Fic: the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill
Title: the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill
Author: wave_obscura
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Genre: het-ish, h/c
Word Count: 2100
Summary: Lisa met him on the Fourth of July. She was drunk off her ass. In the same verse as Swallow The Sky and Isn’t It Good Again, an AU in which Dean sustained a spinal chord injury at a young age. Yes, I'm back with yet ANOTHER forearm crutch fic! *hangs head in shame* This one probably doesn't stand alone.
Warnings/Spoilers: Season six. Non-graphic Dean/Lisa. Angst. Permanently injured Dean. Smoking!Dean.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Note: For neonchica 's prompt at the latest hoodie_time hurt/comfort meme, which was: Permanently injured Dean shows up at Lisa's doorstep (or she goes to get him from the hospital). How does this change the dynamics of their relationship? As per usual, I didn't do a very good job following the prompt, and I'm sorry :( Written also for roque_clasique , who now must write ME a fic :P
Note Two: Thank you pixymisa for being awesome.
the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill
by wave obscura
July 4, 2001
For a man who couldn’t walk any better than he could tap dance, Dean Winchester was all swagger.
Lisa met him on the Fourth of July. She was drunk off her ass and Dean almost schmoozed her out of her panties right there in the bar. She even didn’t notice the forearm crutches until she was scooting into the passenger seat of his car.
“Whatthafucker those?” She (maybe) said to him. Dear God, she hopes she didn’t really say that to him.
“Crutches,” he (maybe) replied. “Desert Storm.”
“Liar!” Lisa wailed. And fuck the maybes, she remembers it clearly now. She had a filthy mouth when she was younger, and she said, “Yer too fuckin’ young for Desert Storm.”
Dean leaned heavily on one crutch and closed her car door with the other. Then he moved around to the driver’s side, watching the the ground as he went. He was quick and oddly graceful.
She watched him. Part of her screamed run the hell away.
The crutches came in first. He slid them into a strap hanging from the back of his seat. He lowered himself down and lifted both his legs into the car.
God, she was so drunk. The world was thick and swirly and thanks to the fireworks, everything reeked of sulfur.
She was caught between his smile, his swaggerless swagger, his eyelashes, her resolve to go home with him and feeling nervous about the distinct possibility for lame awkward sex. She didn’t know what was wrong with him, what he could and couldn’t do, if it was okay to ask, and god, what if she hurt him or something?
And for all she knew, he was pulling a Ted Bundy and it was all a ruse to gain her trust.
So then she blurted, like some drunk floozy: “Lissen, asshole... you better not be faking.”
He laughed at that. He threw his head back and guffawed. A baby firework exploded in the sky behind his head.
“I’m serious!” she insisted. “Yer waaaaaaaay too young to get hurt in Desert Storm.”
“Who doesn’t want a soldier on fourtha July?”
“What?”
“I was just tryin’ to be cute,” he admitted, flicking the wheelchaired tag hanging from his rear view. “Look, I’m licensed and everything.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“Look at these.” He fiddled with something near the steering wheel, smiling. “Hand controls.”
“I should go home,” she said, pawing ineffectually at the door handle.
He made this doe-eyed face at her-- he pretty much batted his eyelashes, only somehow it was still manly. “Aw c’mon. If I start getting creepy, I’m real easy to out run.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
He sighed. “I fell down a couple of flights of stairs, okay? I was fourteen.”
The truth seemed to stun him, like he wasn’t sure why he’d told it.
“Let’s go back to your place,” she said.
July 4, 2002
A year went by, a blurred year of drinking and fighting and fucking, drinking and fighting and fucking and fucking and drinking and fighting some more.
“Hey.” Lisa stood in the doorway of the single room Dean had been renting since he rolled into town. It was pathetic, dangerous, and barely accessible. They spent most of their time at her house. Except during times like this. When he didn’t get out of bed.
She paused to observe the stiff, unnatural way he was positioned on the bed behind a Great Wall of pizza boxes. Same way she’d left him several days before. “You don’t look like you’re in the mood.”
“No,” he confirmed, “not in the mood.”
In addition to the pain, he was drunk. The smell of whiskey wafted hotly out of his pores. She looked at the many pills on the night table, cocooned by empty booze bottles, and wondered how he was still alive.
She stepped inside and shut the door. “Can I help? Massage?”
Dean smiled. “Nah.”
She never got it right, never did it like his brother did. She often touched something wrong, too hard, at the wrong angle, made him yelp in pain.
She took off her overcoat. She wasn’t wearing much underneath. “Then I’ll try something else.”
He leered, very half-assed, and patted the bed for her to sit down. There was something on his face. Something more than pain, more than his obvious disinterest in sex.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Lisa reached for the small of Dean’s back. He squirmed a little under her touch, but let her gently work his muscles.
“Just talked to my dad,” he said, blank as a zombie. “He’s decided it’s time for Sammy to join the family business.”
She keeps massaging, working her way around, trying to avoid the thick bundles of scars. “Is that so bad?”
“He’s only nineteen. He’d gonna fuckin’ get himself killed.” Dean rolled the rest of the way onto his stomach and groped around on the nightstand for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, held it in his teeth and sighed deeply. Lisa had never seen him smoke before.
“Is the family business... dangerous?”
“S’how I became the nimble athlete you know and love today.” He gestured at the paraphernalia around the room, the crutches, his braces discarded on the floor, the wheelchair folded up in the corner, the pills.
“I thought you fell down a flight of stairs.”
Dean snorted. Smoke rolled from his nostrils. “The family business... we’re uh. Stuntmen.”
She smiled awkwardly. He was acting like his brother’s job change was the most horrible, catastrophic thing in the universe. Stuntmen?
“Dean... just because you got hurt. That doesn’t mean that Sam--”
Dean suddenly flinched away from her massaging hand, drew in a sharp breath. “Ow, ow. Ow. Lisa. Stop.”
She jumped away from him like he was on fire.
“See? This is why I tell you stay the hell away from my back.”
He went quiet, sucked on the cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he said after a minute, stamping out the butt in a half-chewed slice of pizza on the nightstand. “It should be me. You know? I should be there with them. And now Sam and my Dad...” he shook the thought away. “I just feel useless.”
Lisa dared to reach out and touch his shoulder. “He’ll be fine, Dean. He’ll be just fine. So will you.”
He nodded, took her hand in his. “Let’s get married.”
July 4, 2010
They hosted neighborhood barbecues every Sunday during the summer. Lisa hated them because she had no children of her own, because if bratty little kids were going to run around and tear up her back yard she wanted them to be hers. Because Gabby, who had two kids of her own and two from Korea, would slip her pamphlets about adoption. Because Brandi with an “i,” who had one dark twin and one light twin, never shut up about fertility treatments.
Dean hated them because Dean was Dean, because he deeply loathed anything mundane, anything repetitive. She’d catch him staring at the barbecue every now and then, the flames licking at the moisture in his eyes. But all it took was for Lisa to say “Dean?” and the gloom would dissipate as quickly as the smoke from the briquettes.
On good days the crutches merely helped him walk; on bad day they propped him up like flimsy scaffolding. By the time they’d hosted their third backyard barbecue, he’d abandoned the crutches altogether. The burgers were black hockey pucks releasing a nasty lighter fluid smell into the air as he sat in the wheelchair and picked at a loose thread on his traction gloves.
“Dean,” she said, and he jumped and looked up at her, blinked, noticed the burnt-to-shit food on the grill.
“Damn it,” he said.
“I’ll get more meat.” She started for the house but he rolled past her, calling “I got it” over his shoulder.
Twenty minutes went by. The guests finished off the baby carrots and spinach dip and started nosing around for another box of wine. Brandi went into the houses to use the bathroom and came back out, an expression on her face that oozed gossip and drama.
“Girl, your brother-in-law is here,” she whispered, as if it were some dirty secret.
Lisa went into the house and lingered in the living room doorway, watching the brothers through the cool darkness of the house. Sam brought with him the smell of the road, heat, sweat and dust. He helped Dean to his feet, then yanked him into a hard embrace.
He lowered Dean back down into the chair and came to kiss her cheek. His beard was a little overgrown and it tickled Lisa’s face. She studied him. He had a new scar over his eyebrow.
“You look skinny, honey,” she said. Her eyes flickered from Dean’s white, unlined face to Sam’s dark, textured complexion. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Dean was the older one.
Especially not with the delirious grin of relief on Dean’s face. He lived in fear that someday Sam would never return.
They both did.
Lisa excused herself to finish feeding the guests. As dusk fell, she sent them away, out to the cul-de-sac to set off the fireworks.
She returned to find Dean on his belly on the sofa. Sam hovered above him, digging his fingers into Dean’s back in a way that made Lisa cringe, in a way she’d assume would make Dean wail with pain.
“Lisa. Come here, I want to show you,” Sam said.
“Sammy please. No,” Dean said. There was a weird, panicked quality to his voice.
“You feel this right here?” Sam said to Lisa, ignoring his brother. He took her hand and ran two fingers across one of the tangle of scars on Dean’s lower back.
“Yeah,” she said.
Somewhere outside, the thunder of fireworks began to sound. Sam guided her fingers. “Just like that. Nice and hard. He can handle a lot more pressure than you might think.”
“Sam,” Dean repeated. He sounded like he was pleading.
Sam stared hard at Lisa. “This is going to hurt him but trust me, it’s for his own good. Work on this area for five minutes, then put your thumbs here and here--”
He walked her through it methodically, where to touch and where not to touch, how hard and how long. Dean went quiet except for a grunt of pain now and then. A tear trailed down his cheek.
“Baby what’s wrong?” she said every so often, but he would only answer, in barely a whisper: “Sam. No.”
Finally Sam finished. He pulled his brother’s shirt back down over the mess of scars. There were tears in his eyes, too. He looked at Lisa. “Do that every night, when he’s having trouble walking. Every night. It helps.”
Lisa finally understood. Sam was leaving. He wasn’t coming back.
Sam leaned down and touched his forehead to Dean’s. He whispered something she didn’t catch. Dean’s mouth moved but nothing came out.
She followed him out the front door, onto the porch. “How the fuck can you do this to him?” She screamed. “To us?”
Sam rubbed at a scar on his hairline. The expression on his face was pure torture. “I’m doing this for you. I’m doing this for everybody.”
He turned and left.
July 4, 2012
Christ in fucking heaven, her fucking head. She must have gotten hella drunk, because it felt like her brain was about to rip into two throbbing, swollen lobes. She cracked one eye open, expecting to see a cheap mirror, or the poster of a disgusting motorcycle babe tacked to some frat guy’s ceiling.
She sees a dingy drop ceiling instead.
Like the kind at a hospital.
Also? She’s thirty-three years old. It’s been years since she’s gotten drunk and fucked around. Ever since...
Ever since what? Her mind was blank.
From across the room, a throat cleared. “Uh... Lisa?”
She turned her head, wincing. A man with longish hair stood in the doorway, next to him a shorter man with a red, puffy face, leaning heavily on a pair of forearm crutches. They seemed to prop him upright like flimsy scaffolding.
“Yeah?” she said.
The shorter one spoke up. “I’m Dean,” he said in a small voice. “I uh-- I hit you with my car. I just wanted to say... I’m sorry. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”
She tried to recall a memory and couldn’t. The two men regarded her sadly for a long moment, and then the taller one nudged Dean by the shoulder. Dean nodded to her as if to say once more: “I’m sorry.”
Then they turned and were gone.
::::
The End.
Author: wave_obscura
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Genre: het-ish, h/c
Word Count: 2100
Summary: Lisa met him on the Fourth of July. She was drunk off her ass. In the same verse as Swallow The Sky and Isn’t It Good Again, an AU in which Dean sustained a spinal chord injury at a young age. Yes, I'm back with yet ANOTHER forearm crutch fic! *hangs head in shame* This one probably doesn't stand alone.
Warnings/Spoilers: Season six. Non-graphic Dean/Lisa. Angst. Permanently injured Dean. Smoking!Dean.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Note: For neonchica 's prompt at the latest hoodie_time hurt/comfort meme, which was: Permanently injured Dean shows up at Lisa's doorstep (or she goes to get him from the hospital). How does this change the dynamics of their relationship? As per usual, I didn't do a very good job following the prompt, and I'm sorry :( Written also for roque_clasique , who now must write ME a fic :P
Note Two: Thank you pixymisa for being awesome.
the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill
by wave obscura
July 4, 2001
For a man who couldn’t walk any better than he could tap dance, Dean Winchester was all swagger.
Lisa met him on the Fourth of July. She was drunk off her ass and Dean almost schmoozed her out of her panties right there in the bar. She even didn’t notice the forearm crutches until she was scooting into the passenger seat of his car.
“Whatthafucker those?” She (maybe) said to him. Dear God, she hopes she didn’t really say that to him.
“Crutches,” he (maybe) replied. “Desert Storm.”
“Liar!” Lisa wailed. And fuck the maybes, she remembers it clearly now. She had a filthy mouth when she was younger, and she said, “Yer too fuckin’ young for Desert Storm.”
Dean leaned heavily on one crutch and closed her car door with the other. Then he moved around to the driver’s side, watching the the ground as he went. He was quick and oddly graceful.
She watched him. Part of her screamed run the hell away.
The crutches came in first. He slid them into a strap hanging from the back of his seat. He lowered himself down and lifted both his legs into the car.
God, she was so drunk. The world was thick and swirly and thanks to the fireworks, everything reeked of sulfur.
She was caught between his smile, his swaggerless swagger, his eyelashes, her resolve to go home with him and feeling nervous about the distinct possibility for lame awkward sex. She didn’t know what was wrong with him, what he could and couldn’t do, if it was okay to ask, and god, what if she hurt him or something?
And for all she knew, he was pulling a Ted Bundy and it was all a ruse to gain her trust.
So then she blurted, like some drunk floozy: “Lissen, asshole... you better not be faking.”
He laughed at that. He threw his head back and guffawed. A baby firework exploded in the sky behind his head.
“I’m serious!” she insisted. “Yer waaaaaaaay too young to get hurt in Desert Storm.”
“Who doesn’t want a soldier on fourtha July?”
“What?”
“I was just tryin’ to be cute,” he admitted, flicking the wheelchaired tag hanging from his rear view. “Look, I’m licensed and everything.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“Look at these.” He fiddled with something near the steering wheel, smiling. “Hand controls.”
“I should go home,” she said, pawing ineffectually at the door handle.
He made this doe-eyed face at her-- he pretty much batted his eyelashes, only somehow it was still manly. “Aw c’mon. If I start getting creepy, I’m real easy to out run.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
He sighed. “I fell down a couple of flights of stairs, okay? I was fourteen.”
The truth seemed to stun him, like he wasn’t sure why he’d told it.
“Let’s go back to your place,” she said.
July 4, 2002
A year went by, a blurred year of drinking and fighting and fucking, drinking and fighting and fucking and fucking and drinking and fighting some more.
“Hey.” Lisa stood in the doorway of the single room Dean had been renting since he rolled into town. It was pathetic, dangerous, and barely accessible. They spent most of their time at her house. Except during times like this. When he didn’t get out of bed.
She paused to observe the stiff, unnatural way he was positioned on the bed behind a Great Wall of pizza boxes. Same way she’d left him several days before. “You don’t look like you’re in the mood.”
“No,” he confirmed, “not in the mood.”
In addition to the pain, he was drunk. The smell of whiskey wafted hotly out of his pores. She looked at the many pills on the night table, cocooned by empty booze bottles, and wondered how he was still alive.
She stepped inside and shut the door. “Can I help? Massage?”
Dean smiled. “Nah.”
She never got it right, never did it like his brother did. She often touched something wrong, too hard, at the wrong angle, made him yelp in pain.
She took off her overcoat. She wasn’t wearing much underneath. “Then I’ll try something else.”
He leered, very half-assed, and patted the bed for her to sit down. There was something on his face. Something more than pain, more than his obvious disinterest in sex.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Lisa reached for the small of Dean’s back. He squirmed a little under her touch, but let her gently work his muscles.
“Just talked to my dad,” he said, blank as a zombie. “He’s decided it’s time for Sammy to join the family business.”
She keeps massaging, working her way around, trying to avoid the thick bundles of scars. “Is that so bad?”
“He’s only nineteen. He’d gonna fuckin’ get himself killed.” Dean rolled the rest of the way onto his stomach and groped around on the nightstand for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, held it in his teeth and sighed deeply. Lisa had never seen him smoke before.
“Is the family business... dangerous?”
“S’how I became the nimble athlete you know and love today.” He gestured at the paraphernalia around the room, the crutches, his braces discarded on the floor, the wheelchair folded up in the corner, the pills.
“I thought you fell down a flight of stairs.”
Dean snorted. Smoke rolled from his nostrils. “The family business... we’re uh. Stuntmen.”
She smiled awkwardly. He was acting like his brother’s job change was the most horrible, catastrophic thing in the universe. Stuntmen?
“Dean... just because you got hurt. That doesn’t mean that Sam--”
Dean suddenly flinched away from her massaging hand, drew in a sharp breath. “Ow, ow. Ow. Lisa. Stop.”
She jumped away from him like he was on fire.
“See? This is why I tell you stay the hell away from my back.”
He went quiet, sucked on the cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he said after a minute, stamping out the butt in a half-chewed slice of pizza on the nightstand. “It should be me. You know? I should be there with them. And now Sam and my Dad...” he shook the thought away. “I just feel useless.”
Lisa dared to reach out and touch his shoulder. “He’ll be fine, Dean. He’ll be just fine. So will you.”
He nodded, took her hand in his. “Let’s get married.”
July 4, 2010
They hosted neighborhood barbecues every Sunday during the summer. Lisa hated them because she had no children of her own, because if bratty little kids were going to run around and tear up her back yard she wanted them to be hers. Because Gabby, who had two kids of her own and two from Korea, would slip her pamphlets about adoption. Because Brandi with an “i,” who had one dark twin and one light twin, never shut up about fertility treatments.
Dean hated them because Dean was Dean, because he deeply loathed anything mundane, anything repetitive. She’d catch him staring at the barbecue every now and then, the flames licking at the moisture in his eyes. But all it took was for Lisa to say “Dean?” and the gloom would dissipate as quickly as the smoke from the briquettes.
On good days the crutches merely helped him walk; on bad day they propped him up like flimsy scaffolding. By the time they’d hosted their third backyard barbecue, he’d abandoned the crutches altogether. The burgers were black hockey pucks releasing a nasty lighter fluid smell into the air as he sat in the wheelchair and picked at a loose thread on his traction gloves.
“Dean,” she said, and he jumped and looked up at her, blinked, noticed the burnt-to-shit food on the grill.
“Damn it,” he said.
“I’ll get more meat.” She started for the house but he rolled past her, calling “I got it” over his shoulder.
Twenty minutes went by. The guests finished off the baby carrots and spinach dip and started nosing around for another box of wine. Brandi went into the houses to use the bathroom and came back out, an expression on her face that oozed gossip and drama.
“Girl, your brother-in-law is here,” she whispered, as if it were some dirty secret.
Lisa went into the house and lingered in the living room doorway, watching the brothers through the cool darkness of the house. Sam brought with him the smell of the road, heat, sweat and dust. He helped Dean to his feet, then yanked him into a hard embrace.
He lowered Dean back down into the chair and came to kiss her cheek. His beard was a little overgrown and it tickled Lisa’s face. She studied him. He had a new scar over his eyebrow.
“You look skinny, honey,” she said. Her eyes flickered from Dean’s white, unlined face to Sam’s dark, textured complexion. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Dean was the older one.
Especially not with the delirious grin of relief on Dean’s face. He lived in fear that someday Sam would never return.
They both did.
Lisa excused herself to finish feeding the guests. As dusk fell, she sent them away, out to the cul-de-sac to set off the fireworks.
She returned to find Dean on his belly on the sofa. Sam hovered above him, digging his fingers into Dean’s back in a way that made Lisa cringe, in a way she’d assume would make Dean wail with pain.
“Lisa. Come here, I want to show you,” Sam said.
“Sammy please. No,” Dean said. There was a weird, panicked quality to his voice.
“You feel this right here?” Sam said to Lisa, ignoring his brother. He took her hand and ran two fingers across one of the tangle of scars on Dean’s lower back.
“Yeah,” she said.
Somewhere outside, the thunder of fireworks began to sound. Sam guided her fingers. “Just like that. Nice and hard. He can handle a lot more pressure than you might think.”
“Sam,” Dean repeated. He sounded like he was pleading.
Sam stared hard at Lisa. “This is going to hurt him but trust me, it’s for his own good. Work on this area for five minutes, then put your thumbs here and here--”
He walked her through it methodically, where to touch and where not to touch, how hard and how long. Dean went quiet except for a grunt of pain now and then. A tear trailed down his cheek.
“Baby what’s wrong?” she said every so often, but he would only answer, in barely a whisper: “Sam. No.”
Finally Sam finished. He pulled his brother’s shirt back down over the mess of scars. There were tears in his eyes, too. He looked at Lisa. “Do that every night, when he’s having trouble walking. Every night. It helps.”
Lisa finally understood. Sam was leaving. He wasn’t coming back.
Sam leaned down and touched his forehead to Dean’s. He whispered something she didn’t catch. Dean’s mouth moved but nothing came out.
She followed him out the front door, onto the porch. “How the fuck can you do this to him?” She screamed. “To us?”
Sam rubbed at a scar on his hairline. The expression on his face was pure torture. “I’m doing this for you. I’m doing this for everybody.”
He turned and left.
July 4, 2012
Christ in fucking heaven, her fucking head. She must have gotten hella drunk, because it felt like her brain was about to rip into two throbbing, swollen lobes. She cracked one eye open, expecting to see a cheap mirror, or the poster of a disgusting motorcycle babe tacked to some frat guy’s ceiling.
She sees a dingy drop ceiling instead.
Like the kind at a hospital.
Also? She’s thirty-three years old. It’s been years since she’s gotten drunk and fucked around. Ever since...
Ever since what? Her mind was blank.
From across the room, a throat cleared. “Uh... Lisa?”
She turned her head, wincing. A man with longish hair stood in the doorway, next to him a shorter man with a red, puffy face, leaning heavily on a pair of forearm crutches. They seemed to prop him upright like flimsy scaffolding.
“Yeah?” she said.
The shorter one spoke up. “I’m Dean,” he said in a small voice. “I uh-- I hit you with my car. I just wanted to say... I’m sorry. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”
She tried to recall a memory and couldn’t. The two men regarded her sadly for a long moment, and then the taller one nudged Dean by the shoulder. Dean nodded to her as if to say once more: “I’m sorry.”
Then they turned and were gone.
::::
The End.