Trigger warning: implied self harm, rape threat.
Days passed while they hunted a shifter in Indiana. The nights passed with drinking and terrifyingly vivid nightmares, different each night. Dean's temper and conversation became shorter. More than once while the brothers were out, Sam would say Dean's name and Dean turned on him with a knife. Every time, he lowered it and walked away without a word.
Before Sam went to bed, the evenings were mostly filled with awkward silence. Dean aggressively didn't want to talk about what was wrong, and Sam couldn't change his mind no matter how much they argued, and so Sam gave up trying.
That was until the night Dean couldn't wake up.
He was tied to a chair in the back room of an abandoned factory. That was nothing new. It was silent around him, without wind or water dripping. He was alone.
Then he heard the door open behind him and his breathing got faster. He couldn't turn to see what had entered, but slowly it walked to where he could see it in the dim light: it was Sam. Dean didn't relax. Something was wrong. Sure enough, he watched as the thing in front of him smiled and started tugging at its skin, which fell to the floor in chunks. Dean winced and looked away. After a minute he felt a hand lift his chin, and he was forced to look into his own green eyes.
"Shifter," he muttered.
"No," the thing said. "I'm you, Dean."
"Go fuck yourself."
"Well, I could do that if you really wanted it, Dean," it said with a laugh. Dean tried to yank his face away from the thing as it leaned closer, and he saw a flicker of something through the half-open door.
"Come on, Dean," the shifter yelled. It let go of his face and pulled out a knife. "Let's have some fun, huh?" Dean wasn't afraid of it, much. There was something else in the shadows, behind the door, and his gut told him to be much more afraid of whatever that was.
The shifter yanked his arm and pulled the blade across it deeply, one, two, three times. Dean gasped but didn't scream. The shift leaned over to get in his face again.
"I know," it said quietly. "I know you, Dean. It's so hard to torture you, when you're so good at torturing yourself. Would it help if I cut your hips instead, just like you do? What's a few extra scars? Would it help if I bent you over a table and ripped you apart from the inside? Would you scream then?"
Dean shut his eyes and tried to block out what the shifter was saying. Blood was still flowing from his arm, and his consciousness started to drift…
The shifter shoved the knife into his shoulder. Dean screamed then.
"Pay attention, Dean!" it yelled.
But he was so close to passing out and he was so tired… The knife went in again and he screamed, his body lurching…
It wasn't his own voice but Sam's calling his name, no rope tying him to a chair but Sam's arms holding him. He wasn't bleeding but his body shook with tension and sweat. Sam rocked him back and forth, humming tunelessly, as Dean tried to gain control of himself again. After a few minutes he opened his eyes, pushed himself away and turned on the nightstand lamp.
"What was that, anyway?" he asked hoarsely. Sam looked down at his hands.
"You wouldn't wake up, Dean," he said. "You were convulsing, and you screamed a few times, and I tried shaking you and calling your name but you couldn't wake up. I didn't know what to do."
Dean ran his hands through his hair and looked over at the bottle on the nightstand. It was empty.
"Don't you think it's about time we talked about this?" Sam asked. Dean looked back to his little brother's face, frowning in concern, and he sighed.