fic: set out running (but i take my time) // supernatural // dean/bela
so apparently i do this thing where i fluctuate from being really active (on the internets and irl) to being totally totally useless, and incapable of typing even a journal entry to say, "hey, i'm kind of useless right now." SO SORRY ABOUT LAST WEEK!
that also explains this story, which was due... a long time ago. so this is my spnrarepairs story, for iluvroadrunner6.
set out running (but i take my time)
dean winchester, bela talbot. (ben braeden.)
pg-13; mentions of hell, ptsd, sadfacing. spoilers through 5x22.
for the prompt, "we are an impossibility in an impossible universe ~ ray bradbury".
this is what happens after you get back from hell.
She drags herself out of hell, darkness seeping out of all the cuts and scrapes and bruises that litter her skin. The air scorches her lungs, but the ground is solid, and her feet are steady.
"Hi," Dean says, bottle of Jack dangling from his right hand. "Welcome back to the planet, Bels."
"Gosh," she says, light, like anthrax, "we're already onto pet names."
He shrugs. "I kind of missed you," he says. "Want a drink?"
(Her depth perception is off; she covers her left eye with a shaking palm, and it makes no difference to her sight.) "Don't mind if I do."
--
They sprawl across the hood of his shiny black car, which is straight out of her memories, sleek and testosterone-fuelled and gorgeous, passing the bottle back and forth. He is warm but not warm like hellfire; he's warm like reality, like safety, like something she barely knew even when she was human.
"It's weird," he says, staring at her, eyes sharp and knowing and kind of sweet, for Dean, "seeing you kind of intact."
"It's weird," she counters, "last time I saw you you had a lot less skin."
He says, "I figured, if anyone was going to crawl out of Hell, it would be you."
She laughs, a little, and is surprised that it does not hurt. "If anyone was going to get deus'd out of Hell, it would be you."
"Thanks," he says, wry. The line of his throat is long and elegant and unblemished, unscarred; his fingers curve loosely around the neck of the bottle as he gives it to her.
"How'd you know where to find me?" she asks, taking a swallow, looking down at the clean intact skin of her fingertips through the clear glass. "Why'd you care?"
"I did my research," he says. "There was a mess, with some angels. I knew you'd take the chance."
"Good call," she says, tilting her head back, to stare up at the stars. (There are no stars in Hell, only razor-sharp barbed wire.) They are bright, so bright; they stick in her eyes and she finds herself tearing up, a little bit, finds herself breathless. "Where are we?"
"Graveyard," he says, "well, it used to be. Now it's a field."
"Huh," she says. There is dirt under her fingernails, grave dirt, probably. There is a little red mixed in. "Nice for the dead people."
--
They check into a motel, drunk and laughing; she is wearing his jacket which drapes across her and hides her nakedness; he's grinning wildly when he pays for the room with a credit card that has nothing to do with his name. The girl at the counter blinks at them blearily but she's a teenager, she knows what they are talking about.
She lies across the double bed and slips out of his jacket; a thousand years ago she would have complained about the fabric but now she is older, and more broken. She looks down at the paleness of her breasts and thighs and then he is next to her, shucking out of his jeans and tshirt and shoes so they can lie there together, skin to skin, just breathing. She tucks her head on his chest, under his chin, and says, very very softly, "I'm glad you came to get me."
His hand is too hot, starfish-spread across her stomach. They are closer than they were before Hell, but not inside; she feels herself arching into his touch.
"I'm sorry," he says, into the softness of her hair, "about the, you know."
"It's okay," she says, remembering his face as he stood over her, remembering the rack against her wrists and ankles and skin, "it probably sucked more for you than me, you cried the whole way through."
"It was my first time," he says, "I barely knew how to hold the knife properly."
"Boo hoo for you," she says, laughing a little: this is when he leans forward, just shy of awkward, and they kiss.
His mouth tastes like Jack, and ice cubes: just barely too sweet. She licks inside, curving into the warmth of him, the reality of him. She thinks about Sixth Form physics: he is a stationary object, and after twelve hundred years in Hell, she is finally at rest.
--
Into the silence, into the dark, she asks, "Where's your brother?"
He does not answer for so long she thinks he is not going to. The rhythm of his breath is steady, measured; this is how she knows he is lying. "He's married," he says. "Lives with a girl. In Wisconsin."
"Okay," she says. She puts her hand in his, like they are a boy and girl in a meadow in a shitty romantic movie aimed primarily at teenage girls, and squeezes tight. Her nails dig into his palm. She draws blood, but neither of them mind.
--
For a while there in Hell, she would smile at him and he would smile back. They were broken, too bad to ever be fixed: but they were broken together.
He told her I hate my dad and she said, I hate my father; you miss yours.
One time he said, the money isn't worth it any more, is it and she laughed, hollow, flat: You think so little of me, Dean Winchester?
Later they walked through the worst of her memories and he said, half-crying, I am so sorry.
She said, Everybody has a sob story.
--
Somehow they are a thing, now. There is a stretch of emptiness between them spelled Hell, which is like comradery; it's terrifying, but they are alike in a way no one else can be. They drive down endless stretches of road and she makes jokes about post-apocalypses and how America post-the end of the world looks pretty much like it did pre-the end of the world, only with a couple more Starbucks on every corner.
She thinks about leaving him alone in his Impala one rainy evening in Maine; he's so tired, like she is. This is never what she wanted. It's this weird unspoken thing that holds them together; they don't talk about it and it's so frustrating, but who else is going to hold her as she shakes apart?
They fuck that night and she scores long red lines into his back and he leaves dark purple bruises all along her sides, warm hurt that reminds them they are no longer in Hell.
She stares at him after and thinks about gravity, about orbit. She does not know if she is capable of walking away.
--
He doesn't have a hero complex, anymore. when they were doing their enemies-with-benefits thing, before she went to Hell, she'd thought he would be interesting without it; turns out he's just sad, and slow, and not-quite-right.
She doesn't really like stealing things anymore. She's not sure what she has left, after that, except some black smoke like recompense for the dead nerves in her left leg, the blankness in her left eye. Maybe she'll grow a conscience; that would be novel, at least. (Nothing is new, after twelve thousand years.)
She supposes their dull edges at least fit each other.
(She is now the one who stops sometimes, and folds the newspaper over, and says, That's unusual, isn't it?
He is the one shaking salt onto his eggs, sometimes over his shoulder if they're alone; he is the one who makes it difficult for their eyes to meet.)
--
They drive through Indiana and pull over in this town, Cicero. She washes her hair that night; it drips across her shoulders when she sits next to him on the bed. The sheets have flowers on them, faded and pale with winding green stems.
He has been wearing these jeans for the past five days. There is some dirt on them, from a bar fight in Illinois, and a little blood. It's funny how she notices this, when Hell was dirt and shit and blood everywhere, the smell obscene and terrible, and she got over that pretty fast (inside the first hundred days, if she is remembering correctly, which she probably is not because is infinite and ancient, and things start to blur when you are that old).
There is a wet patch on his shirt, from her hair. She says, "you could shower."
He says, "Are you saying I smell?" There isn't enough bite to it to be convincing; he's been all bluntness, lately.
"Yes." She knows her smile is too sharp, too brittle. "Would I be wrong?"
He shrugs, and twists around, and presses his mouth to hers, and bites her lip so both of them can taste her blood in-between them.
--
She's in a playground the next morning, with a cup of coffee in her hands, feeling a bit creepy watching the children throw sand at each other and bite and kick and generally be horrible. The bench is hard and her shoes sunk into the grass when she sat down, so there's mud on her heels.
Dean is in bed, sleeping. She doesn't know why she's here, except that the motel was kind of close and she didn't really have anything to do and being alone is kind of a luxury she never had in Hell. (And children are very rarely composed of the rotting bones she still sees, on occasion.)
There is a boy; he's maybe twelve, thirteen. "Hi," he says. His eyes are wide, dark; his hands are in his pockets. "You're from out of town."
"It's pretty obvious, right?" she pauses, running a hand through her hair. "It's been a while since I was a kid, but I'm pretty sure you still shouldn't talk to strangers."
"I haven't been a grown up yet," he says, raising an eyebrow, "but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to sit in playgrounds if you don't have kids. I'm Ben."
"Bela," she says; reflex action, even if the name's unfamiliar, not quite right. "Shouldn't you be inside playing video games?"
"Fresh air is good for you." Sarcasm is light, delicate, over his syllables. "You're really pretty."
"You're really young," she counters. "Go play in the sandpit."
"If you're back in like five years," he says, "you should look me up."
--
"So I got hit on by a ten year old this morning," she says, over a burger balanced in its wrapper neatly in her grip. Lettuce crunches between her teeth when she takes a bite.
"Smart ten year old," he says. "I went to see an old friend."
"Oh?" She looks at him through her eyelashes. He is not good at volunteering information; neither of them are.
"She says hi," he says, and that's it. There's history in his voice but she doesn't have to know it yet.
When she was young, alive, she was impatient; she would have pressed this. Now, she knows better. Now, she knows she has plenty of time.
--
They peel out of Cicero, Metallica blaring out of the windows from the radio, where Dean set it.
She drums her fingertips along the wheel, in time with the music, until it lulls; track-change.
"We are an impossibility, you know," she muses. Sunlight washes over her shoulders, hot. It's an observation, slipping out of her mouth because of his quietness, sadness, dullness. Because of the way she has stayed, despite this. Because there is Hell in both of their eyes, both of their nightmares, but they are sitting in this car together and she is not even thinking about leaving.
"This is an impossible universe," he says, slowly, thoughtfully, and then grins, sort of bright, for him. "Don't you know, I stopped the end of the world with the power of love."
"That's pretty fucking Sailor Moon," she laughs, staring out at the stretch of empty road.
"Don't mock my early-morning cartoons." His hand slips across the space between them, into hers, and squeezes.
that also explains this story, which was due... a long time ago. so this is my spnrarepairs story, for iluvroadrunner6.
set out running (but i take my time)
dean winchester, bela talbot. (ben braeden.)
pg-13; mentions of hell, ptsd, sadfacing. spoilers through 5x22.
for the prompt, "we are an impossibility in an impossible universe ~ ray bradbury".
this is what happens after you get back from hell.
She drags herself out of hell, darkness seeping out of all the cuts and scrapes and bruises that litter her skin. The air scorches her lungs, but the ground is solid, and her feet are steady.
"Hi," Dean says, bottle of Jack dangling from his right hand. "Welcome back to the planet, Bels."
"Gosh," she says, light, like anthrax, "we're already onto pet names."
He shrugs. "I kind of missed you," he says. "Want a drink?"
(Her depth perception is off; she covers her left eye with a shaking palm, and it makes no difference to her sight.) "Don't mind if I do."
--
They sprawl across the hood of his shiny black car, which is straight out of her memories, sleek and testosterone-fuelled and gorgeous, passing the bottle back and forth. He is warm but not warm like hellfire; he's warm like reality, like safety, like something she barely knew even when she was human.
"It's weird," he says, staring at her, eyes sharp and knowing and kind of sweet, for Dean, "seeing you kind of intact."
"It's weird," she counters, "last time I saw you you had a lot less skin."
He says, "I figured, if anyone was going to crawl out of Hell, it would be you."
She laughs, a little, and is surprised that it does not hurt. "If anyone was going to get deus'd out of Hell, it would be you."
"Thanks," he says, wry. The line of his throat is long and elegant and unblemished, unscarred; his fingers curve loosely around the neck of the bottle as he gives it to her.
"How'd you know where to find me?" she asks, taking a swallow, looking down at the clean intact skin of her fingertips through the clear glass. "Why'd you care?"
"I did my research," he says. "There was a mess, with some angels. I knew you'd take the chance."
"Good call," she says, tilting her head back, to stare up at the stars. (There are no stars in Hell, only razor-sharp barbed wire.) They are bright, so bright; they stick in her eyes and she finds herself tearing up, a little bit, finds herself breathless. "Where are we?"
"Graveyard," he says, "well, it used to be. Now it's a field."
"Huh," she says. There is dirt under her fingernails, grave dirt, probably. There is a little red mixed in. "Nice for the dead people."
--
They check into a motel, drunk and laughing; she is wearing his jacket which drapes across her and hides her nakedness; he's grinning wildly when he pays for the room with a credit card that has nothing to do with his name. The girl at the counter blinks at them blearily but she's a teenager, she knows what they are talking about.
She lies across the double bed and slips out of his jacket; a thousand years ago she would have complained about the fabric but now she is older, and more broken. She looks down at the paleness of her breasts and thighs and then he is next to her, shucking out of his jeans and tshirt and shoes so they can lie there together, skin to skin, just breathing. She tucks her head on his chest, under his chin, and says, very very softly, "I'm glad you came to get me."
His hand is too hot, starfish-spread across her stomach. They are closer than they were before Hell, but not inside; she feels herself arching into his touch.
"I'm sorry," he says, into the softness of her hair, "about the, you know."
"It's okay," she says, remembering his face as he stood over her, remembering the rack against her wrists and ankles and skin, "it probably sucked more for you than me, you cried the whole way through."
"It was my first time," he says, "I barely knew how to hold the knife properly."
"Boo hoo for you," she says, laughing a little: this is when he leans forward, just shy of awkward, and they kiss.
His mouth tastes like Jack, and ice cubes: just barely too sweet. She licks inside, curving into the warmth of him, the reality of him. She thinks about Sixth Form physics: he is a stationary object, and after twelve hundred years in Hell, she is finally at rest.
--
Into the silence, into the dark, she asks, "Where's your brother?"
He does not answer for so long she thinks he is not going to. The rhythm of his breath is steady, measured; this is how she knows he is lying. "He's married," he says. "Lives with a girl. In Wisconsin."
"Okay," she says. She puts her hand in his, like they are a boy and girl in a meadow in a shitty romantic movie aimed primarily at teenage girls, and squeezes tight. Her nails dig into his palm. She draws blood, but neither of them mind.
--
For a while there in Hell, she would smile at him and he would smile back. They were broken, too bad to ever be fixed: but they were broken together.
He told her I hate my dad and she said, I hate my father; you miss yours.
One time he said, the money isn't worth it any more, is it and she laughed, hollow, flat: You think so little of me, Dean Winchester?
Later they walked through the worst of her memories and he said, half-crying, I am so sorry.
She said, Everybody has a sob story.
--
Somehow they are a thing, now. There is a stretch of emptiness between them spelled Hell, which is like comradery; it's terrifying, but they are alike in a way no one else can be. They drive down endless stretches of road and she makes jokes about post-apocalypses and how America post-the end of the world looks pretty much like it did pre-the end of the world, only with a couple more Starbucks on every corner.
She thinks about leaving him alone in his Impala one rainy evening in Maine; he's so tired, like she is. This is never what she wanted. It's this weird unspoken thing that holds them together; they don't talk about it and it's so frustrating, but who else is going to hold her as she shakes apart?
They fuck that night and she scores long red lines into his back and he leaves dark purple bruises all along her sides, warm hurt that reminds them they are no longer in Hell.
She stares at him after and thinks about gravity, about orbit. She does not know if she is capable of walking away.
--
He doesn't have a hero complex, anymore. when they were doing their enemies-with-benefits thing, before she went to Hell, she'd thought he would be interesting without it; turns out he's just sad, and slow, and not-quite-right.
She doesn't really like stealing things anymore. She's not sure what she has left, after that, except some black smoke like recompense for the dead nerves in her left leg, the blankness in her left eye. Maybe she'll grow a conscience; that would be novel, at least. (Nothing is new, after twelve thousand years.)
She supposes their dull edges at least fit each other.
(She is now the one who stops sometimes, and folds the newspaper over, and says, That's unusual, isn't it?
He is the one shaking salt onto his eggs, sometimes over his shoulder if they're alone; he is the one who makes it difficult for their eyes to meet.)
--
They drive through Indiana and pull over in this town, Cicero. She washes her hair that night; it drips across her shoulders when she sits next to him on the bed. The sheets have flowers on them, faded and pale with winding green stems.
He has been wearing these jeans for the past five days. There is some dirt on them, from a bar fight in Illinois, and a little blood. It's funny how she notices this, when Hell was dirt and shit and blood everywhere, the smell obscene and terrible, and she got over that pretty fast (inside the first hundred days, if she is remembering correctly, which she probably is not because is infinite and ancient, and things start to blur when you are that old).
There is a wet patch on his shirt, from her hair. She says, "you could shower."
He says, "Are you saying I smell?" There isn't enough bite to it to be convincing; he's been all bluntness, lately.
"Yes." She knows her smile is too sharp, too brittle. "Would I be wrong?"
He shrugs, and twists around, and presses his mouth to hers, and bites her lip so both of them can taste her blood in-between them.
--
She's in a playground the next morning, with a cup of coffee in her hands, feeling a bit creepy watching the children throw sand at each other and bite and kick and generally be horrible. The bench is hard and her shoes sunk into the grass when she sat down, so there's mud on her heels.
Dean is in bed, sleeping. She doesn't know why she's here, except that the motel was kind of close and she didn't really have anything to do and being alone is kind of a luxury she never had in Hell. (And children are very rarely composed of the rotting bones she still sees, on occasion.)
There is a boy; he's maybe twelve, thirteen. "Hi," he says. His eyes are wide, dark; his hands are in his pockets. "You're from out of town."
"It's pretty obvious, right?" she pauses, running a hand through her hair. "It's been a while since I was a kid, but I'm pretty sure you still shouldn't talk to strangers."
"I haven't been a grown up yet," he says, raising an eyebrow, "but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to sit in playgrounds if you don't have kids. I'm Ben."
"Bela," she says; reflex action, even if the name's unfamiliar, not quite right. "Shouldn't you be inside playing video games?"
"Fresh air is good for you." Sarcasm is light, delicate, over his syllables. "You're really pretty."
"You're really young," she counters. "Go play in the sandpit."
"If you're back in like five years," he says, "you should look me up."
--
"So I got hit on by a ten year old this morning," she says, over a burger balanced in its wrapper neatly in her grip. Lettuce crunches between her teeth when she takes a bite.
"Smart ten year old," he says. "I went to see an old friend."
"Oh?" She looks at him through her eyelashes. He is not good at volunteering information; neither of them are.
"She says hi," he says, and that's it. There's history in his voice but she doesn't have to know it yet.
When she was young, alive, she was impatient; she would have pressed this. Now, she knows better. Now, she knows she has plenty of time.
--
They peel out of Cicero, Metallica blaring out of the windows from the radio, where Dean set it.
She drums her fingertips along the wheel, in time with the music, until it lulls; track-change.
"We are an impossibility, you know," she muses. Sunlight washes over her shoulders, hot. It's an observation, slipping out of her mouth because of his quietness, sadness, dullness. Because of the way she has stayed, despite this. Because there is Hell in both of their eyes, both of their nightmares, but they are sitting in this car together and she is not even thinking about leaving.
"This is an impossible universe," he says, slowly, thoughtfully, and then grins, sort of bright, for him. "Don't you know, I stopped the end of the world with the power of love."
"That's pretty fucking Sailor Moon," she laughs, staring out at the stretch of empty road.
"Don't mock my early-morning cartoons." His hand slips across the space between them, into hers, and squeezes.