let's lie, say we're happy to be here

anna is seventeen

She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She took a sip of coffee and looked again. She dug her fingernails into her leg and kept looking.

The report in front of her said she'd deteriorated.

Anna stared at it with a numb chest, tingling fingers, and dry eyes. "Deteriorated," she mouthed. She scanned the rest of it, but it was just a summary of her visit with Ramone, and she'd been there. She knew it all. But the words at the bottom…

Condition since last visit: Deteriorated

She had. But she didn't understand how Ramone could see it. She'd made sure it all stayed inside of her. Her father's face in her head, her mother's blood in her chest, she'd made sure not to show them the world. Not to show them to the world.

But Ramone had always been good at hearing what Anna refused to say. That was why Sam and Dean kept bringing her back to him. He said things they already knew but with a matter-of-factness that made it less frightening the way Anna had deteriorated over the past month. No. Over the last year.

When she thought about it, Anna could picture herself flaking apart. And she could watch with objectivity, she thought, but not the same kind that Ramone had. She watched numbly as she picked at a layer of charred skin, peeling it away without feeling the pain.

She wasn't objective. She was just used to it.

"Hey." She turned her head to see Dean had walked in. She tried to make herself return to the world as she was supposed to exist in it. Like a teenager. Like a girl. Like a person, not a corpse.

"Hey," she murmured. "Ramone sent me the thing. I guess he wants me to come in weekly now."

"Oh yeah?" Dean asked. He dropped into a chair beside her and took a sip of black coffee before setting his cup aside and reaching for her laptop.

Anna let him take it, let him read the summary. They'd talked about John in that session, and she'd said more than she ever had before. She'd cried in front of him really hard for the first time, and she'd admitted things she'd never been willing to say out loud, because she'd finally felt like it was time. No wonder Ramone had written that word– deteriorated– she'd practically begged him to.

Thing was, she'd deteriorated long before her most recent session with him. All those reports he'd written no change, she'd really been flaking apart. She'd just been silent. And she thought that, really, he should've known that was the worst of it. Who built a shell around themself if their insides weren't soft and rotten?

But the thing was, Anna had a thicker, more convincing shell than most, or so she liked to think. Nobody got a whiff of the mold in her blood unless she decided they should know it was there. So it was only when she sat in front of Ramone and dug her fingers a little deeper into her skin– to where it hadn't yet died and flaked away, where it was pink and vulnerable, stretched tight across flesh and bone and blood– so that it hurt again and she cried, that he was able to see.

Anna called that progress. Her therapist called it deterioration.

She looked at Dean again. "Yeah, I guess… I guess they're changing my meds." They'd probably have done it a long time ago, but Anna never told them there was all that rot in her core waiting to be scooped out.

"Well, that's good, right?" Dean said, looking at her cautiously from behind the screen. "That's why we went."

The we made Anna give her brother a faint smile. Dean wasn't the one deteriorating. "I guess so," she said and reached for her own coffee cup. The bitterness settled over her tongue, and Anna was reminded of mornings she'd felt saved by this flavor. Now it felt like a weak force with a strong mask. It might hit your tongue with an impressive taste, but it couldn't help you. Not really. Not for long.

"Did you schedule another visit?"

Anna shrugged.

"You want me to do it?"

She shrugged again.

"You okay?"

A third shrug. Suddenly her weakness was infusing her exterior. Talking to Dean wasn't anything like talking to Ramone. She didn't have to peel at her own skin and try not to cry, because Dean knew where all the sensitive spots were, and he knew how to cover them and promise her that it was all gonna be okay.

"He said I deteriorated," Anna said, her voice cracking like a kid's. She wanted to hide from the sound of herself.

Dean frowned slightly at her and folded the computer screen down halfway. It was like seeing the flag fly at half mast, some sort of broken show of respect. "You know he just means-"

"My mind," Anna interrupted quietly. She nodded. "I can't think right anymore, Dean."

"That's not what he said, Rugrat."

"I know, it's just…" Anna sighed. It was hard explaining things to her family. They weren't lepers and they weren't counselors. They cared too much, and they didn't know how to help. "I feel like the way I think is just all depression."

Dean gave her this pained frown that told her he didn't understand. "Anna, you know you're brilliant, right? The way you think is different, it's not depression."

"Bet," Anna murmured a castaway joke. She reached her palms toward her eyes when they suddenly began to water. "I feel so fucked up right now."

Dean put a gentle hand on her head and leaned a little closer. "Hey, you're not. Alright? You just need some more time." She knew that. She did. But in the meantime, it hurt. "This stuff is complicated."

Lepers and Counselors and Family. This stuff sure was complicated.

Dean leaned back in his chair and looked at her with a faint glimmer in his eye. Anna recognized his nostalgia in an instant. "You remember when you were seven, we picked Sam up and went lookin' for Dad?"

Anna nodded a little, sniffled, and picked up her coffee cup. Dean was giving her some time to hide from herself, whether he meant to or not. And it started with that mask.

"You wrote him all these letters. You were just a little kid, but you had these huge thoughts. You would tell him everything we did, and you would say sorry to him for things that… that somebody should have been apologizing to you for."

"Dean…"

Dean bit his cheek like she'd hurt him just by saying his name. Anna thought his eyes looked wrong too, but she knew that was only because it wasn't often that he felt things in front of her. "I think about that little girl a lot, you know," Dean told her. "You always had a mind that was too big for your body, and you always used it to worry too much."

"That's called anxiety."

"Whatever," Dean quipped, and they both smiled wetly. "What I'm trying to say to you, kid, is that there's nothing wrong with your mind. You've got some chemical imbalances or whatever, but the way you think isn't gonna change when the meds kick in."

Anna nodded, trying not to cry again. "I don't remember writing those," she admitted after a minute. "I just remember being scared I would never see him again."

She watched Dean's face deteriorate like her body and her brain. He didn't pick himself apart, though, at least not in front of her. Anna figured that was because he could still feel the pain when he shucked skin away from bone. She felt like she should apologize, but she didn't. She couldn't stand to hear her own voice again.

"I'm sorry," Dean said, and Anna knew she should have been the one to just buckle down and say it. Fuck if it didn't hurt her when his skin started to flake.

"I'll call him."

Dean looked startled. "What?"

"Ramone," Anna said, calling do-over because she wished she would have apologized. "I'll call him and make an appointment for next week. But I don't want to do every week."

Dean ran his tongue over his teeth but nodded. He wanted to say something. It was obvious. But he just opened the computer back up.

For a minute, Anna just sipped at her coffee and watched Dean scan the report. Her brain, for the moment, was remarkably quiet. It didn't poke at her eyes or throat like it had been just a second ago. It let her be still and at peace for a little while.

"You know, Ramone's a nice guy, but I'm startin' to get why you hate these doctors."

Anna raised an eyebrow and quirked a half-smile of tired amusement. "About time," she murmured into her coffee.

"Kinda pisses me off," Dean continued, shaking his head at the computer screen before finally turning it back toward Anna and pushing it to sit in front of her. She was grateful to have her laptop– her distraction– back. "I get it, the guy's an objective third party or whatever, but does he have to talk like a fuckin' robot?"

"I know," Anna grumbled. "They talk about me like a frickin' test subject. Condition deteriorated, trialing sertraline 100mg, will reassess in one week." She looked up from her pale fingers to see her brother giving her a slight smile.

"Funny girl," he told her and chugged a few swallows of his coffee. "So, how you feelin'? Really."

Anna shrugged one shoulder and looked back down at her hands, fingers wrapped around glass, pressing just hard enough to look a little paler at the tips. "I've been thinkin' about chopping my hair off with my silver blade. So I guess you could say I've seen better days." She raised her shoulders in a shrug again, and as she let them fall, she sighed long and hard like she only could in just the right company. You can't fill the air with pain if you don't know that the ones who will be ingesting it are happy to do so. "But I'm not thinkin' about slitting my wrists with it, so… I've seen worse days."

She always hesitated to say things like that to Dean, but she knew he'd rather hear them than worry she might be thinking them all by herself. So she'd been slowly training herself to stop biting her tongue and start screaming again. She'd been a screamer once, when she was still a kid.

"Yeah, well, if you do start thinkin' about that again, I wanna know, okay?"

Anna tossed her eyes very briefly in Dean's direction. "Yeah, I know," she said softly. "I'm getting better," she told him. She gave her brother another quick glance, and it was enough for her to see that he was hesitant to believe her. She'd so often sugarcoated the pain she fed him, that she understood his caution. "I know Ramone thinks I'm getting worse, but that's just because I used to be really quiet and now I'm actually talking to him."

Dean's eyebrows pulled together in what looked to Anna like a rare form of pain– the happy kind, the long-awaited kind. "That's really-" He cleared his throat and nodded, catching Anna's eyes and hanging onto them. "That's really good, Rugrat."

Anna blinked a couple times, straining to hold everything Dean was feeling. "It's this weird cycle," she said. "It happens every time. I feel myself start sinking, but I don't do anything, and then I blink and I've hit rock bottom." She pulled her eyes away from his and took a sip of coffee. It didn't embolden her like it had when she was a kid. But it was a familiar taste on her tongue, and it left a familiar feeling in her stomach. "And I never feel it when I start to go up again, but I just, like… I blink and I'm a little closer to the surface, and I blink again, and I'm a little closer. I don't know if that makes sense."

Dean nodded subtly, his expression serious and a little pinched. "I follow."

"A month ago, I couldn't think about next year without crying." She paused, but reminded herself not to bite her tongue. "'Cause I didn't know if I would ever see it." Her eyes burned, and instinct said to freeze, but Anna kept going instead. "I guess I just didn't have any hope."

It was a simple explanation for a complicated feeling, but she didn't know what else she was supposed to say that would make Dean understand. The goal wasn't to tell him how much pain she'd been in. The goal was to convince him she wasn't there anymore. She looked at him, half-expecting him to say something simple and wise. But Dean was just listening.

"Now it's like… I still feel fucked up. I'm still sad and tired and angry and just… I don't know. I still want to give up sometimes," she admitted without really meaning to. "It's just different, 'cause even though I'm scared I'm gonna feel like this forever, I don't believe that. Like, I know there's this happy version of me somewhere in the future, and- and I want to meet her." She sniffled, but she hadn't even realized she was crying until that instant. For once, she'd been able to feel something without trying to stifle it. She looked at Dean, and that uncommon breed of pain seemed to be taking root in him as it had gotten stronger since she'd last looked.

"Do me a favor, Sweetheart?"

She nodded, tugging the sleeve of her henley over her hand and using it to wipe at her eyes. She was really regretting that she'd put on eyeliner this morning.

"Keep that attitude." Anna heard the tremors in her brother's voice, minute though they were, and it made her eyes sting a little more. But that was alright, because Dean's eyes were suspiciously wet too. "'Cause I want you to meet her too." Dean stood up, something in his posture saying Alright, so that's that. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the forehead that lasted longer than they usually did. "I missed you, kiddo."

Anna looked up in surprise and watched her brother go. He seemed to be in a hurry, and she knew why. They both needed to cry, and neither of them wanted to do it in front of the other.

She sat in the silence, and poked at the memory of Dean's words. He used to tell her the same thing when he and Sam returned from hunts, back when she was a skinny little girl, all arms and legs, hugging his waist in Bobby's driveway or some random motel room. Then when they'd first moved into the bunker, he'd said it teasingly every day when she got home from school. This time was different, though. Probably because she'd been gone so much longer… and she hadn't even noticed her own departure.

Anna heard herself start to cry even as she smiled. She'd missed herself too.

()()()

"Did you eat lunch?"

"Jesus, Sam, you could say hello first." Anna tossed her backpack on the table beside her brother's computer. She felt a little guilty for being quite so snappy, but Kate was standing right behind her, and she didn't like being treated like a kid in front of her friend.

"Hello, Anna, did you eat lunch?" Sam asked, his smile telling her how remarkably good-natured he was willing to be despite her grouchiness.

Anna sighed. "Yeah."

Kate poked her in the side, and Anna looked at her with a silent request that she let it go. "Chips aren't lunch."

"Anna, go eat something real," Sam told her.

"Unlike the imaginary chips I ate for lunch." She looked to Kate. "Snitch."

"And proud of it," Kate said, trailing after Anna toward the kitchen.

Anna opened the fridge, stared blankly at the food on each of the shelves for a minute, then closed it again. "We have no food," she hollered in the direction of the library. She looked at Kate, who was giving her a half-amused, half-exasperated look. "What? I swear, they should let me do the shopping. It's ridiculous. We get, like, beer and lettuce, something for each brother. That's it."

"Yeah, and way too much caffeine for the sister."

"And her best friend."

"Of course," Kate said with a solemn nod. She hopped up to sit on the counter, but when Sam entered the room, she slid instantly back onto the floor and turned to him with an innocent, slightly nervous look about her.

Sam hadn't even noticed, though. He walked past both girls to the fridge and opened it.

Anna looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing that interested her. "Practically barren," she said, and she smirked when Sam shot her an annoyed look.

"There's pizza and chinese food left from this week. Both things we ordered because they were all you would eat."

Anna shrugged. "I don't really want pizza." She thought for a second. "Or chinese."

"Anna, you have to eat something."

"Girl cannot live off chips alone," Kate said solemnly, and Anna turned to match her grin.

"Are their rangoons in there?"

"There should be," Sam snorted. "You ordered two dozen of them."

Anna laughed. "I forgot about that. I'll eat rangoons."

Sam finally looked satisfied, and he smiled at her. He pulled the takeout container from the fridge and pushed it into her hands. On his way past her, he grabbed her shoulder and leaned down to give her a kiss on the head. "Finish the lo mein too," he said and headed for the library.

"But you're gonna make me eat dinner later," Anna complained.

"Yep," Sam called back to her.

Anna wrinkled her nose and looked down at the container in her hands before turning to Kate. "See what I put up with?"

Kate swallowed hard like she didn't want to say anything. But she said, "I wish my mom asked if I ate lunch."

The corners of Anna's mouth fell, and she felt her stomach rot. Why'd she have to be such an ungrateful brat of a kid all the time? "I'm sorry, Katie."

"It's not your fault," Kate said. "I just wish sometimes."

Anna nodded, making a mental note to sit down later and peel away the layer of skin that had just died. She wished Kate's parents were different in a lot of ways, but no matter which way she thought about her friend's family, she always came out of it feeling guilty. "I do too." Then she said what she wished Kate's parents would remember to say, "Kate, you're beautiful, and you're smart, and you're, like, the sweetest ever. Eat some rangoons with me?"

Kate gave her this dead little smile that made Anna want to claw herself apart, mold and all. What good was it healing if it meant leaving her best friend behind?

"I've never turned down a crab rangoon, and I'm not about to start now," Kate said good-naturedly. "But you gotta eat the noodles. I'd hate to get on Sam's bad side."

Anna smirked, but it was all shell, no blood. She wondered if Kate's mother missed some gangly little version of Katie who smiled big, goofy smiles and gave warm, happy cuddles. Hell, Anna missed a happy Kate, even though that girl had never stood in front of her. She wondered if Kate ever looked in the mirror, reached out a finger toward her own tear-streaked cheek, and choked. She wondered if Kate ever missed herself. She broke a crab rangoon in half.

"I think they should put fortunes in these instead," she said.

Kate made a face and broke a corner off her own rangoon. "Why?"

"Fortune cookies taste like butt."

Kate shrugged. "I think that's fun, though. 'Cause, like, you gotta work for it."

Anna thought quietly that whatever the Kate she missed was like, it was purer than the little Anna she and her brothers were mourning. "That's weirdly wholesome," she said. She swallowed her first bite and felt it hit her stomach, where it would surely rot with the rest of her insides. If there'd been a fortune in this rangoon, what would it have said? Something hopeful, she liked to think. This was the part where she learned to heal after all. Even when there wasn't any joy to make it worth it yet.

La Fin