Title: "Hang Me Up to Dry"
Author: Lila
Rating: PG-13
Character/Pairing: Dean, Crossroads Demon
Spoiler: "Crossroad Blues"
Length: one-shot
Summary: Dean wants to hate her and tries to hate her but he can't hate her because she's not a demon, she's a person, just like he is.
Disclaimer: Don't own them, just borrowing them for a few paragraphs.
Author's Note: Fanfic is the best procrastination tool around! I've been sick in bed all weekend and struggling to finish a project, and there's nothing like plot bunnies that won't quit to keep me even more distracted. It's not a sequel to "Into Dust," but falls in the same vein of a girl making Dean see the light. Title and quote courtesy of Cold War Kids. I hope you enjoy.
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Dean's first thought is that she's beautiful, and she is, with a tangle of long dark hair and a body that won't quit and boobs that keep threatening to spill over the low-cut neckline of her dress, and she might be evil and all that's wrong with world, but he's still Dean Winchester and can't resist sneaking a quick peak.
Dean's second thought is that she's dangerous, and she is, because when her eyes flash blood red and her lips part in a smile that's nothing but wicked and depraved, it doesn't matter how good she looks falling out of her dress or the way her full lips part to form a perfect circle or how much he likes the way her perfume catches on the southern air and clings. Because she's the devil incarnate, and that's all that matters, even if it comes wrapped up in a perfect package.
Dean's third thought is that demon or no demon, the girl knows how to do things with her tongue, and that it's not so bad when she looks him dead in the eye and he catches the crimson lurking behind her irises as she breathes against him, "Sealing the deal."
Dean's fourth thought is that it's gotta hurt when her neck snaps back and she tilts her face to the sky and black smoke pours from her throat like a flock of crows racing across the moon, and she collapses in a heap at his feet.
Dean's fifth thought, his final thought, is that this girl just played Russian roulette with his emotions and his heart and his life, and he wants to hate her and tries to hate her but he can't hate her because she's not a demon, not really. She's a person, just like he is.
---
She's curled up in a ball a few feet away and scooting through the yarrow flowers twining along the patches of weeds lining the crossroads. She landed in the gravel and winced because the rocks sliced into the skin of her palm, and she's cradling her right hand in her left and doing her best not to cry. She's scared and confused and he knows the feeling, because it's been pressing on his chest since the moment he woke up when he should have died and his father dropped dead at his feet barely ten minutes later. It feels like he can't breathe and he'll never be okay in his own skin, and like life will never feel right again. When she looks up at him with her dark hair spilling down her back like Lady Godiva gone wrong and that glorious cleavage threatening to overflow the neckline of her dress, he knows that she feels it too. Her eyes might be brown where they used to shine flaming red, and her lips might be trembling while they used to wear a mocking smile, but there's something in the way she's holding herself the lets him know that even if she can't remember what happened to her, she's still feeling the fallout.
"What? How did I get here?" she asks and her voice comes out squeaky and terrified, and even though she's a person again, a living, breathing, feeling human being, Dean kind of misses the self-assured mocking the demon employed because it didn't remind him of himself.
He crouches down next to her and she springs back, crossing bloody palms over the neckline of her dress, and leaving a smear of blood on her skin. Her eyes are open wide, wide as they'll stretch, and she's alternately looking at him like a savior and a living embodiment of things that go bump in the night. He pries her hands away from her breasts and examines her torn palm in the moonlight, eyes watching how the blood oozes from the shallow wound to the rhythm of her pulse. There's a bruise forming along her thigh from her fall, and her eyes are trembling with moisture as he notes the battle wounds. Demons might not bleed, but people do, and she could use his help. "I'm Dean," he says softly, and closes her fist around the blood. "I have a first-aid kit in the car. I'll get it and we'll have you all fixed up in no time."
He talks to her slowly, the way he does with kids, and smiles reassuringly before heading to the Impala. The trunk is filled with guns and knives and crossbows and buried under all the crap he uses to fight evil is the battered first-aid kit. When he turns back, she's standing dead center in the crossroad and watching the clouds pass over the moon, the filmy skirt of her dress blowing high and wide over her thighs.
Dean's first thought is that she's still beautiful, and when she tilts her face towards the sky, his second thought is that she might be playing him for the fool after all.
But she hears him coming and turns at the sound of his boots on the gravel and when she looks at him her eyes are a soothing brown, like liquid chocolate in the pale light. They flash as they meet his, but it's just the moonlight flitting across the planes of her face. There's a streak of blood on her cheek and she's clutching her right hand in her left, but when she smiles it's innocent and little shy and there's nothing mocking about it.
"Come here," he says and takes her good hand in his. "I'll put you back together."
Dean leads her to the Impala and settles her on the hood, her bare feet resting on the bumper and her short skirt riding high on her thighs. She winces when he swabs her torn palm with peroxide, and he's tempted to kiss it to make it better, because she's beautiful and her eyes are just brown and there's no longer anything demonic about her.
Except she's holding herself rigidly, spine stiff as a board, and she's staring straight ahead instead of running her eyes over his profile the way women usually do. She keeps tugging at the neckline of her dress with her free hand and even though he can barely see a foot in front of him in the darkness, he can see the blush staining her cheeks.
He gives her hand an awkward pat when he's finished bandaging her palm, and she smiles at him gratefully, but still hasn't said anything. "Are you okay?" Dean asks. "Do you need anything, some water, maybe?" He thinks there might be a half-empty bottle stashed in the back somewhere, and considering she just had a demon living inside her, a mouth full of backwash doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
She gingerly pushes herself off the hood and keeps pulling at her dress, and it just slides up and down the length of her body as she alternately shifts the neckline and the hem, and Dean's first thought is that whoever this girl is, she's got him possessed by something.
"I hate to ask," she finally says, and there's still fear lurking in her voice, but she sounds a bit more confident and sure of herself. "I don't know where this dress came from, but it's not mine. Do you think you have something I can wear until I get home? I promise you'll get it back." She tugs on the dress again and when she sucks in a breath she really does pop straight out of the neckline.
It's everything he hoped for and more.
"Uh, yeah," he says awkwardly and even though it's almost pitch black with the moon moving behind the clouds, there's no denying the blush that's crept it's way up her neck to her mortified face.
He hears her muttering, "Oh my god, oh my god," under her breath as he hastily rummages through the crap in the trunk, and when he turns back to face her, she's managed to stuff herself back in her dress and she fixates on a spot over his right shoulder while he hands her the torn Stanford t-shirt Sammy uses to cushion his bowie knife.
She pulls the shirt on over the sinfully tight dress, and fluffs her hair and because his brother is nine hundred feet tall the shirt almost reaches her knees, and she manages to smile brightly because she's covered and clothed, and can finally meet his eyes. "Thank you," she says and extends a hand, the one he pieced back together, and ducks her head. "I don't know you and I have you playing nursemaid, and I can't even express my gratitude properly."
Dean lets go of her hand, because she's no longer a demon – she's a person – and people can feel pain and it has to hurt, the way his fingers are wrapped around hers and her injured palm is pressed tightly against his. "You can start by telling me your name," he suggests.
"I'm Amelia," she says. "Mili Dupree."
His fingers lock on the handle of the passenger door, and he opens it wide. "Well, Mili Dupree, I'll give you a ride. Hop in."
The easy smile disappears from her face and it becomes wary, guarded, and her fingers curl in the hem of Sam's t-shirt. "What?" Dean asks and he's a little annoyed because he rescued her from a demon and bandaged her hand and respectfully turned away when she busted out of her top and gave him an eyeful, and she still won't trust him.
"I, I just," she starts and looks around her, at the yarrow flowers decorating the crossroads like gleaming yellow eyes and the moonlight casting dark shadows across the path like hellhounds on the loose. "I don't know where we are or how we got here." She trembles a little, even though it isn't cold. "What happened to me?"
Dean wishes Sammy were with him, because Sammy has the brains to match his brawn, and Sammy's good at this kind of stuff. "What do you know about magic?" he tries, and it sounds lame, but it's better than trying to explain to Mili Dupree how her entire body was previously inhabited by something spat out of hell.
"I know Marie Laveau," she says and he looks at her in a whole new light, because voodoo ain't his thing, but he has to have an appreciation for someone who knows her stuff.
"Yeah?"
Mili nods, and she's starting to look a little less like a skittish colt and more like a confident woman. "I grew up in New Orleans. Everyone knows the Voodoo Queen."
Dean tries to figure out how to phrase this, because the thing living inside Mili was a helluva lot more potent than a dead woman rumored to have danced with her pet snake. "Think more along the lines of pea soup."
Mili's eyebrows knit and its clear she has no idea what he's talking about. "Huh?"
"You ever seen The Exorcist?"
Her liquid eyes widen and her arms wrap around her stomach and she rests a hand on the Impala's hood to steady herself. "My head didn't spin one hundred eighty degrees, did it?" she asks and rubs her neck, checks for crimps and cramps.
"We didn't get that far," Dean smiles because she's taking this like a champ, and she might be all long dark hair and a cocksucking mouth, but she's got a backbone of steel and he appreciates that. He's always thisclose to falling apart himself – he can't deal with holding another person together.
She sits on the hood and runs her hands over her limbs, feeling the muscles underneath her skin and the bones beneath them, rests a finger on the pulse beating in her wrists and takes the big, gulping breaths that separate her from them. "I think I understand what possession is," she says softly. "But I don't understand what it means."
"What do you want to know?"
She runs a shaky hand to push her hair off her forehead and closes her eyes briefly. "I mean, I haven't seen that movie since I was twelve-years-old, but I'm trying to remember and trying – "
"Mili," Dean laughs. "Real life isn't what you see in the movies."
"What does it mean, Dean?" she asks and turns to face him and her eyes are searching his, begging for answers. Dean doesn't want to break her heart because he's had his own shattered a million times over since he woke up gasping and alive when he should have been dead, but her eyes are pleading the way Sammy's did when he was a little boy, and he could never turn his brother down – never – and as long as she keeps looking at him that way, he can't turn her down either.
"It means a demon was inside you," he says and he tries to keep the frustration out of his voice, and when she flinches he knows he didn't succeed. "It means it took over your body and it took over your mind and it made you do things, things you wouldn't normally do. Things you weren't supposed to do."
It takes her a long while to respond, and when she finally asks her question he knows she doesn't really want to know the answer. "Do you think I killed anyone?"
"Does it matter? Even if you did, it wasn't you. It wasn't something you asked for. It was something done to you." There's bitterness lacing his voice and his jaw is clenched so tight it hurts, but he can't let it go because it hits too close to home.
She looks at him with Sammy's eyes and wearing Sammy's shirt and before he can move she's laying her hand on his thigh in a way that's all comfort and nothing else. "So what do we do?"
Dean doesn't want to be the one giving advice because he doesn't have a solution. He doesn't know how to make it better, only how to get through it. "You live," he says. "You live your life and do your best and hope that someday it makes up for what shouldn't be yours." He's surprised by how easily the words form on his tongue, and how much he believes them when he hears them with his own ears.
"Were you…" she trails off and she doesn't have to finish the question for Dean to know what she's asking.
"No," he says and closes his eyes and sees his father falling and the coffee splashing over Sammy's shoes and his cries filling their room as he took the big, gulping breaths that separated him from them. "But I still know what it's like to have your choices taken away." This time, he really, truly believes what he's saying. "You'll be okay, Mili. Just give it time."
Her fingers tighten on his thigh and squeeze, holding onto something real. "We'll be okay, Dean?"
"Yeah, we'll be okay."
---
Dean's first thought is that she's beautiful, and she is, with a tangle of long dark hair and a body that won't quit and boobs that keeps pressing against the thin cotton of his brother's t-shirt and she's been through the worst experience of her life, but he's still Dean Winchester and can't help taking a quick peak as the Impala rolls down the highway towards New Orleans and her home.
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Dean's second thought is that she's dangerous, and she is, because he can't keep himself focused when he can see the slide of the t-shirt against her bare thighs out of the corner of his eye. "Eyes on the road, lover boy," she laughs and draws her legs up to rest her chin on her knees, burying all that smooth skin under worn cotton.
He can't resist leering at her one last time. "I liked the dress more."
She smirks at him, and it's the first time all night that he's seen natural light reflected in her eyes. "What if I told you that I'm a nun and modesty is my bond?"
He ignores her choice of words, and focuses on the way her full lips part into a perfect circle. "I'd say score one for the big guy, and ask if you have a sister."
He doesn't know if she has a sister, but he knows that he loves the easy way she laughs and lets the darkness go.
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Dean's third thought is that demon or no demon, the girl knows how to do things with her tongue, and when he deposits her on her parents' porch she tangles her fingers through his hair and presses her mouth against his and slips her tongue inside and makes him remember that life is truly worth living.
"What was that for?" he asks and he's breathing kind of hard, and unlike last time he really wants to know the answer.
Mili kisses him again, just a butterfly touch of her mouth to his, and breathes, "Sealing the deal. We'll be okay, Dean. Remember?"
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Dean's fourth thought is that it's gonna hurt when she wakes up the next morning and remembers the full extent of what happened to her and what that thing did to her and she did to other people. He watches her wave to him in the rearview mirror, Sam's t-shirt his companion in the passenger seat, and the skirt of that filmy dress is blowing up over her thighs and he knows she'll be okay. It's gonna hurt and it's gonna suck and she's gonna want to crawl out of her own skin and be someone else, but she'll pull through. He knows she will, because if he could, she can too.
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Dean's fifth thought, his final thought, as he pulls into the motel parking lot for Sammy and home, is that this girl played Russian roulette with his emotions and his heart and his life, but he can't hate her and he won't hate her because it wasn't her choice. She's a person, just like he is, and all they can do is live.
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