the first time he saw the horrible, ragged scar that ran down her abdomen just left of her navel. "But the feeling, hunter, the power, the cold surge of passion for existence. The sweet apathy where nothing matter quite enough as the mere sense of being. But it fades, as time passes, and all you can do to stop from going mad is to make yourself believe that you feel nothing. The Salem Witch Trails ended over 300 years ago. The fleeting heartache I though would consume me there is nothing compared to what I've lived as I am. Seeing countless people you learn to love die at your feet as you are forever frozen in the moment in which you mortality ended? The sense of dread as the Rapture crawls nearer every day. How time stops being time. Eternity, hunter, is what every vampire truly hates. Some kill because of this, but Michael kills for a reason we will never know."
"Why are you telling me this?" He asked.
"Because eternity is what waits for us all at the other side of death. Life might end and pain might go away, but consciousness is forever, existence is forever. Even in heaven there is knowledge and existence. That which we fear, Dean."
"Death is nothing..." His voice trailed off.
Sammy loved life, he saw the good in it. He's happy with eternity, with heaven, but the mere thought of it scares Ashley to hell, and him too.
"What is there in the world hunter? What is there to constitute life?" She asked. Needing as answer.
One that only Dean could give. Then he understood. He saw it all...
"God." He answered.
She took a step back and put her fingers to her lip, as if she had suddenly remembered.
"Forgiveness is easy Dean." She said.
He frowned. Was she testing him? His trust in her slipped for a moment.
"What?"
"God can't forgive you if you don't forgive." She said softly.
He jumped up and out of bed. Before he knew it he had the silver blade to her throat.
"Who!? Michael? I never..." He was cut off, half by the fear in her eyes, half by the whisper of the word that brought him to his knees.
"Yourself..."
God works in mysterious ways...
He sat at her feet, sobbing helplessly. How could he forgive himself for failing everyone he loved? Every last one of them had suffered unimaginably because of him, and she expects him to forgive himself?!
She knelled down in front of him and took him into her arms.
"That's all there is. It doesn't matter what you are or what you've done. If there is one thing I've learned in my life it's that all God wants is for you to forgive, especially yourself. Humans are his most dear creations. Don't let humanity slip away. It is something you can never get back."
As he sat there in her arms on the bed he noticed first how cold she really was. Then he saw what he had ignored previously. Around her neck, in her ears, in every piercing on her body he could see was a cross or a crucifix. Five around her neck, rosaries, silver crosses, everywhere. Every tattoo on her body was a sign of faith.
Her faith is the sliver of humanity she had left. The one thing she refused to give up to the vampire inside of her. No matter what it did to her. Even though she knew she would never see the gates of heaven, solely because her humanity, her soul, had been taken from her.
Now she was here, giving him back his own dwindling chance to see heaven.
A cloud around him lifted as the guilt over his family's death lifted...
He could no longer feel her cold body. He was faintly aware of a cold sting in his neck. A hazy feeling enveloped him and the golden morning air turned gray and thick. He opened his eyes and stared directly into the eyes of Azrael. The archangel of death. A young man as a manifestation, dark hair, green eyes, no older than 30. Behind him, was Sammy.
As Dean staggered into Sam's open arms, consumed by a sense of joy, he found himself, even in an embrace with his brother, staring back at the vampire looming over his dead body. She had not a speck of blood on her. It had been a gentle bite. But as she turned towards them, even looking so distant and distorted, he saw tears streaking her perfect cheeks. All the pain of the ages contorting her breathtaking features, as she walked from the room, crying bitterly into the morning, into her own cross to bear, into eternity.
"She is an aeger Dean. A servant of faith." Azrael said putting his hand of Dean's shoulder.
"Will she be saved?" he asked.
"Her soul already resides in hell. It is the curse of the Lamia. Her spirit remains on earth to do what it pleases."
"She chose to serve you, through everything, and you won't even grant her peace?"
"She'll never have peace. Not even in heaven."
"That's..."
"Reality Dean. It is a way not be questioned. She knows that. Now is the time for you to be at peace. It is what she wanted for you."
Dean nodded, sadly. It is a thing not be questioned. She won't question it and neither will he. She had given him what he wanted, he had Sammy back, and now, neither of them would ever suffer again, no matter how long eternity is.
A/N: So?
I don't really know what to say coz I don't know where it came from...
I guess I'm just sad and I wanted to pass the time.
I hope there's at least someone out there who likes it.
Reviews please. Flames too if you like, I don't mind.
PS: Aeger is latin for sufferer.