Title: (Find Me Guilty) When True Guilt is Within
Rating: PG13 (for language)
Spoilers: None – set pre-series
Disclaimer: Huh. I wish this was my day job.
Author's Notes: You know that feeling you sometimes have when you've been plugging away at a fic that felt good when you started writing it and ends up being kinda 'nyeh'? Feedback and constructive criticism is, as always, adored.
Dean dreams.
The nightmares wake him, shaking and sweating with cramps, several times a night.
He denies it when they ask him – Dad, Sam. Pastor Jim. Says he's sleeping just fine, never better, lovin' the honest-to-god innerspring mattress on the bed in Jim's spare room. Sleepin' like a baby, he tells them, and bitches at Sam to turn out the damn light. Jim, who remembers that Sam rarely slept for longer than three hours at a time before he was two , views the analogy with some suspicion. Sam, he is pretty sure, knows that he's lying. But Dad, at least, seems satisfied with his answer and for this reason alone Dean continues to give it.
The first few nights of the summer, he tries running the dreams out of his system before bed. Pounds the pavement of the old familiar streets of the neighbourhood around Jim's church; runs till his legs aches and his chest heaves and he is sure the fatigue will be enough to override the nightmares It doesn't, and he staggers down the stairs each morning tired, irritable, calves twinging with the aftermath of the cramps.
The demon, the demon.
Always –almost every night – it comes back to this.
The demon in his goddamned head.
Can't run, can't fight, can't break free. Alone and trapped and knowing that be it today, tomorrow, or a week from now, he will locked in his own head til the moment he dies.
"Pretty little thing, pretty little girl; gonna spill her guts. Gonna make her bleed. Gonna make you taste her, red and hot in your mouth." And it does and he does, and Jesus.
The truth of it is, he is willing to tell the fuck-faced son-of-a-bitch anything. Willing to do anything. Everything. Whatever he's got, whatever he knows, whatever it takes to make it stop. Make it leave
But it neverasks for anything.
And so he says nothing.
Not because he is strong, or brave. Heroic.
Because he is locked inside, and he doesn't know how to break free.
Fourth night home, he smuggles a bottle of Dad's carefully rationed bourbon up to his room and proceeds to get completely, thoroughly drunk. Shit-faced. Or, as that chick from twelfth grade, (what was her name? Amanda, it was Amanda ) once put it, inebriated. Too fancy a word, Mandy. Don't need no stinking dictionary, just plain drunk will do. He should know better, it's something he's tried a few times on the road with only marginal success, but the bourbon is hot and true on the back of his throat and it is so easy to keep lifting the glass to his lips. It stops the cramps, true, but when he finally slips into the drunken sleep he's been seeking, he finds, too, the confines of the prison that was his own body. And when he wakes the next morning, his mouth is lined with fur and he has an angry bruise across three knuckles where he's inadvertently smashed his hand against a wall trying to free his arms of the nightmare constraints.
The flight plays out in vivid detail behind his eyes.
Every twist and turn of her body, every word spilling from her lips, every gasp for breath and rush of blood and beat of her heart.
Her words, ripping at his heart. God Dean no, please, no. Don't. Don't do this.
Her final gasping shout for help . Dean!
Exoneration? A curse.
Dean!
His name, the last sound she makes before she dies.
She's sprawled before him on the bloody garage floor. Her skin is paler in death; her hair, darker.
He did this to her. He put her here.
He doesn't know how to live, now. Doesn't know how to survive this job, this world, if these are the consequences. He longs for the weight of a rifle, a knife. But he has no weapons, no options. His hands are stayed by the demon in his body and God forgive him, because he will never forgive himself.
By the end of that first week, he's doing his damnedest not to sleep at all.
Caffeine helps, a little. He consumes it by the litre – hot coffee and cold cola and all the variations between. One of Jim's parishioners introduces him to Red Bull – got her through her graduate thesis, she says – and he sucks back close to six of those a day, most of them in the hours after Sam and Dad have gone upstairs to bed.
Television helps too, and books. He watches a lot of tv, especially at night. A few times Sam has wandered downstairs to join him, curling up in the recliner and dozing while Dean flicks the channels, searching for something to hold his attention long enough to stave off fatigue.
Sex might help.
He thinks so, anyway.
So he tries it, once, to prove to himself that he's still human. He tries it because he aches for it – physical contact without commitment, without guilt, without blood on his hands. And it's easy, so damn easy: this tall girl from the bar down the road, blonde and beautiful and writhing above and beneath him. Yet the whole time she is moving against him – long golden hair, long golden limbs, hot wet mouth and that damned talented tongue of hers – he is somewhere else. Somewhere outside, where he can't touch or be touched.
Afterwards, when the girl is curled naked into her sheets, he slips out of the bed and fumbles in the dark for his jeans. Walks home barefoot, because it's easier than putting his boots on. He wanders through Jim's house and out onto the porch, where he curls up on the swing with a bottle of beer to wait for the sunrise.
There are so many ways to take life, and so many lives to take. He takes them all.
The people he loves. Dad, Sam. His family.
They die at his hands, over and over and over again.
Sometimes they are tangible: he can reach out, touch them. His hands close around their necks, sink into their bellies, wield knives to split their throats. He detonates bombs, crashes cars. Feeds poison through IV lines. Shoves them from cliff tops and buildings. Shoots them point-blank, the buckshot ripping through their skin.
Sometimes they are not tangible – neither are his actions, though he knows in his heart that he's done it, he's killed them. He knows, because whether he can see them or not, touch them or not, their anguished screams of betrayal reverberate through his mind and the flashing of their eyes – silent, accusing – damn him further with each beat of his heart.
He can't remember when the micro-sleeps start. Isn't even aware of it, the first time it happens; standing at the kitchen sink with a tea-towel in his hand and the shattered pieces of Jim's gravy boat at his feet, and no memory of how either came to be where they are. He loses time – a minute here, a minute there, a couple of words in a conversation. The segment between ads on the tv. The space between sentences on the page he is reading.
It gets harder and hard to be with them – to make mundane conversation, to make plans with Dad about the next hunt, to follow Jim's plans for the old vegetable patch, to listen to Sam's problems with the girl he met at the library and answer as though it matters. His eyes, red-rimmed and awful, are slowly burning holes in the back of his head. And they are going to notice, sooner or later.
If they want to.
If they can bear to.
His body starts to betray him. The slightest level of physical comfort and he's asleep. At the kitchen bench, bent over the table in the study, leaning against the linen cupboard waiting for Sam to pass him on the way to the bathroom. Ten minutes in a warm shower. Once, while driving, an entire change of traffic lights in a luckily empty street. Almost half an hour on the couch in front of the tv, during which time he starts to cramp so badly that upon waking he limps out into the kitchen for a heat pack. He slumps into a seat at the table, reaching down to hold the lavender-scented bag – a gift to Jim from a faithful parishioner; damned thing stinks – firmly against his aching calf.
She is going to die.
He knows this – completely, unequivocally. His fists are clenched in preparation; he has steeled his silent footsteps to give maximum momentum to his strike.
She has made it through the house to the garage and she's at the work bench, hands moving frantically over the tools in her search for a weapon.
He wants to fight it. Aches to fight it. But the demon is in him and equally strong is the urge to kill her. Smash her, throttle her, rip her fucking throat out with his bare hands. His arms, his hands, ache with the need to do so even as what's left of himself fights against it.
He passes a workbench, fist curling around a length of solid metal piping. He is within striking range now, raises the pipe to bring it down across the back of her neck –
– but she hears the movement and whirls around to face him, dodging the blow instinctively, swinging the tool in her hand with a determined expertise showing clearly through her fatigue.
Wrong wrong fucking wrong!
It's not supposed to happen this way.
He knows she doesn't fight back.
But she is advancing on him and he feels the first blow glance of his shoulder, the barest of touches that sends him recoiling defensively. She knocks the pipe out of his hand with the next blow – he's confused now, the part of him desperate to kill her warring with the part of him that simply does not know how to do this. His mind rages and his limbs move in response but his muscles scream in protest at the unfamiliar motion.
Yet it takes only one kick, and another, and another, before he's able to knock her to the ground. He moves instinctively, pinning her to the floor with the weight of his entire body, one arm hard across her throat.
She bucks beneath him: manages to get one leg free long enough to plant a solid kick on his calf. By sheer chance it connects with the tender part of his cramping muscle and he curses in pain, releasing the pressure on her throat long enough for her to gasp "Dean!"
He presses harder, determined to choke the very life out of her.
She kicks again; worms one arm free to hammer at his back with an open hand. "Dean, please!"
She is gasping for breath, eyes swimming with tears of exertion as she struggles against him.
Eyes.
Green eyes.
What the fuck?
The grey void between dream and reality shifts. He looks down, sees the tangled grey t-shirt and maroon boxers, the cloud of dark brown hair. The familiar freckle at the corner of his lips, the small scar above his left eyebrow. Sam? He stares at him, not understanding.
Sam's face is turning a dark, horrible red. "I can't – !" he gasps. "You're hurting me!"
Oh god, oh Sammy no, no!
He releases the pressure, removes his arm. Rolls his body away.
Sam rolls onto her side, coughing, sucking in long, ragged breaths. He reaches out a trembling hand, touches his back and the ends of her hair, not believing. "Sammy?"
He coughs again, clears her throat, manages to get the words out. "It's me."
"How do I know?" Because he has to know, he has to be sure.
"I broke my arm in the third grade when you pushed me off Caleb's front porch." He's drawing breath a little easier now; that awful rasping sound has subsided.
Oh, Jesus. He snatches his hand away. I almost fucking killed you, Sam. "You better go. I'm not – I was –"
"You were dreaming," he says, and pulls herself up into a sitting position. "You okay?"
The fuck's Sam gotta ask that, when he's just tried to throttle him with his bare hands? Jesus. Tears well in his eyes; he nods, afraid that if he opens his mouth to speak, they'll fall.
"What were you dreaming about?"
Are there words for it? "Nothing. It's okay."
"Was it, you know...?"
"It's nothing," Dean repeats, without rancour. He's trembling.
Sam leans back against the wall. Pushes his hair off his face with a shaking hand that belies the calm expression on his face; draws his legs up to his chest. The motion is so familiar, so Sam, that something inside Dean collapses. He sags against him and though he still has a few inches on his little brother and the position is awkward at best – they are sprawled on the floor behind the kitchen table – Sam manages to catch him and bring his head down on his shoulder. And because he is Sam, he doesn't ask again.
He just strokes Dean's hair, and he waits.
"They said," he whispers, and the words stick in his throat so that he has to force them past his lips in a rush of air that once, in another life, may have been a sob. "Dad said I shouldn't remember. It was the demon, and I shouldn't remember, but I do." He clutches at Sam, not wanting to tell him, not wanting him to know, but desperate to make him understand.
Share the burden, ease the pain.
Even if, God help him, it adds to his.
"What do you remember, Dean?" Sam's hand cool on his flushed skin, his voice soft and soothing,
floating out of the darkness.
"Her neck. The weight of the spanner. But mostly her neck. My hand fit all the way around it, my fingers met, and I broke it. I didn't know I was strong enough to do…for that. And I didn't have a choice, I couldn't stop it. And they say it wasn't me, it was the damn demon, but I can feel her bones and the grip of my hand and I remember it, Sam."
Sam smoothes his hair.
He waits.
"You want to know the stupid part?" His laugh is bitter; heavy with unshed tears. "It's all so fucked. So I don't even know why she – why it – I shouldn't remember her."
The faintest tremor runs through Sam and he stiffens momentarily. Fear, perhaps. Disgust. Or maybe sorrow; he can't tell. Not when he feels all of those things himself, so often and so intensely that he's forgotten how to feel almost everything else. Dean's fingers are still curled around the soft material of Sam's t-shirt and after a few moments his hand resumes its gentle, stroking caress.
He doesn't ask Sam to stay with him. He doesn't need to.
He knows, because he is Sammy and he always knows.
It feels good…so good to be lying here with the tiles cool beneath him and Sam's calming face above him and the weight of the universe momentarily lifted from his shoulders. The tight muscles in his legs start to relax. His breathing slows. The morning is still several hours away but they stay huddled together on the kitchen floor, waiting for it. Perhaps Sammy sleeps. He doesn't know, he can't see Sam's face. He watches the shadows grow and lengthen and fade into the light of the dawn, and because he is here, in his baby brother's arms, the monsters hiding in or behind all of them are held temporarily at bay.
But he's not safe.
And he doesn't sleep.