[cl] 20. Dawn
[Set in whenitsadream. Michael is feel_theburn who made a request for a kiss on the neck. Set a few months after THIS.]
It took her months to actually manage to sleep through the night.
One hundred eighty years doesn’t just disappear, especially when it was full of torture and madness, endlessly pushing at the corners of her mind. It comes and goes, tearing at her to the point where she can barely get out of bed some days. She hates feeling like this, waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night, no idea where she is. Sometimes she just screamed in her sleep, unable to pull herself out of it until Michael shook her awake, and other times her body just hurt, phantom pains from where Alistair and other demons had cut into her over and over again.
She hated it. She hated Dean Winchester for bringing her back and putting her in this position. There were days when she just wanted to kill herself and send herself back to Hell to make it all stop, but she didn’t. She knew it would kill Michael, and while killing herself was fine, hurting him in any way was something she couldn’t have on her conscience. Not again.
So instead she suffered through it. Tried sleeping pills, drinking, dream catchers-anything and everything she could think of. Some worked better than others, but none of them worked completely. There was always something there, something lurking in the back of her mind and she knew that it would never really, truly, go away. And Michael?
Michael worried.
Never vocally, but she could tell. It was in the way he held her when she cried and the way he looked at her sometimes, and she hated that she made him this way. She had never been one for pity when she was alive, and she certainly wasn’t one after she came back, but every time he looked at her she could see that all he wanted to do was help. And this was something that he could never truly help with. Not without revealing more about what happened to her down there and the people who had been involved.
So she just tried to sleep. Tried sorting through things on her own and seeing the nightmares for what they were-her brain just trying to process information as she slept. And slowly, but surely, they lessened and soon she was sleeping more and more until one morning, she woke up just as the sun was coming through the windows of the loft, and Michael was wrapped protectively around her. It was the first night in a long time when there was no thrashing, no screaming, no interruptions. Bela couldn’t help but consider that a step in the right direction.
Turning so that she was facing him a little more, she tipped her head closer, brushing a soft kiss against his neck, before curling in closer and closing her eyes again. She wasn’t completely ready to disturb him yet, but that didn’t mean she was going to stay away either.
496 words
It took her months to actually manage to sleep through the night.
One hundred eighty years doesn’t just disappear, especially when it was full of torture and madness, endlessly pushing at the corners of her mind. It comes and goes, tearing at her to the point where she can barely get out of bed some days. She hates feeling like this, waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night, no idea where she is. Sometimes she just screamed in her sleep, unable to pull herself out of it until Michael shook her awake, and other times her body just hurt, phantom pains from where Alistair and other demons had cut into her over and over again.
She hated it. She hated Dean Winchester for bringing her back and putting her in this position. There were days when she just wanted to kill herself and send herself back to Hell to make it all stop, but she didn’t. She knew it would kill Michael, and while killing herself was fine, hurting him in any way was something she couldn’t have on her conscience. Not again.
So instead she suffered through it. Tried sleeping pills, drinking, dream catchers-anything and everything she could think of. Some worked better than others, but none of them worked completely. There was always something there, something lurking in the back of her mind and she knew that it would never really, truly, go away. And Michael?
Michael worried.
Never vocally, but she could tell. It was in the way he held her when she cried and the way he looked at her sometimes, and she hated that she made him this way. She had never been one for pity when she was alive, and she certainly wasn’t one after she came back, but every time he looked at her she could see that all he wanted to do was help. And this was something that he could never truly help with. Not without revealing more about what happened to her down there and the people who had been involved.
So she just tried to sleep. Tried sorting through things on her own and seeing the nightmares for what they were-her brain just trying to process information as she slept. And slowly, but surely, they lessened and soon she was sleeping more and more until one morning, she woke up just as the sun was coming through the windows of the loft, and Michael was wrapped protectively around her. It was the first night in a long time when there was no thrashing, no screaming, no interruptions. Bela couldn’t help but consider that a step in the right direction.
Turning so that she was facing him a little more, she tipped her head closer, brushing a soft kiss against his neck, before curling in closer and closing her eyes again. She wasn’t completely ready to disturb him yet, but that didn’t mean she was going to stay away either.
496 words