The Heart's Bleed Longest
Title: The Heart's Bleed Longest
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1,772
Spoilers: Up to the Purgatory flashbacks.
Warnings: Language, nasty hell flashbacks.
Summary: A peaceful night's sleep is a joke in Purgatory, which Benny probably should have known. For balder12's prompt over at Geckoholic's hurt Dean-centric comment meme.
Neurotic author's notes: Pretentious title is pretentious, and comes from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which I'm pretty sure I've culled for titles before, but whatever. "What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?/The heart's bleed longest, but heal to wear/That which disfigures it." Cut text is from the Mountain Goats's "In Memory of Satan," because I'm kind of twisted.
Most nights, Benny doesn’t sleep much, but when he does, it’s the sleep of the fucking dead. And tonight, he’s still stiff against clothes absolutely bathed in blood-foul demon shit, nothing he can even eat-and Dean’s not in a talkative mood, and God knows the fucking angel isn’t gonna sit up with him and chat, so he leaves the two of them to do their thing. Benny is not yet entirely certain what Dean and the angel’s thing is, and while he’s not exactly a traditionalist he’s also not inclined to pry. If they want to brood at each other over their stubble, that’s their prerogative. He’s fucking exhausted.
He drifts off after Dean promises gruffly to take first watch and begins to scrape a five day beard from his face with water and a dull knife. This is possibly the stupidest thing Benny has ever seen anyone do, but Dean is remarkably insistent about it, even when he nicks his own face and the smell calls to Benny like a fucking siren, even when he’s so tired he can hardly hold the damn knife steady. If forced to think very hard about it, Benny would probably say it’s something to do with feeling like a person, still, the same Dean who arrived here. Some tiny scrap of what he was before to cling to. Or something. Like the angel and his proclivities, it’s not Benny’s job to worry about.
Benny falls asleep to the sounds of Dean raking his face clean, absently supervised by the angel, and wakes what feels like seconds later to the sound of heavy breathing directly above him.
His eyes fly open, and the overwhelming instinct to take his attacker down is quelled only by the thick, familiar smell of Dean’s blood, familiar and hot and sweet, dripping onto his face in steady plops. The heavy breathing is Dean’s, and it’s ragged and shallow. His arms are pinned. Dean’s straddling him, his nose is inches from Benny’s.
“What’re you doing, brother?” he says, trying to keep his voice even, as Dean is clearly straying pretty far from the reservation right now. Dean makes a high keening noise and straightens a little, lets go of Benny’s arms. Benny begins to wriggle free and stops immediately when Dean bends low again and sets the knife-cum-razor to his neck. It’s slick with Dean’s blood. Benny holds very still and wishes for the angel.
“I have to,” says Dean abruptly. His voice is wavering, strangely, and his expression is absent. “I have to,” he repeats, sounding like a little boy, “I don’t want to, okay, okay, I have to, I gotta. Everybody’s gotta, everybody’s gotta do what they gotta. Right? Right. Everybody’s gotta do what they gotta.” He lets out a harsh little laugh as Benny stares back uncomprehending. “I don’t know what you did to get down here, you know, maybe something horrible. People will confess to some really fucked up shit once you’ve got them eating their own intestines, you know?” He tilts his head, smiles crookedly down at Benny. “I wonder what you’ll confess to.”
Benny swallows hard, acutely aware of the knife at his throat. It’s dull and smells so strong and tangy it’s making him dizzy, but Dean clearly has no idea who he’s talking to. Benny doesn’t, either, and he thinks maybe humans just ain’t made to handle the no man’s land, but there’s time for head shrinking later. The present danger is a lot more acute.
“Dean,” he says, “brother, it’s me. Benny.”
Dean blinks rapidly, smiles again. “I remember I had something in my ear. Maybe a rib. It was sharp. Right up against my brain. Tickling. I said I killed my father and kidnapped the Lindberg baby.”
“What in the hell,” Benny gasps.
He lets out a strange little laugh, takes the knife from Benny’s neck, examines it. Benny doesn’t dare move. “This isn’t yours,” he sing-songs, after a moment, waving the bloody knife around. “Not ye-e-et.” He sets the blade down against the length of Benny’s nose, but doesn’t apply any pressure. “I’m really good at this,” he says earnestly, “can split you down the middle and then we’ll sew you back together, do it again. I got good, you know, cuz I gotta. Everybody’s gotta. Maybe you will. Maybe if I take my time with your little bones.” He pushes down a little, not enough to bleed, or even hurt, but enough to make Benny’s heart do somersaults. “The littlest bone is in your ear. Wanna know how I know?”
“Dean-”
“Don’t fucking talk,” Dean says, and removes the knife, pitches forward, sets his forearm against Benny’s neck. Leans down close, gets up by Benny’s ear with all the intimacy of a lover. “It’s easier if you don’t talk,” he whispers, and he sounds a little more like Dean again. “Okay? It’s easier. I don’t. I don’t-listen, everybody’s gotta do what they gotta do, right? Right? Right. Okay. I don’t know anything else to do, okay, I’m not good at anything else.”
Where the fuck is the angel?
Dean is breathing against his ear, too quickly, and Benny throws caution to the wind. He’s already fucking dead, isn’t he?
With a shout, he pitches to the left, away from the knife, gets Dean off him, under him, holds his wrist fast and pinches until his hand twitches and the knife falls, holds him down as he thrashes and shouts, “No, no, not fair, not fair, I was doing it, I was, I was, I was, you promised, you promised, I was doing it-!”
With an apologetic hum Benny clamps a hand over Dean’s mouth-the last thing they need now is to get found-and Dean gives a little shudder and then just starts making his sort of low whining noise against Benny’s hand, whipping his head back and forth, trying to get out from under it.
“You have to hold still, now,” Benny murmurs, trying to be calming to figure out what the hell is going on, and Dean’s face is hot and salty-wet like a child’s mid-temper tantrum, and he’s trying to talk, making the same repetitive, desperate noise against Benny’s hand, and he knows from all those nightmares, from the little truncated yells Dean gives as he wakes, what he’s trying to say. Sam. Sam. Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.
And then, all at once, the angel is there, looked raggedy and appalled, and Benny isn’t sure what happens but he’s suddenly sprawling on the ground beside Dean and the angel is bent low, pulling Dean upwards and trying to get a grasp on his face as Dean whimpers for Sam, begs for Sam, for somebody, for some phantom pain to just stop, please oh please make it stop Sam Sam SAM!
The angel is frowning, trying to tilt Dean’s face up, trying to make eye contact. “Dean,” he says, low and sure, “Dean, you need to calm down. Dean. Stop. Dean, it’s alright.”
Dean appears to recognize something in the angel’s face and grips his filthy lapels, knuckles white under the grime, and the angel rocks forward and back in time with Dean’s body, keeps his hands on Dean’s head and face, keeps repeating his name, creates a wild little song of it, Sam Dean Sam Dean Sam Dean.
After a moment, the angel bends his head low and starts speaking in Dean’s ear, and Dean’s frantic movements begin to slow down, and after a last plaintive “Sam?” he falls silent.
The angel holds Dean’s limp body to his, all but cradles his head, and Benny is struck by the thought that this is the most sure he’s ever seen the angel of anything.
“Cas?” Dean moans softly, and the angel’s grip tightens.
“Yes,” says the angel, and Dean lets out a little whine. “Go to sleep,” says the angel, “I’ll watch over you.”
After a long silence, Benny dares to ask, “What the fuck just happened?”
The angel, who is still kneeling with a quiet Dean slumped against him, looking less like a lover and more like a father with his child, looks at Benny for a long moment, tilts his head like curious animal. Opens his mouth and closes it several times before sighing and rocking back off his knees and onto his rear, pulling Dean with him, leaning against a tree. Dean’s head settles on his chest, their bodies bizarrely entangled like some two-headed monster.
“You know of the righteous man in hell,” the angel says softly, and Benny’s breath stutters in his chest for a moment. Of course he does. He hadn’t been topside in decades, no longer had any sense of what monsters whisper to one another in the dark, what revolutions and revelations make their way from the Pit. But he remembers. The humans aren’t the only ones with legends.
Benny doesn’t say anything more, just scoots back against another tree and fixes the angel with an appraising glance, looks at Dean, face slack and still bleeding sluggishly. He’d finished shaving, before whatever the hell that was. He looks younger. He thinks of Dean’s insistence that they find the angel, that the angel come home with them, safe and whole. Thinks of how he’d clung to the least glorious manifestation of God’s will Benny could conceive of, a scruffy, bloody mess in a dirty trench coat. Thinks of the way they’d looked at each other, like two men with a thousand years of understanding between them.
“I meant that, about keeping watch,” says the angel’s gruff voice, interrupting Benny’s revery. “You should sleep.”
“You sure?” asks Benny, because what else is there to say? He’s exhausted, more so than he was before he went to sleep, but after what he just saw, he’s not sure he trusts the world to be right when he wakes up.
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
“Goodnight then, angel,” says Benny.
“Goodnight,” echoes Castiel softly, bringing a hand up to cup the back of Dean’s head.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1,772
Spoilers: Up to the Purgatory flashbacks.
Warnings: Language, nasty hell flashbacks.
Summary: A peaceful night's sleep is a joke in Purgatory, which Benny probably should have known. For balder12's prompt over at Geckoholic's hurt Dean-centric comment meme.
Neurotic author's notes: Pretentious title is pretentious, and comes from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which I'm pretty sure I've culled for titles before, but whatever. "What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?/The heart's bleed longest, but heal to wear/That which disfigures it." Cut text is from the Mountain Goats's "In Memory of Satan," because I'm kind of twisted.
Most nights, Benny doesn’t sleep much, but when he does, it’s the sleep of the fucking dead. And tonight, he’s still stiff against clothes absolutely bathed in blood-foul demon shit, nothing he can even eat-and Dean’s not in a talkative mood, and God knows the fucking angel isn’t gonna sit up with him and chat, so he leaves the two of them to do their thing. Benny is not yet entirely certain what Dean and the angel’s thing is, and while he’s not exactly a traditionalist he’s also not inclined to pry. If they want to brood at each other over their stubble, that’s their prerogative. He’s fucking exhausted.
He drifts off after Dean promises gruffly to take first watch and begins to scrape a five day beard from his face with water and a dull knife. This is possibly the stupidest thing Benny has ever seen anyone do, but Dean is remarkably insistent about it, even when he nicks his own face and the smell calls to Benny like a fucking siren, even when he’s so tired he can hardly hold the damn knife steady. If forced to think very hard about it, Benny would probably say it’s something to do with feeling like a person, still, the same Dean who arrived here. Some tiny scrap of what he was before to cling to. Or something. Like the angel and his proclivities, it’s not Benny’s job to worry about.
Benny falls asleep to the sounds of Dean raking his face clean, absently supervised by the angel, and wakes what feels like seconds later to the sound of heavy breathing directly above him.
His eyes fly open, and the overwhelming instinct to take his attacker down is quelled only by the thick, familiar smell of Dean’s blood, familiar and hot and sweet, dripping onto his face in steady plops. The heavy breathing is Dean’s, and it’s ragged and shallow. His arms are pinned. Dean’s straddling him, his nose is inches from Benny’s.
“What’re you doing, brother?” he says, trying to keep his voice even, as Dean is clearly straying pretty far from the reservation right now. Dean makes a high keening noise and straightens a little, lets go of Benny’s arms. Benny begins to wriggle free and stops immediately when Dean bends low again and sets the knife-cum-razor to his neck. It’s slick with Dean’s blood. Benny holds very still and wishes for the angel.
“I have to,” says Dean abruptly. His voice is wavering, strangely, and his expression is absent. “I have to,” he repeats, sounding like a little boy, “I don’t want to, okay, okay, I have to, I gotta. Everybody’s gotta, everybody’s gotta do what they gotta. Right? Right. Everybody’s gotta do what they gotta.” He lets out a harsh little laugh as Benny stares back uncomprehending. “I don’t know what you did to get down here, you know, maybe something horrible. People will confess to some really fucked up shit once you’ve got them eating their own intestines, you know?” He tilts his head, smiles crookedly down at Benny. “I wonder what you’ll confess to.”
Benny swallows hard, acutely aware of the knife at his throat. It’s dull and smells so strong and tangy it’s making him dizzy, but Dean clearly has no idea who he’s talking to. Benny doesn’t, either, and he thinks maybe humans just ain’t made to handle the no man’s land, but there’s time for head shrinking later. The present danger is a lot more acute.
“Dean,” he says, “brother, it’s me. Benny.”
Dean blinks rapidly, smiles again. “I remember I had something in my ear. Maybe a rib. It was sharp. Right up against my brain. Tickling. I said I killed my father and kidnapped the Lindberg baby.”
“What in the hell,” Benny gasps.
He lets out a strange little laugh, takes the knife from Benny’s neck, examines it. Benny doesn’t dare move. “This isn’t yours,” he sing-songs, after a moment, waving the bloody knife around. “Not ye-e-et.” He sets the blade down against the length of Benny’s nose, but doesn’t apply any pressure. “I’m really good at this,” he says earnestly, “can split you down the middle and then we’ll sew you back together, do it again. I got good, you know, cuz I gotta. Everybody’s gotta. Maybe you will. Maybe if I take my time with your little bones.” He pushes down a little, not enough to bleed, or even hurt, but enough to make Benny’s heart do somersaults. “The littlest bone is in your ear. Wanna know how I know?”
“Dean-”
“Don’t fucking talk,” Dean says, and removes the knife, pitches forward, sets his forearm against Benny’s neck. Leans down close, gets up by Benny’s ear with all the intimacy of a lover. “It’s easier if you don’t talk,” he whispers, and he sounds a little more like Dean again. “Okay? It’s easier. I don’t. I don’t-listen, everybody’s gotta do what they gotta do, right? Right? Right. Okay. I don’t know anything else to do, okay, I’m not good at anything else.”
Where the fuck is the angel?
Dean is breathing against his ear, too quickly, and Benny throws caution to the wind. He’s already fucking dead, isn’t he?
With a shout, he pitches to the left, away from the knife, gets Dean off him, under him, holds his wrist fast and pinches until his hand twitches and the knife falls, holds him down as he thrashes and shouts, “No, no, not fair, not fair, I was doing it, I was, I was, I was, you promised, you promised, I was doing it-!”
With an apologetic hum Benny clamps a hand over Dean’s mouth-the last thing they need now is to get found-and Dean gives a little shudder and then just starts making his sort of low whining noise against Benny’s hand, whipping his head back and forth, trying to get out from under it.
“You have to hold still, now,” Benny murmurs, trying to be calming to figure out what the hell is going on, and Dean’s face is hot and salty-wet like a child’s mid-temper tantrum, and he’s trying to talk, making the same repetitive, desperate noise against Benny’s hand, and he knows from all those nightmares, from the little truncated yells Dean gives as he wakes, what he’s trying to say. Sam. Sam. Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam.
And then, all at once, the angel is there, looked raggedy and appalled, and Benny isn’t sure what happens but he’s suddenly sprawling on the ground beside Dean and the angel is bent low, pulling Dean upwards and trying to get a grasp on his face as Dean whimpers for Sam, begs for Sam, for somebody, for some phantom pain to just stop, please oh please make it stop Sam Sam SAM!
The angel is frowning, trying to tilt Dean’s face up, trying to make eye contact. “Dean,” he says, low and sure, “Dean, you need to calm down. Dean. Stop. Dean, it’s alright.”
Dean appears to recognize something in the angel’s face and grips his filthy lapels, knuckles white under the grime, and the angel rocks forward and back in time with Dean’s body, keeps his hands on Dean’s head and face, keeps repeating his name, creates a wild little song of it, Sam Dean Sam Dean Sam Dean.
After a moment, the angel bends his head low and starts speaking in Dean’s ear, and Dean’s frantic movements begin to slow down, and after a last plaintive “Sam?” he falls silent.
The angel holds Dean’s limp body to his, all but cradles his head, and Benny is struck by the thought that this is the most sure he’s ever seen the angel of anything.
“Cas?” Dean moans softly, and the angel’s grip tightens.
“Yes,” says the angel, and Dean lets out a little whine. “Go to sleep,” says the angel, “I’ll watch over you.”
After a long silence, Benny dares to ask, “What the fuck just happened?”
The angel, who is still kneeling with a quiet Dean slumped against him, looking less like a lover and more like a father with his child, looks at Benny for a long moment, tilts his head like curious animal. Opens his mouth and closes it several times before sighing and rocking back off his knees and onto his rear, pulling Dean with him, leaning against a tree. Dean’s head settles on his chest, their bodies bizarrely entangled like some two-headed monster.
“You know of the righteous man in hell,” the angel says softly, and Benny’s breath stutters in his chest for a moment. Of course he does. He hadn’t been topside in decades, no longer had any sense of what monsters whisper to one another in the dark, what revolutions and revelations make their way from the Pit. But he remembers. The humans aren’t the only ones with legends.
Benny doesn’t say anything more, just scoots back against another tree and fixes the angel with an appraising glance, looks at Dean, face slack and still bleeding sluggishly. He’d finished shaving, before whatever the hell that was. He looks younger. He thinks of Dean’s insistence that they find the angel, that the angel come home with them, safe and whole. Thinks of how he’d clung to the least glorious manifestation of God’s will Benny could conceive of, a scruffy, bloody mess in a dirty trench coat. Thinks of the way they’d looked at each other, like two men with a thousand years of understanding between them.
“I meant that, about keeping watch,” says the angel’s gruff voice, interrupting Benny’s revery. “You should sleep.”
“You sure?” asks Benny, because what else is there to say? He’s exhausted, more so than he was before he went to sleep, but after what he just saw, he’s not sure he trusts the world to be right when he wakes up.
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
“Goodnight then, angel,” says Benny.
“Goodnight,” echoes Castiel softly, bringing a hand up to cup the back of Dean’s head.