Devil's Trap
The utter loneliness struck you first like a devil's trap bullet, shooting you through the heart and forcing you to stay there. You weren't strong enough to overcome it all on you own. It was as if you were in the very chasm of hell, waiting forever to find a sense of company, a sense that you weren't falling into a dissatisfactory bottomless pit. It wasn't until Dean had left that you knew that you could feel so completely alone. Before you had known him, you drifted from one job to the next, never quite finding your calling, but at least you had never felt this alone. With him, you found a kindred spirit, someone you could talk to and laugh with. But you didn't know that without him by your side, that you would feel so devastatingly alone.
You had been a bartender in a petite, but run down town of the side of a crappy little highway that few cars ever roamed. You served your fair share of truckers, a couple of strippers, and ditzy college students from a few towns over. Over time, rumors started among the college students about sightings of cannibals out in the woods between the highway and the town, but you rolled your eyes at it all. It seemed like the usual bullshit that drunken idiots would "see" when they stumbled out of the bar in the middle of the night after they were kicked out after closing. That is, you didn't believe them until the bodies were found a couple of weeks after the rumors had seemingly erupted out of nowhere. It had been late one night, almost closing time in the unusually empty bar, and you could still remember the first time you laid eyes on him.
He walked in alone wearing a blue and white plaid button up over a simple charcoal grey Aerosmith t-shirt and blue jeans. His dirty blonde hair was slightly messy, but you though he looked cute from afar. You turned away from him so that you wouldn't stare—after all, your mother had told you all those years ago, that it wasn't polite to stare. He sat directly across from where you were standing at the bar, and he watched as you moved to take inventory of the drinks that were left. "We're closing in a minute or two, you know."
He laughed, "Yeah, well I thought maybe you could pour me a drink with the minute you have left." His voice was deep, a little gravely. You found something about his voice more intoxicating than all of the liquor in the building. "So what do you say?"
You turned around, smirking at him, "Pick your poison, pretty boy." That's when you saw his strikingly green eyes watching you, roam over your body and swallow you up all in a second that felt as if it had lasted an eternity. Your breath hitched.
"Pretty boy, huh?" He bit his lip suggestively, but said nothing more on the matter. "Bourbon, and I don't want any of the cheap crap, alright?"
Two glasses clinked on the bar table as you set them down, and you poured copious amounts of bourbon in them. Something about him made you feel slightly reckless. Maybe it was how the slightest flutter of his breath against your hand that you had felt when you set the glasses down made your skin feel hot and erupt into goosebumps.
"So what are you doing here?" you asked him, taking a sip of the bourbon that lightly burned the back of your throat.
"Hmm, well…" He looked off into the distance, past you, his eyes analyzing the room. You watched his lips part as he exhaled softly. He turned back to you, smiling. "What do you mean?"
"Yeah, well, I mean what is a guy like you doing in a shit hole like this?"
"Hunting monsters mostly," he said half-seriously.
You laughed, thinking it was only a joke. But if only you had known the weight his words had carried, how serious he had actually been. "Well, good luck with the hunting, um… I don't think I caught your name."
"Dean," he said simply, but the seemingly simple name seemed alluring and lovely to you when it rolled off of his lips. Something about him intrigued you, though you couldn't quite put your finger on it. Maybe it was the way he moved, or the vivid past his eyes held, but you wanted to know more about him.
"(Name)," you replied, extending your hand. You looked at the clock across the room, sighing. "It's been nice meeting you, but I've got to close up before I get in trouble."
You noticed his eyes shift to the left as if he had seen something in the corner of his eye. He simply nodded his head, and waved by to you as he stood up, leaving ten dollars on the table. "Take care."
What you hadn't known is what Dean had seen in the corner of his eyes had been a vampire, lurking in the shadows waiting until you closed the bar to drag you out into the woods. Dean had been there to save you, in the end, along with his brother Sam. By the time all was said and done, you couldn't go back and live as a normal human being anymore. The world of monsters, demons and angels had been thrust upon you and you would never be able to forget it. It was at that moment that it had occurred to you why you had found your parent's bodies on the floor when you were a little girl, their hearts ripped out of their chests and a man rushing into your house, carrying an odd looking knife, saying almost comically in the tragedy of it all, "Balls," as you cried your heart out.
You begged the brothers to take you under their wing, teach you how to hunt and destroy these evils on the planet. You could no longer exist without pouring the rage you had bottled up over the loss over your family through hunting. You couldn't explain it to them—you didn't feel comfortable enough yet to pour your heart and soul out to them—but they could tell by the look in your eyes that you had encountered your fair share of monsters before, but it was only now that you understood that those monsters weren't just stories, but that they were very real and that they had taken away everything you had ever loved.
And Dean, once taking you under his wing, paid special attention to you. He wanted to make sure that you would be safe during the hunts, that you wouldn't be reckless. You worked closely with him, all the while forgetting how attracted you were to him initially. It wasn't the time for a relationship and you were almost certain that Dean hadn't felt attracted to you in any case. But you had grown close to each other, almost like brother and sister.
"You know how to shoot?" he asked you ever so casually, a smile dancing on his lips like a tempting little demon.
You had to ignore how your core absolutely burned for him. There wasn't room in the bunker for you and Dean to become an item. There wasn't room in your chest for more heartbreak. "Yeah," you said, looking out of the door thinking that maybe Sam would come and take over the lesson from here. You found Sam handsome, but you didn't feel the magnetic pull to him that drew you to Dean.
"Alright, then show me what you got." He handed you a gun, and tugged you by the hand, leading you to a room set up with a practice dummy. "Aim for the head, the heart, the balls, I don't care."
You took the safety off, and aimed carefully, your hands shaking from how nervous Dean's presence made you feel. Annoyingly, you couldn't get your arms to stay still as you aimed. All of a sudden, you felt his body pressed up behind you. Your breath hitched. He wrapped his arms around you, and helped you hold the gun.
"Stay still, would ya?" He held your arms tightly, but he didn't know that it only made you feel as if your nerves were vibrating beneath your skin. "Come on, if you do this, I'll let you split the last piece of apple pie that's left in the fridge with me." The ultimate offer—the one thing that Dean would almost never sacrifice—he offered to you. You had quickly learned of his affinity for pie after moving in with the boys.
"I'm truly touched by your generosity," you spoke teasingly before shooting the gun straight at the dummy's head. "But really, I won't need any of your pie to make me shoot better." You turned to face him, but you realized that you were standing too close to each other for comfort. Your lips lingerd inches away from his. He eyes you carefully, unsure of what was going to happen next but you were sure that for a moment he had spoken to you with his eyes that he was welcome to a kiss. Maybe if you felt entitled to, or more confident, you would have kissed him on the lips then and there with wild abandon. But something inside you made you place the gun in his hand before running off into you room to clear your head of how fuzzy he made your mind feel.
A tear slid down your cheek as you stared at a picture of him, and you couldn't deny that you had developed feelings for him. You sat at the edge of his bed, trying to desperately hold yourself together when you felt as if everything around you was falling apart. "Dean," you choked out, your body shaking as you were overcome with a wave of despair. "I miss you."
He watched his black eyes flicker before him in the puddle left by a storm a day ago. The air blew against his skin, but he couldn't quite feel it as he used to. Something within him had changed; a sort of hunger, a bloodlust bit at him like a rabid dog. It was consuming him slowly, but he vowed to fight it as long as he could, damnit.
"You could go back, before it's too late to go back, Dean. Are you sure you want to do this?" Crowley's rough voice spoke behind him. It was rare for Crowley to ever show concern, but perhaps he had found a friend in Dean, but he couldn't quite be sure. Crowley was a screwed up son of a bitch, the King of Hell, not exactly trustworthy per se. But, it was the only companion Dean had on this long and lonely road he would be walking from now on.
He couldn't lead (Name) or Sam into this; it wasn't right of him to force them on this dark path that they had fought against for so long. And, if Dean ever went too dark, he could trust that they would one day be there to put him in his place. "Yeah, I'm sure." He nodded his head slowly, holding back the few human emotions he had left dwelling in him. It was early for him as a demon; he had a ways to go before he would be completely indoctrinated into hell. But, he knew it was inevitable—how far he would sink until he fell through the Earth into its depths.
"You're willing to leave behind a brother you love and a girl—"
"Don't bring Sam into this, and especially not (Name)." He spun around quickly, a rage building up inside him unlike any other. He wrapped his hands around Crowley's thick, stubbled neck. "Alright, you son of a bitch? I swear to God, if you even think so much as to bring them into this I'll kill you."
Crowley pushed Dean back without touching him, and smirked smugly, "You know, God won't be helping you now," he chuckled cruelly, "But I'm here, and I'm all the help you have for now, so I would appreciate it if you expressed some sort of gratitude for me not leaving you to succumb to this all on your own."
Dean left Crowley in the streets and walked off alone, to the run down motel they had chosen to stay at for the time being. He knew Crowley would be back in the morning for him to take him to the next shit hole on the map, but for now, he needed to be alone.
A/N: Rough start, I guess. Hopefully it'll get better as it progresses. Thanks for reading!
Song I listened to while writing this: David Bowie: You Feel So Lonely You Could watch?v=tSb9O1hepEA