(no subject)
So apparently I have a thing for writing characters with empathic powers and writing at inappropriate times like when I should be sleeping and writing nonsense that feels overly wordy and so this happened when I was meant to be sleeping last night. Some kind of Supernatural thing, sometime in season four (without spoilers because I'm cool and/or vague)...thing. Which took on a life of it's own, albeit a pretty brief life.
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Some people are born double-jointed. Some people have photographic memory, or are amazing with numbers. A few are even psychic, reading minds and just knowing things, only most of the time no one believes them, but she does, she'll believe a lot of things, and how is it any weirder than someone who can bend themselves in all kinds of freakish ways, or memorize a dictionary in an hour?
Lea could read people since she was a child, but not their minds - their emotions are like open books to her. She can tell everything they feel inside, what’s hiding under their facades. Everyone’s hiding emotions somewhere deep down, hiding them from others, or sometimes from themselves, but never from her.
She can change them, too. A touch, the faintest brush against them, and she can pull out whatever she doesn't want them to feel. Usually the most she can do is calm them down or make them feel at peace and happy because the negative emotions are gone - she's only been doing this part for a year now, and she tries to be careful with it because she can't control it very well. If she touches someone, she has to consciously force herself not to pull at their emotions. It isn't unusual for people to come to bars to drown their sorrows, and not unusual for the bartender to “accidentally” touch them when she passes them drinks or takes their money. It’s not unusual to leave a bar feeling a little better than you came in (although usually that’s due to inebriation, but still).
It is unusual to feel pain radiating from patrons before they’re even in the doorway yet. The level of pain and grief and just. Brokenness. A person shouldn’t even be holding themselves together with that much underneath, let alone grinning and flirting and smiling. There’s never that level of pain in more than one person at once, either, and these two are just so broken, hiding it so well on the outside.
Her hands are shaking when she serves them their drinks, brushes against the taller one’s hand as she presses the glass against his and manages a smile, “First drink’s on the house, boys,” and she thinks he’s looking at her funny but she’s too busy cramming the onrush of paindesperationtaintedbrokenanger that she pulls off him to the back of her mind, where it can’t hurt him anymore, but damned if she’s not going to have a migraine tonight.
The other one winks at her and takes a drink from his glass, leaning on the bar all casual ease and confidence, even though that’s not real, that’s not him, that’s just a mask and she can see through and it hurts to even look at him, so she just turns away and busies herself with gathering up empty glasses from another section of the bar, trying to steady herself. One touch, one pull, isn’t going to help the first one, not enough, and she hasn’t even helped the other at all yet.
It’s probably more obvious that she’s unsteady the next time, when she slips up behind them after she’s served other drinks around the building and puts a hand on each of their shoulders, standing between their stools. She thinks maybe her knees actually buckle slightly, but she can hear her own voice, calm and normal, “Anything else I can get you two?”
When she brings them their next drinks and an order of curly fries, the shorter of the two reaches out and catches her wrist, suspicion and chill overlying everything else (shatteredscaredexhaustedworried), but his touch isn’t threatening or painful even though she expects it to be.
“Lea Jameson, right?”
“Yes,” she responds coolly, tugging gently at his emotions and siphoning off what she can while she still can.
“We’ve been looking for you,” the other says, smiles disarmingly even though he’s suddenly radiating a biting anger, barely controlled wrath that makes her blood run cold (or that could be what she’s pulling from the one touching her, because it hurts; how can he hold all that in without breaking?).
“Well you’ve found me.” She tugs away from the grip on her wrist slightly, and he lets her go, maybe he feels her shaking. Her head throbs, and she thinks she really needs a drink right now. A drink, and maybe a bottle of Aspirin. “Can I help you?”
“We should probably talk in private,” the one who had been holding her arm says, and his eyes shift over to the taller of the two, who looks back and it’s like they’re sharing an unspoken conversation, like they know each other well enough that they don’t need to talk, “Now would probably be best.”
She nods and slips away from them, tells her boss she needs a few minutes, and then comes back, follows the shorter one out (the taller one falls in behind her, and he’s still simmering with rage and it makes her worry about having him out of sight). He doesn’t take them far, just leads them out and around the corner of the building before he stops.
“What’s this about?” she asks before either of them have the chance to talk, tone edging towards defensive.
“We know what you are,” the taller says, his tone matches the rage inside him; he’s stepping closer and she steps back, her back hits the cold wall and she wonders if he really does and if he does why he hates her so much.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, lets some of her fear creep into her voice, because they won’t know if she doesn’t let them see, “I swear. I just. I wanted to help.”
“Help?” the shorter asks, “You call killing those people helping anything?”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” She forgets to even try to maintain an image (monkey see monkey do, even if she can see through everyone else she never wants them to see through her), wishes she could make them believe her like she could believe someone telling her the same thing.
“Yeah, sure, okay, sweetheart,” he responds, sarcasm and coolness in his tone, but inside something slipslides like maybe he almost believes her. “That’s what they all say.”
“We know already, you’re just wasting time,” the tall one says, and nothing inside him says he believes her. He steps closer again, looms over her. She thinks probably he’s going to kill her. He’s holding a gun, his anger boils and freezes her inside; she doesn’t know how he can stand it. “Just tell us how you did it. Now!”
”Sam,” the other one says, tone warning but mostly calm, and he’s uneasy, he’s scared, he’s so terrified it physically hurts.
Sam glances back, steps aside, but the gun is still there and the anger is still there and all she can feel is their anger and fear mixing together, that and her head pounding.
“We don’t have time to do this your way, Dean,” Sam says, “There’s no time.”
Dean doesn’t say anything in response, just moves in to stand in front of her, looming less than Sam but still towering over her own frame, but he doesn’t scare her anymore because he believes her, at least a little, he’s scared of Sam as much as she is, except it’s different it’s like maybe he’s scared for him, not just of him.
“If you’re not killing them, who is?”
She doesn’t know, can’t say anything though because disbelief that isn’t hers floods her then and she can see Sam stiffen and stare at his partner, insulted that this Dean is believing her over him, they must be close or maybe they were they don’t feel close now he’s touching her arm and somehow he’s taller than he was or maybe she’s on the ground now, snow melting against her and through her clothes and she should feel cold but all she feels is everything she’s pulling from Dean though his fingers wrapped around her arm worrypainfearexhaustionconfusion and then eventually there’s nothing, and his grip loosens and her head falls back against the wall as her eyes fall closed.
She can hear the sound of a gun being cocked, feels, distantly, rage and panic that come from Sam, the serenity that’s coming from Dean directly in front of her, but she doesn’t actually feel anything of her own, and it would be a relief if it were possible because that means it doesn’t hurt anymore.
“What’d you do to him?” Sam’s yelling, and when she opens her eyes and looks at him he’s pulled Dean away from her, has the gun pointed at her, hand shaking, “Stop whatever you’re doing to him, now!”
She should maybe worry a little the way he goes supernova on the inside, but she can’t, so she doesn’t, she just stares at him vacantly and watches like it’s not really her he’s talking to. Beside him, Dean’s lying on the snow-covered pavement, staring at the sky, breathing even and he’s just calm, peaceful, in her senses, like everything is finally really alright for him, and if she could feel right now she thinks she’d be happy for him.
“Let my brother go now!”
Her eyes feel heavy, and her head lolls against the brick behind her. She recognizes the way anger isn’t the only thing he’s feeling, there’s panic and something she can’t quite place but thinks might be grief or something like it, but she can’t help him even if she could manage to lift her hand to grasp hold of him. She just. It’s too much. She’s too full to take anything else, she can’t help him.
“Please,” Desperation. She can’t keep her eyes open, but she flails a hand out to reach for him, her fingers just brush and she pulls and he jerks away, “Please, don’t do this,”
She doesn’t understand. She’s just trying to help. She has to help them. They’re broken, they need. They need so much. It’s the least she can do, it’s all she can do, it won’t ever be enough but it’s all she has to give.
“Bring him back.” She doesn’t understand. Her eyes open, she tries to focus on Sam. He’s not holding the gun now, he’s just sitting, sitting on his heels between her and his brother and he looks small and fragile and feels it even more, and she doesn’t understand but she reaches out for Dean, but she can’t reach, doesn’t know what to do even if she could.
Sam doesn’t seem to understand either, doesn’t know what she did doesn’t know what she means to do, he’s just. He’s a million different emotions, like he’s splintering into pieces.
“Just tried to help,” she murmurs, when she finds her voice, fingers curling in the snow where they fell, couldn’t catch on Dean and just stayed where they could land, inches away. “I just wanted to help him. You. Both of you, you were so broken, it hurt…”
“What?”
She breathes in, cold air that starts dismissing the fog around her mind a little. “I can feel things. What other people are feeling. You two, you were. Just. Everything hurt, I couldn’t just leave you like that,” she breathes out with the words, breathes in more cold, feels awareness slip back a little more, “I just took it, the bad things,” she leans forward to brush her fingers over Dean’s limp hand, “He’s resting?”
“He’s dying,” Sam responds, voice shaking and small and nothing like what she’s heard, “You think you’re helping them? You’re killing them. That's why we're here. You take pieces of them, and they die. The more you take the faster they...”
No. No. It’s not possible. She’s helping them, she just wants to help, they can’t be dead. Can’t be, because… except she pulled from her mother and then she died and they said it was just age and there was that man and now. And…
“I didn’t… I don’t know how to... I can't control it,” she pushes away from the wall and forward, onto her hands and knees to shift closer to the fallen man, “I’m so sorry.”
“No! You have to... You can’t just. I can’t lose him again.”
Her fingers touch Dean’s arm, his skin where his sleeve rides up, it’s cold from the snow leeching the heat from him (or maybe he’s dying fast, cooling and gone because she stole pieces of him), and she curls her fingers around his wrist.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “I’ll try,” and she pushes, like she pulls but backwards, finding what she took and putting it back where it belongs, but and it’s like turning herself inside-out, and it hurts twice as much going back as it did taking it, and if she could spare any energy to feel anything of her own she’d be glad all over again that no images or memories come with the sensations because it hurts and he must have seen horrible things to feel this much agony and fear and be this broken.
She remembers, belatedly, that she pulled from the the other one, two - from Sam. While she's still doing this she has to try to fix that too, so she gropes blindly for him until she's grabbed his arm and pushes what she took back into him, too.
Everything goes white and then black.
The next thing she knows someone is carrying her or maybe she’s flying except if she were flying she’d probably have to be awake for that and it would be smoother. She feels like she just ran ten million miles, only it’s not her muscles that hurt it’s her head, her muscles are just limp and refuse to cooperate when she tries to move, and she just lets herself drift again.
The next time she’s awake, she’s warm and she’s not flying floating being carried anymore, she’s stationary and curled up and she thinks it’s probably a bed of some kind and when she can open her eyes she’s right, but it’s not her bed it’s different, it’s a motel room and there’s someone in the other bed next to hers and she recognizes him but doesn’t remember, and someone else is pacing around but the movement makes her eyes hurt trying to focus so she just closes them and drifts.
She doesn’t want to wake up the next time it happens, someone’s talking nearby and it’s like her brain latches on and pulls her out of her rest to listen. They’re talking about her, she can hear that much, “What do we do with her now?” and murmured words she can’t catch and then “…can’t just kill her, Sam,” and her fingers curl around the folds of her blankets as she forces herself to open her eyes, “…no other option, she’s dangerous. She can't control it.
Dean’s sitting up, still in the next bed but he’s alive; she did it, she doesn’t know how she did it and she doesn’t think she could ever do it again, but he’s alive so that’s okay. She didn’t kill him, too. She killed other people, they said she killed people, she never meant to, though, it was an accident, she doesn’t think she can control this enough to not do it again though, she’s not strong enough.
“He’s right,” she manages, half-slurred and too-quiet and all kinds of weak but somehow they hear and both look over at her, and she pushes herself to move, shift, throw the covers back and get up but she can’t, just lies there.
“No he’s not,” Dean says, and she doesn’t have the energy to feel anything from him but she can see it anyway, see that he knows they’re both right, knows it but he hates it and maybe it even hurts him.
She drifts again.
When she comes to it’s feeling everything and it overwhelms her and pulls her the rest of the way to awareness, and she’s not so weak now, sits up and Dean and Sam are sitting and talking quietly, they’re broken and shattered but they’re holding themselves (each other) together so well.
She can walk a few hours later, her energy returns quickly after that, and she knows what comes next, and she tells them they don’t have to do it for her, she doesn’t want them to have that on them because she knows it’ll hurt them, wonders if this sort of thing happens to them a lot, if it’s this that has broken them before, but she thinks it’s probably a lot worse than that.
Sam packs their things and worries while Dean sits and watches him, watches her, watches and hurts and looks like he’s just tired, both of them holding their masks in place even now, and she wishes it wouldn’t kill them to take the pain away from them. They deserve peace, but she can’t give it to them.
When they leave, Dean’s sad, shattered again, and Sam’s resigned and relieved and regretful, thanks her quietly and apologizes while Dean stands there and does the same silently with his eyes.
When they leave, they leave a gun sitting on the table for her.
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That ended a little more morbidly than intended and is probably a result of the deathstalking feeling I've been having. And it's very dramatic, which, um, actually bothers me even more. But yeah.
In other news, mmmmm coffee!
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Some people are born double-jointed. Some people have photographic memory, or are amazing with numbers. A few are even psychic, reading minds and just knowing things, only most of the time no one believes them, but she does, she'll believe a lot of things, and how is it any weirder than someone who can bend themselves in all kinds of freakish ways, or memorize a dictionary in an hour?
Lea could read people since she was a child, but not their minds - their emotions are like open books to her. She can tell everything they feel inside, what’s hiding under their facades. Everyone’s hiding emotions somewhere deep down, hiding them from others, or sometimes from themselves, but never from her.
She can change them, too. A touch, the faintest brush against them, and she can pull out whatever she doesn't want them to feel. Usually the most she can do is calm them down or make them feel at peace and happy because the negative emotions are gone - she's only been doing this part for a year now, and she tries to be careful with it because she can't control it very well. If she touches someone, she has to consciously force herself not to pull at their emotions. It isn't unusual for people to come to bars to drown their sorrows, and not unusual for the bartender to “accidentally” touch them when she passes them drinks or takes their money. It’s not unusual to leave a bar feeling a little better than you came in (although usually that’s due to inebriation, but still).
It is unusual to feel pain radiating from patrons before they’re even in the doorway yet. The level of pain and grief and just. Brokenness. A person shouldn’t even be holding themselves together with that much underneath, let alone grinning and flirting and smiling. There’s never that level of pain in more than one person at once, either, and these two are just so broken, hiding it so well on the outside.
Her hands are shaking when she serves them their drinks, brushes against the taller one’s hand as she presses the glass against his and manages a smile, “First drink’s on the house, boys,” and she thinks he’s looking at her funny but she’s too busy cramming the onrush of paindesperationtaintedbrokenanger that she pulls off him to the back of her mind, where it can’t hurt him anymore, but damned if she’s not going to have a migraine tonight.
The other one winks at her and takes a drink from his glass, leaning on the bar all casual ease and confidence, even though that’s not real, that’s not him, that’s just a mask and she can see through and it hurts to even look at him, so she just turns away and busies herself with gathering up empty glasses from another section of the bar, trying to steady herself. One touch, one pull, isn’t going to help the first one, not enough, and she hasn’t even helped the other at all yet.
It’s probably more obvious that she’s unsteady the next time, when she slips up behind them after she’s served other drinks around the building and puts a hand on each of their shoulders, standing between their stools. She thinks maybe her knees actually buckle slightly, but she can hear her own voice, calm and normal, “Anything else I can get you two?”
When she brings them their next drinks and an order of curly fries, the shorter of the two reaches out and catches her wrist, suspicion and chill overlying everything else (shatteredscaredexhaustedworried), but his touch isn’t threatening or painful even though she expects it to be.
“Lea Jameson, right?”
“Yes,” she responds coolly, tugging gently at his emotions and siphoning off what she can while she still can.
“We’ve been looking for you,” the other says, smiles disarmingly even though he’s suddenly radiating a biting anger, barely controlled wrath that makes her blood run cold (or that could be what she’s pulling from the one touching her, because it hurts; how can he hold all that in without breaking?).
“Well you’ve found me.” She tugs away from the grip on her wrist slightly, and he lets her go, maybe he feels her shaking. Her head throbs, and she thinks she really needs a drink right now. A drink, and maybe a bottle of Aspirin. “Can I help you?”
“We should probably talk in private,” the one who had been holding her arm says, and his eyes shift over to the taller of the two, who looks back and it’s like they’re sharing an unspoken conversation, like they know each other well enough that they don’t need to talk, “Now would probably be best.”
She nods and slips away from them, tells her boss she needs a few minutes, and then comes back, follows the shorter one out (the taller one falls in behind her, and he’s still simmering with rage and it makes her worry about having him out of sight). He doesn’t take them far, just leads them out and around the corner of the building before he stops.
“What’s this about?” she asks before either of them have the chance to talk, tone edging towards defensive.
“We know what you are,” the taller says, his tone matches the rage inside him; he’s stepping closer and she steps back, her back hits the cold wall and she wonders if he really does and if he does why he hates her so much.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, lets some of her fear creep into her voice, because they won’t know if she doesn’t let them see, “I swear. I just. I wanted to help.”
“Help?” the shorter asks, “You call killing those people helping anything?”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” She forgets to even try to maintain an image (monkey see monkey do, even if she can see through everyone else she never wants them to see through her), wishes she could make them believe her like she could believe someone telling her the same thing.
“Yeah, sure, okay, sweetheart,” he responds, sarcasm and coolness in his tone, but inside something slipslides like maybe he almost believes her. “That’s what they all say.”
“We know already, you’re just wasting time,” the tall one says, and nothing inside him says he believes her. He steps closer again, looms over her. She thinks probably he’s going to kill her. He’s holding a gun, his anger boils and freezes her inside; she doesn’t know how he can stand it. “Just tell us how you did it. Now!”
”Sam,” the other one says, tone warning but mostly calm, and he’s uneasy, he’s scared, he’s so terrified it physically hurts.
Sam glances back, steps aside, but the gun is still there and the anger is still there and all she can feel is their anger and fear mixing together, that and her head pounding.
“We don’t have time to do this your way, Dean,” Sam says, “There’s no time.”
Dean doesn’t say anything in response, just moves in to stand in front of her, looming less than Sam but still towering over her own frame, but he doesn’t scare her anymore because he believes her, at least a little, he’s scared of Sam as much as she is, except it’s different it’s like maybe he’s scared for him, not just of him.
“If you’re not killing them, who is?”
She doesn’t know, can’t say anything though because disbelief that isn’t hers floods her then and she can see Sam stiffen and stare at his partner, insulted that this Dean is believing her over him, they must be close or maybe they were they don’t feel close now he’s touching her arm and somehow he’s taller than he was or maybe she’s on the ground now, snow melting against her and through her clothes and she should feel cold but all she feels is everything she’s pulling from Dean though his fingers wrapped around her arm worrypainfearexhaustionconfusion and then eventually there’s nothing, and his grip loosens and her head falls back against the wall as her eyes fall closed.
She can hear the sound of a gun being cocked, feels, distantly, rage and panic that come from Sam, the serenity that’s coming from Dean directly in front of her, but she doesn’t actually feel anything of her own, and it would be a relief if it were possible because that means it doesn’t hurt anymore.
“What’d you do to him?” Sam’s yelling, and when she opens her eyes and looks at him he’s pulled Dean away from her, has the gun pointed at her, hand shaking, “Stop whatever you’re doing to him, now!”
She should maybe worry a little the way he goes supernova on the inside, but she can’t, so she doesn’t, she just stares at him vacantly and watches like it’s not really her he’s talking to. Beside him, Dean’s lying on the snow-covered pavement, staring at the sky, breathing even and he’s just calm, peaceful, in her senses, like everything is finally really alright for him, and if she could feel right now she thinks she’d be happy for him.
“Let my brother go now!”
Her eyes feel heavy, and her head lolls against the brick behind her. She recognizes the way anger isn’t the only thing he’s feeling, there’s panic and something she can’t quite place but thinks might be grief or something like it, but she can’t help him even if she could manage to lift her hand to grasp hold of him. She just. It’s too much. She’s too full to take anything else, she can’t help him.
“Please,” Desperation. She can’t keep her eyes open, but she flails a hand out to reach for him, her fingers just brush and she pulls and he jerks away, “Please, don’t do this,”
She doesn’t understand. She’s just trying to help. She has to help them. They’re broken, they need. They need so much. It’s the least she can do, it’s all she can do, it won’t ever be enough but it’s all she has to give.
“Bring him back.” She doesn’t understand. Her eyes open, she tries to focus on Sam. He’s not holding the gun now, he’s just sitting, sitting on his heels between her and his brother and he looks small and fragile and feels it even more, and she doesn’t understand but she reaches out for Dean, but she can’t reach, doesn’t know what to do even if she could.
Sam doesn’t seem to understand either, doesn’t know what she did doesn’t know what she means to do, he’s just. He’s a million different emotions, like he’s splintering into pieces.
“Just tried to help,” she murmurs, when she finds her voice, fingers curling in the snow where they fell, couldn’t catch on Dean and just stayed where they could land, inches away. “I just wanted to help him. You. Both of you, you were so broken, it hurt…”
“What?”
She breathes in, cold air that starts dismissing the fog around her mind a little. “I can feel things. What other people are feeling. You two, you were. Just. Everything hurt, I couldn’t just leave you like that,” she breathes out with the words, breathes in more cold, feels awareness slip back a little more, “I just took it, the bad things,” she leans forward to brush her fingers over Dean’s limp hand, “He’s resting?”
“He’s dying,” Sam responds, voice shaking and small and nothing like what she’s heard, “You think you’re helping them? You’re killing them. That's why we're here. You take pieces of them, and they die. The more you take the faster they...”
No. No. It’s not possible. She’s helping them, she just wants to help, they can’t be dead. Can’t be, because… except she pulled from her mother and then she died and they said it was just age and there was that man and now. And…
“I didn’t… I don’t know how to... I can't control it,” she pushes away from the wall and forward, onto her hands and knees to shift closer to the fallen man, “I’m so sorry.”
“No! You have to... You can’t just. I can’t lose him again.”
Her fingers touch Dean’s arm, his skin where his sleeve rides up, it’s cold from the snow leeching the heat from him (or maybe he’s dying fast, cooling and gone because she stole pieces of him), and she curls her fingers around his wrist.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “I’ll try,” and she pushes, like she pulls but backwards, finding what she took and putting it back where it belongs, but and it’s like turning herself inside-out, and it hurts twice as much going back as it did taking it, and if she could spare any energy to feel anything of her own she’d be glad all over again that no images or memories come with the sensations because it hurts and he must have seen horrible things to feel this much agony and fear and be this broken.
She remembers, belatedly, that she pulled from the the other one, two - from Sam. While she's still doing this she has to try to fix that too, so she gropes blindly for him until she's grabbed his arm and pushes what she took back into him, too.
Everything goes white and then black.
The next thing she knows someone is carrying her or maybe she’s flying except if she were flying she’d probably have to be awake for that and it would be smoother. She feels like she just ran ten million miles, only it’s not her muscles that hurt it’s her head, her muscles are just limp and refuse to cooperate when she tries to move, and she just lets herself drift again.
The next time she’s awake, she’s warm and she’s not flying floating being carried anymore, she’s stationary and curled up and she thinks it’s probably a bed of some kind and when she can open her eyes she’s right, but it’s not her bed it’s different, it’s a motel room and there’s someone in the other bed next to hers and she recognizes him but doesn’t remember, and someone else is pacing around but the movement makes her eyes hurt trying to focus so she just closes them and drifts.
She doesn’t want to wake up the next time it happens, someone’s talking nearby and it’s like her brain latches on and pulls her out of her rest to listen. They’re talking about her, she can hear that much, “What do we do with her now?” and murmured words she can’t catch and then “…can’t just kill her, Sam,” and her fingers curl around the folds of her blankets as she forces herself to open her eyes, “…no other option, she’s dangerous. She can't control it.
Dean’s sitting up, still in the next bed but he’s alive; she did it, she doesn’t know how she did it and she doesn’t think she could ever do it again, but he’s alive so that’s okay. She didn’t kill him, too. She killed other people, they said she killed people, she never meant to, though, it was an accident, she doesn’t think she can control this enough to not do it again though, she’s not strong enough.
“He’s right,” she manages, half-slurred and too-quiet and all kinds of weak but somehow they hear and both look over at her, and she pushes herself to move, shift, throw the covers back and get up but she can’t, just lies there.
“No he’s not,” Dean says, and she doesn’t have the energy to feel anything from him but she can see it anyway, see that he knows they’re both right, knows it but he hates it and maybe it even hurts him.
She drifts again.
When she comes to it’s feeling everything and it overwhelms her and pulls her the rest of the way to awareness, and she’s not so weak now, sits up and Dean and Sam are sitting and talking quietly, they’re broken and shattered but they’re holding themselves (each other) together so well.
She can walk a few hours later, her energy returns quickly after that, and she knows what comes next, and she tells them they don’t have to do it for her, she doesn’t want them to have that on them because she knows it’ll hurt them, wonders if this sort of thing happens to them a lot, if it’s this that has broken them before, but she thinks it’s probably a lot worse than that.
Sam packs their things and worries while Dean sits and watches him, watches her, watches and hurts and looks like he’s just tired, both of them holding their masks in place even now, and she wishes it wouldn’t kill them to take the pain away from them. They deserve peace, but she can’t give it to them.
When they leave, Dean’s sad, shattered again, and Sam’s resigned and relieved and regretful, thanks her quietly and apologizes while Dean stands there and does the same silently with his eyes.
When they leave, they leave a gun sitting on the table for her.
-
That ended a little more morbidly than intended and is probably a result of the deathstalking feeling I've been having. And it's very dramatic, which, um, actually bothers me even more. But yeah.
In other news, mmmmm coffee!