Title: So Close It Almost Breaks The Skin
Author:
brosedshieldDisclaimer: Don’t own, don’t profit.
Characters/Pairing: Deanna
Warnings: short, medium-graphic overview of torture in Hell, self-loathing, recovery
Rating: R
Word count: 875
Spoilers: general S4 background
Summary: Before Sam left for college, Dee never shaved her legs...it’s different now that she’s out of hell.
Beta credit: Awesome co-thinker
lavinialavender did an lovely job. Errors that remain are totally mine.
Author Notes: Apparently I’m obsessed with Dee and hair. And Dean/na’s post-Hell mental issues. Huh.
Before Sam left for college, Dee had never shaved her legs. Guys never did-unless they were the speed freaks on the swim team, or gay or something-and it just struck her as a waste of time and money, cutting away something that would just grow back the next day.
After Sam left, she tried a lot of things that hadn’t been worth it before. She fucked guys-and girls-and wore tight tops, push-up bras, high heels and shaved herself down to her pores, everywhere.
It was strange, seeing her legs bare and unprotected, the muscles under the skin almost shining as they flexed. They looked vulnerable and unbreakable at the same time, like the cabling of suspension bridges or the roots of a plant growing through the rock. She liked it and hated it at the same time. Liked and hated the feel of her hand-and others’-riding up that lean line of leg. Liked and hated the feel of her hair growing in.
This is what it would feel like on my face, she thought, rubbing the stubble against the grain, if I had been a boy.
Even when Sam came back, it was an occasional thing, something she did when she wanted to, or to play the part she was born to.
It’s different now that she’s out of hell.
Now she slides into the bathtub and the feel of the straight razor against her skin is like a rite of passage, a reassurance and threat. She used to buy the girlie safety razors-in for a penny, in for a pound, right?-but now she’s more than comfortable with a razor against her skin. She knows exactly the angle, exactly the pressure, to ghost along the tender edge of flesh and never cut in. She knows exactly what the knife would do if she flexed her wrist.
Memories from hell dance on the surface any time she has a knife in her hands. She imagines the feeling would rise up if she handled hot irons and nutcrushers too, but it’s not like those are just laying around the standard apartment kitchen.
It’s the same-but different-when she comes here to shave.
It’s not like she has to do it. Sam doesn’t care, and Dee doesn’t put any particular stock in the standard concepts of feminine beauty-except to avoid them, at times-so coming here is her choice. Not her choice like hell was her choice-what the fuck else was I supposed to do, Sam? Let you go?-but a true option. She could walk around hairy as a freaking abominable snowman, or shave herself down to the bikini straps, and no one she cares about would give a damn.
So she leaves Sam to his books and secrets and locks the door, washes herself clean of the mud and muck and filth of another day hunting with not enough alcohol to dull the memories, and she flicks open her straight razor and sets it against her skin.
She could flay the big muscle out of her leg with this knife. She could strip the skin and cut the tendons into a dozen, little pieces, and she could chip away at the bones beneath until the crack was big enough to scrape out the marrow with a fingernail.
She’s done it. It’s been done to her. She knows both sides of this knife, and both of them cut until she feels like she’s bleeding inside, and sometimes when she sits down, the pale lather making her pale legs long and slick and ready for the blade, she can’t do it. She can’t hold that knife and not think of Alastair, and hell, and all the times she screamed like the little bitch she is and all the time she made them scream because they had fucking nothing on her, and she drops the knife in the tub and shakes and cleans the soap off her legs as fast as she can.
Those nights she drinks herself to sleep and hopes that Sam will still be there in the morning.
But other times, she gets through it. Not because she’s a tough-as-nails hunter who can do anything the big boys can, but because in this she has a choice, a true choice. This isn’t the choice between taking pain or giving it, between writhing on the rack or sticking her knife in the other guy. For once, she can choose pain, or no pain. Peace, or violence. It’s in her power to decide and she damn well will because they took a lot from her, and she gave them more, but-in spite of what it feels like sometimes-she does still have a choice.
She slides the knife along the softest, tenderest part of her calf and shivers. The water’s cooled down, she thinks, and it’s not a lie and not all the truth either. She moves down her leg, around the vulnerable bones of the ankle, and the hands that have sliced open thousands leave not a single strand untouched.
But they don’t draw blood. And they don’t cause pain. Because she has made this choice.
Nights Dee shaves her legs, she doesn’t need alcohol to fall asleep. And she doesn’t wake up screaming.
She wonders if Sam notices.