Title: Time Heals
Author: Curt Kenobi
Summary: Time doesn't heal all wounds. Sometimes, it encourages them to fester.
Rating: PG-13/T (for imagery)
Genre/Warnings: Angst, gory imagery
Timeline/Spoilers: S4 forward. Somewheres in there. (No spoilers if you know Dean is the Lazarus in the S4 opener's title.)
A/N: Just a quick semi-incoherent little flash-fic that bit me while I was on the road for a week. Lyric break was honestly an afterthought.
–I'll–paint–it–on–the–walls–/–'cause–I'm–the–one–at–fault–
"Time heals all wounds." That's what they say. That's what he keeps telling himself. "Time heals all wounds."
It's bullshit. Time doesn't heal; time dulls, time fades.
Makes you forget the details in hypersensitive, vivid technicolour and THX Dolby surround.
(Like the raw burn of a throat screamed hoarse on his brother's unanswered name….)
Like the feel of the metal or leather bruising – biting – breaking through flesh, probing – sliding – sawing through the flimsy barrier and beneath it. Inside it. The blossom and gush of blood. …The fragility of internal organs – how easily they give under pressure – squishing within an ever-tightening vise-grip until they expire with a wet pop and splash, like a childhood water balloon. …The grind and crack and SNAP! of bone…
A taunting smile, like a razor-edged gash, offering…. Follow it down and shred the tatters left of your soul asunder, the damnation a clanging gate rewarding the cave of acquiescence, of "Yes."
The still, cold burn. How it stung and stabbed initially…until it started to seep in. Until you didn't notice at all.
All of this…before you, done to you…done by you.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
He's been out of Hell a nice minute – he
(refuses – won't)
doesn't keep a count.
(He did that enough before going in.)
And, as "time heals," he doesn't recall his forty-year stint like it's happening in real-time anymore. Just details now, instead of
(lurid sense memory – sensory overload)
living flashbacks – war-story worthy to the nth degree.
But it's not like that anymore. Because time heals.
Except…
It doesn't. He's lost the waking reality of Hell, the recollection of every second spent down there. The details are fading in time, like scars – yeah. …But with every precise memory that fails him, his mind wastes no time compiling a could-have-been.
Sure, it's not exactly what happened, some of what his mind conjures up, but he did so much…. Who's he to say? Maybe it really did happen. Maybe his mind's not exaggerating. After all, it was Hell; it's all quite possible.
He said "Yes."
Maybe it should have happened.
Maybe it was worse.
Time does not heal all wounds.
It lets you make worse ones.
(The lyrics in the break are from "Breaking the Habit" by Linkin Park.)