Damn Nuisance When It's Raining - Mania
Suicide by poltergeist.
That’s what he calls it in that dark, twisted part of his mind, just as he lets his fingers go limp around his colt. Something solid crashes into his chest and then he’s falling backwards through a second story window before he even hears the gun hit the floor.
Dean spends a good chunk of time pretending there’s nothing wrong with him or his brain or the way he sometimes gets so lost inside his own head he can spend days on end killing evil shit without sleep, running on nothing but coffee and doughnuts. And the other times, like this past week, when getting out of bed takes so much effort he wants to eat a bullet (usually, he puts those down to Sam and Stanford and who wouldn’t slide into a little funk if their entire purpose in life decided to up and leave for college classes and California beaches?). He gets good at pretending it’s normal, even though it’s been years since Sammy left and he still sometimes feels like there’s a big black hole in the middle of his chest that just keeps sucking everything in on itself.
He blinks himself back to consciousness, out in the wild rose bushes in the house’s front yard and waits for his heart to jump up into his throat because that fall could have killed him and the poltergeist could have killed him and this strange, hollow feeling in his stomach that’s uncomfortably close to boredom is not at all an appropriate response to almost dying.
Figures somehow, his brain would be the one in a million defective model.
He lies in those bushes for a long time, feels the earth under his head grow damp with his own blood and somehow that is when he finally decides to try something other than the tried and true get me a drink, doctors are for pussies Winchester school of therapy.
He’s sitting on his plastic chair in the corner of the emergency room where he can see all the doors and most of the windows, waiting for someone to tell him he’ll need fifteen stitches and an icepack (Dean knows and he’s feeling kind of ridiculous, going to a hospital with something like this, but Dad isn’t around and he can’t very well stitch up the back of his own head) and figures, what the hell, he’ll just mention it to one of the doctors.
The doc listens, even though she looks like she’s ready to collapse, with dark, big, fat bags under her eyes and her upper lip in desperate need of a shave. She nods and closes her eyes when she’s massaging her own neck and prescribes him an antidepressant (Dean doesn’t think about what that means. He can’t ever think about that).
“Make sure to consult your personal physician when you get home and let him refer you to a psychiatrist, Mr. Addy,” she mumbles while filling out his prescription.
Dean forces his mouth to twist into a grin which earns him a tired smile.
It’s good at first. Great, really.
He sleeps less, but that’s hardly a bad thing in his line of work, especially with the way he’s been moping about lately. It’s almost like his mind got a good kick in the ass and is trying to make up for lost time.
Dad meets up with him a week later and Dean has so much energy he ends up cleaning weapons and doing research on the computer in the hotel lobby late at night, long after Dad has given up and collapsed on top of his covers. He still feels up and great and alive in the morning so he goes out and gets them coffee and breakfast burritos.
Dad looks at him kinda funny so Dean tries to shut down the finger-tapping on the table and the way his knees are bouncing to some fast inner rhythm and gets on with his report.
Bloody footprints, missing women, some obscure legend from Eastern Europe, yada-yada-yada.
He has to stop to take a huge bite which Dad takes as his cue to pat him on the shoulder and smile.
And that makes Dean grin so hard he actually forgets to chew for a minute.
He sneaks the pills into the bathroom every morning, hidden under a pile of semi-fresh clothing. It’s a pain in the ass, but what’s he supposed to do? They share the small toilet bag they have hanging off the hook above the sink, putting them with the other meds would be insane and there’s always a chance Dad will ruin his own jeans and decide to wear Dean’s instead. So little orange bottle inside a sock on the bottom of his duffle it is. Sort of like the pack of cigarettes he used to hide there when he was fourteen (though Dad did eventually find out about those, so it’s really only sort of like that except a hundred times better and more sneaky).
Dean isn’t sure why, but he knows Dad can’t know about the pills. Ever.
Winchesters drink when they’re upset and they fuck girls they pick up in bars when the drinking’s not enough and they only ever take meds when their own hands are the only thing separating their intestines from the ground.
Dean doesn’t even want to think about the look on his father’s face if he ever saw the pills.
The hunt’s a piece of cake. Dean’s managed to cram three days’ worth of research into two nights and okay, so maybe he sort of scared their witness when he wouldn’t let her finish a sentence and cheered when she told them about the bloody footprints that are exactly like the ones Dean found out about in that creepy chat room, but…yeah. Hunt. Piece of cake. Dean can’t wait to shoot the evil son of a bitch in the head.
“Jesus, kid,” Dad says when they climb out of the car and Dean keeps slipping the magazine into his gun, taps the bottom, slides is back out, pushes it back in.
Dean shuts it down with an effort.
“Too much blood in my caffeine,” he quips and wonders why his hands are so fucking hot. He tries shaking it out, but that only makes the skin up his arms tingle even worse.
Dad looks at him kinda weird and Dean does his best to stand still with his back straight for the fivetensixteenfivehundred seconds it takes for Dad to nod, then shake his head and say, “alright then.”
Dean’s hands are shaking and clammy around his gun. His shot goes wide and it’s a damn miracle Dad manages to get to the spirit before it rips out Dean’s throat.
He seems pretty pissed about that so Dean quickly grabs his left shoulder like he’s not sure if he dislocated it again and Dad lets him off with a light cuff about the ear. It’s almost gentle really and Dean bounces all the way back to the car.
Dad leaves later that night because, historically speaking, Dad has a problem with Dean getting hurt. Holy misplaced guilt complex, Batman. He says he has some job lined up in Michigan and he’s gonna take the Impala and leave Dean his beat-up, piece of shit Chevy C10, which, yeah, it would probably be nice to be asked instead of told but Dean’s pretty much a black belt in turning this kind of thing into a compliment so he does.
“Make sure you get some sleep tonight,” Dad says and Dean just goes ahead and imagines the please and the clap to the shoulder that might or might not be injured because he knows Dad means it that way.
The weapons cleaning happens on autopilot and it’s only when Dean reaches for his papers on the case, only to have his hand land flat on top of the Formica table that he realizes that he has nothing left to do.
It takes him another couple of seconds to realize that he hasn’t gotten any real sleep at all in at least four days. He figures he should, so he toes off his boots, slips out of his jeans, buries his face in his pillow and waits.
And waits.
And waits.
It’s 2:30 and the gazillionth time he’s checked the digital red alarm clock.
2:42 by his gazillion-and-third check and that’s when he decides enough is enough.
It’s a college town, so Dean finds himself a bar and before he knows it he is playing pool for fun with a group of peroxide blondes who are teaching him some sort of drinking game he doesn’t really get. He’s pretty sure they’re making the rules up as they go along, mostly they just drink and woo whenever someone shouts “everyone drink” and that’s really the sort of drinking game Dean can get behind.
He goes home with two of them and finally (finally) falls asleep after three rounds and after he’s banged his head on the top bunk for the second time.
It’s not dark outside when he wakes up. Not really light either, though and when he checks his watch he figures he’s only really slept three hours and is still feeling pretty drunk.
He groans, tries to untangle himself from Blondie One who’s still got her legs wrapped around his. He knows one of them was called Sara or Cara (possibly Keira) and the other one’s name was slightly Russian sounding, but for the life of him, he can’t figure out which one’s which. He stifles a laugh in the crook of his arm, not really sure what exactly he finds so funny.
His arms are sort of shaky and he ends up collapsing on top of Blondie Two instead of climbing out of bed without disturbing them.
Natasha (he’s pretty sure her name’s Natasha) wraps her arm around him and pulls him close for some more fooling around which Dean also finds a little hilarious, the way they’re sort of stuck in limbo between drunk and hung over.
They have Funyuns for breakfast and Dean leaves with a hug from each and the promise to call whenever he feels like hooking up again.
If this is what college chicks are like, maybe Dean can’t be all that mad at Sam for leaving.
He doesn’t even try to sleep when he gets back to his motel. The ground is still fairly unsteady under his feet, so he digs a Hershey bar out of his duffel and dry swallows two Aspirin and one Prozac (he stuffs the bottle back into his sock even though Dad won’t be around for fuck knows how long because for all he knows they might be a very well-known brand of anti-depressant and the thought that some cleaning lady might stumble over them is infinitely more terrifying than the idea of the same cleaning lady finding any of his guns. Cops are okay to deal with, but Dean doesn’t need the men in white coats to come chasing after him).
Dad’s car is a piece of shit. They’ve been working on it on and off for six years now and every now and then it still decides to pitch a fit for God knows what reason. None, probably, other than the fact that from the day it rolled off the line till it landed in Bobby’s yard none of its owners treated it right and now it’s just old and jaded and not particularly interested in playing nice.
Dean can respect that.
Still, he supposes they’re going to be stuck together for some time, so he might as well give the old truck a good wash and maybe if it doesn’t spontaneously remember it hates him and try to run him over or something, he could even be persuaded to use some of the car wax he uses on the Impala for special occasions.
Cleaning turns into listening to Dad’s tunes and trying to fix the crappy speaker, turns into noticing the window isn’t closing properly and Dean figures he might as well fix that too. He’ll have to go find a hardware store and get the tools to take apart the door.
Sleeping doesn’t really happen the night after that either. Dean lies with his face mashed up against his pillow and tries to keep the frustration at bay. There’s no hunt he needs to research, no college co-ed he needs to fuck, not a hint of leftover adrenaline from last night’s hunt, so legitimately he should be asleep. He can feel it, circling around the edges of his consciousness, there but never quite enough to sweep him under and okay, so maybe he isn’t doing a particularly good job of not getting frustrated.
He turns on the TV after a while, even though the light hurts his eyes and the laugh track makes him want to throw things. He closes his eyes and listens to Joey and Rachel bitch about not having sex because of Ross.
God, when did this show get so bad? He hopes they’ll cancel it soon.
He pretty much gives up on sleeping altogether after that. Athens is a big town, so mostly he just makes sure he has cases to work and things to kill with his motel room close by so he has a bed to collapse in when by some miracle he does pass out for a couple of hours only to wake with his head pounding and his eyes gritty and dry.
Dad keeps a bottle of tequila in the glove compartment of his truck and Dean takes to knocking back a gulp or three whenever he remembers even though he hates tequila with a fucking passion. It helps with the nervous energy crawling under his skin, but doesn’t make sleeping all that much easier.
He isn’t quite sure how exactly he meets Cassie, which should probably be a warning sign in and of itself.
She’s awesome though. Smart and funny and so freakin’ beautiful it takes his breath away.
She doesn’t sleep with him that first night and Dean doesn’t want to play into every macho hunter/gatherer stereotype there is, but somehow that…works. Makes him stick around and spend check after check on ridiculous dinner and a movie nights.
“There’s pie!” he almost yells, grabs her hand and drags her up to the counter of Darren's Lovin’ Oven the morning after their third date.
There’s lemon and apple and chocolate and all kinds of berries and Dean wants to try them all!
Cassie gives him a funny sort of look, but she keeps her hand in his, wraps their fingers around each other and that’s something Dean probably hasn’t done since Carol Tanner in the third grade.
“We’ll have one of everything,” he tells the old baker lady which makes Cassie giggle until she realizes he’s serious when he hands over Chris Pitman’s credit card.
They sit at their tiny round table with ten pieces of pie and two forks and feed each other and really, it’s a whole lot like something from a stupid WB teen romantic comedy and Dean fuckin’ loves it.
“You gotta try the banana-raspberry one,” he tells Cassie between bites. “Seriously, you can totally taste the berries and the…the banana. C’mon, just try a little bite. Change your life, swear to God.”
The look Cassie gives him is both somehow, slightly disturbed but also like someone might look at a clumsy puppy.
“You like pie, right?” he asks, suddenly, just a tiny bit scared, because seriously, she’s only had like four bites and doesn’t look like she wants more and who the hell doesn’t like pie?
“Would it be a problem if I didn’t?”
Dean cocks his head to the side, sucks on his fork and pretends to consider.
“Yeeaaah,” he says with a solemn nod, but his lips curl into a smile around his fork before he has to put it down because his hands are starting to shake.
“Then I like pie,” she says and steals his plate.
Dean likes the old guy who runs the auto shop just a couple of blocks from the motel. Karl. He’s got long white hair and a greasy biker jacket that’s black with motor oil and he’s always got the radio in the back of his shop turned to conservative talk because it scares off the boring people.
“Couldn’t you get a bull terrier or something?” Dean asks one day when he’s sorting through a box of spark plugs (the ones he has right now are fine and freshly gapped, but he’s got some idea that putting in extra plugs might endear him to the truck or maybe he’s even gonna put in half an extra motor, who knows it might work, he did the math last night and it made sense).
Karl shrugs and Dean forgets to blink because he can’t even remember the last time his eyes weren’t dry and sore and swollen. “Nah. Wouldn’t be the same. Folks call the Humane Society on you if you throw a wrench at a puppy.” And then he turns around and cusses at his radio and it makes Dean’s head throb, but it’s also kind of great, so he laughs and then Karl gives him a weird look over his shoulder and smiles, showing all his teeth.
Cassie and him aren’t a one night thing.
They seem to be the opposite of a one night thing, in fact.
Dean is very confused and very surprised when he notices. He isn’t scared though.
Cassie lets him focus.
When she’s around, it’s not so hard to pick a single thought from the rushing flood of ideas and hold on to it until he’s ready for the next. Granted, most of those thoughts involve trying out new things he picked up from the motel’s porn channel, but Dean’s okay with that.
She makes it easier to ignore the feverish heat under his skin and mostly when she’s around he can forget that he feels wired and jumpy even though he hasn’t really slept in days.
He doesn’t tell her about the pills. He thought about it in the beginning, because he figures going to college makes you more likely to buy into the whole idea that depression’s just like asthma or whatever, but in the end he’s just not sure enough to risk it. (They watch One Flew Over the Coo-Coo’s Nest one night and she doesn’t say anything about how the patients had it coming, so that’s good. Maybe they can watch 12 Monkeys and Dean can strike up a conversation about Brad Pitt’s character and if she doesn’t say he should be put out of his fuckin’ misery, then he’ll know.)
He still drinks too much and sleeps too little. It’s easier to ignore the not sleeping when he’s got Cassie’s arms around him with her breath hot against his neck but sooner or later he climbs out of the bed and wanders back to his motel room with the liquor bottles on every available surface where he can at least pretend that he’s up because he wants to be.
He needs to tighten the fan belt in Dad’s truck. Thing’s been screeching all day and it’s embarrassing the shit out of him.
He should probably replace the brake pads while he’s at it.
He needs to work on this poltergeist thing over on Columbia Ave.
If it weren’t for the poltergeist he’d totally be sleeping right now.
Then he laughs and pours himself another drink because even Dean Winchester can’t con himself into believing that pile of shit.
Dean is in a mood when Dad calls.
Jumpy and short for breath and like he’s got insects crawling around under his skin.
Cassie’s doing research for some super important story for her school paper and she threw Dean out of her apartment after she told him to sit still and stop bugging her for the fifth time. He had plans for tonight. Dinner, drinks, a movie, a Beavis and Butthead marathon, a road trip and romantic walk around Dow Lake. Sex up against a tree very much included. Dean had plans and Cassie ruined all of them.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked and Dean pulled his lips into a crazed smile that hurt his face and told her that sleep is for the weak.
He’s itching all over, grinding his teeth as he throws himself into the notes he’s been neglecting. He’s out of ideas for the gremlin-infested forest for now. That’s okay though, because now Dean gets to really look into that haunted Walmart on East State Street and the witch he suspects might have set up quarters in one of the cemeteries. He got all the pages printed at the Xerox store on Cassie’s street days ago and now he finally has a second to himself to work through them.
The papers are covered in his notes, messy scrawls and arrows and words that should be underlined but ended up crossed out instead and Dean’s mind just keeps winding and winding and winding until he’s sure it’s about to break. His wrist is aching from how hard he’s pushing the motel pen against the paper but he needs to get the ideas out, pick them out of the racing stream before they get whisked away and -
Right. Dad’s name is blinking on his phone.
“Heeeyy. Hey, Dad. Hi. How’re you doin’? Killed any good shit lately? How’s my baby? You guys gonna come back soon?”
“Whoa, kiddo, calm down there.”
When they get here, Dean can take Dad to the place with the pies and all the good bars Cassie’s shown him that aren’t on the wrong side of the tracks and they can eat at that steakhouse where they cook the meat so soft, Dean would seriously consider having sex with a T-Bone. And all that stuff he’s bought for the truck, Dad’s gonna go crazy over the new fan belt and the simultaneous window/speaker fix, and then they can use all of the left-over paint he bought on the Impala so she doesn’t feel left out.
Dean starts clicking his nails against the ceramic mug he’s been using ever since he realized it holds more than your average shot glass.
“Hold on there for a minute,” Dad says and Dean knocks back the weird orange juice, whiskey mix Natasha and Sara introduced him to.
And then Dad says something crazy. Something about Wisconsin and meeting up for a job in Minnesota and Dean just stares at the wall for a minute because why would he ever want to do that?
“I…no,” he starts, licks his lips a couple of times and tries to get his tongue back to working. “No, you’re supposed to come visit us. I’m gonna show you the steakhouse.”
Dean licks his lips again and starts mixing himself a new drink. His hand is trembling and he ends up with the ratio all messed up. Three parts whiskey to one part juice. He frowns at his mug for a second before deciding that he really, really doesn’t give a fuck.
“Dean.”
Dad is using that tone. It makes Dean jump and drop his phone on the table.
By the time he’s got the phone back attached to his ear, Dad is rattling off coordinates, possible cases he’s dug up and Dean just has to interrupt, because Dad doesn’t get it. Doesn’t get that Dean has a girl here and that he’s well on his way to turning Athens, Ohio into the first supernatural free major city in the entire country and what’s Dad’s stupid siren in stupid Toledo compared to that?
“Are you drunk, son?”
Huh. Dean glances down at the mug that’s already well on its way to empty again. He’s probably not fit to drive right now, sure, but the most important part is that it’s finally - finally - quiet inside his head and anyway, who’s Dad to tell him he shouldn’t be drinking in the middle of the day?
“Yup.”
Dad seems kind of thrown by the lack of ‘yes, sir’ in their conversation. Dean can hear him breathing on the other end.
“Alright, sleep it off. I got a case here we need to take care of. He’s -“
Dean snaps, “dude, I don’t care,” and then there’s silence on the other end and some part of Dean knows he’s screwed up big time, but mostly he’s just trying to not throw things.
“Did you just call me dude?”
Maybe? Dean fiddles with his mug and knocks that over as well, right onto his notes for the witch case.
“For future reference, I didn’t like that. At all.”
Dean swallows quickly, a slight click in the back of his throat and it only adds to the thick, twisting ball of acid in his guts.
He doesn’t know how it happens. He blinks and suddenly his shoulders are so tense they hurt and he’s angry like he’s never been before.
“Fine,” he growls and throws the phone onto the bed without even disconnecting the call. “Fuck you, anyway.”
And then he’s imagining his gun in his hands and firing round after round into Dad’s chest and yeah, that’s probably not normal. Or any sort of okay.
Fuck.
Karl asks him if he’s alright when Dean comes by to buy wiring for the mini bar he wants to put into the glove compartment.
He’s not, Dean thinks. Really, really not. He glanced into the mirror when he was taking his morning pill and his skin looks grey and pale over the feverish flush.
“Chill, I’m fine,” Dean says and grins as big as he can.
The first time he sees the air moving with a kind of soft, bright glow, he grabs his gun from under his pillow and puts a bullet in the ceiling. Then he remembers he has salt lines everywhere and figures this is just the sort of thing that happens to people who don’t sleep. He heard about this guy who got tortured in Vietnam and he saw all kinds of trippy shit, and not sleeping at all is kind of like sensory deprivation in the exact opposite way.
(The fact that nobody even complains about a gun being fired inside the motel in the middle of the night should probably worry him.)
He gets used to it. Sometimes shadows move and sometimes lights are so bright, they start to sing and sometimes it’s hard to tell if a monster is doing it or not, but as long as he’s not in a crowded street or something, Dean just goes with Dad’s old motto. He shoots at the things first and doesn’t really have to ask questions later, because either he put a bullet through the monster (which is good) or he shot at nothing at all (which isn’t that much of a problem).
Cassie isn't happy when Dean shows up with a bloody nose and bruises all over his back and right shoulder.
She asks him what he did with that super serious edge to her voice, like she's already decided he did something stupid - which he did, started staring at the pretty lights instead of focusing on the 'geist and got thrown right into a marble fireplace but that's not the kind of stupid Cassie's thinking about, so Dean doesn't say it.
They fight and she keeps asking if he’s in any sort of serious trouble and he keeps dodging her questions and it's almost fun, like the magnificent chaos of a rock concert and it doesn't even matter that Dean's never been to a concert before, it's just the way it is.
Dean likes fighting with Cassie. They’re good at fighting.
"You can't just do that," she says when Dean grins and pulls her down on top of him, starts fumbling with the buttons on her shirt and asks her if she'd be scared if he got hurt.
The music is loud enough to drown out the engine’s growling as Dean pushes the needle to the edge of the speedometer, then pushes is just a tiny bit further.
“I’m your average ordinary everyday kid, happy to do nothin’ in fact that’s what I did,” Dean is screaming the lyrics at this point, rather than singing.
His left foot is tapping a mad rhythm, totally off beat and out of synch with his head-banging. It’s a mad, magnetic energy, Dean can see it welling up all around him, warming him from the inside when he breathes it in.
“In at the deep end, hang on tight. It won’t take a minute, it won’t take long. So get on in it, come on, come on, come ooooooon.”
His fist collides with the roof of the car and Dean’s last come on turns into a delighted laugh.
He makes sure he’s actually flooring the pedal and takes the next turn full speed. The truck rattles and howls and fishtails all across the empty road before Dean yanks the steering wheel back.
Someone honks, maybe, or maybe it’s all just part of the song.
The Impala would be faster, drifting around corners instead of threatening to tip over like the cows back in Dean’s junior year in Oklahoma. Dean misses her so much. He’s gonna go back down to the shop and ask Karl for some heavy machinery and turn the truck into a new Impala! Karl’s gonna call him crazy, but he also said Dean couldn’t turn the glove compartment into a semi-functioning mini-bar and that’s coming along just fine. Speaking of which, Dean needs another drink, something to slow down the thick heat that’s pushing through his veins so fast it hurts.
He reaches over and makes sure to avoid the wires that are hanging out of the dash board. The project’s not quite done yet, mostly because Dean can’t decide whether to relocate the entire cooling unit, so for now it’s really not so much a mini-bar and more of a glove compartment full of bottles that also has some dodgy, hazardous wiring going on, but Dean’s got ideas for making the whole thing less perilous eventually.
He’s trying to decide if he can safely mix himself another drink without slowing down, when he turns another corner and has to slam on the brakes so hard the bottles tumble out, into the foot well and Dean maneuvers the truck almost into a tree, trying to not hit the white sedan.
“Fuck…” he hisses, then, louder, as he brings his car back up onto the road. “Motherfucker, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”
A white sedan, doing barely five miles above the limit. Fucking…white. What kind of asshole drives a white car, anyway? The truck’s horn is louder now, ever since Dean replaced it and the white car slows down even more.
Dean’s hissed expletives get drowned out in the music and that…well, that pisses him off even more.
There’s one of those stickers on the sedan’s rear window. Alyssa on board, next to some fuck-ugly stick figure family. Dean sneers because only assholes put that kind of passive-aggressive challenge on their cars.
He honks one last time, loud enough to cut through his music and swerves to speed past the white abomination. He floors the gas-pedal and - fuck , why didn’t he roll down the passenger side window to give the driver the finger as he passes? He should lean over, stay level with the other car ‘till the window’s down and he can maybe shout something too and then suddenly the sedan’s gone and the truck is on two wheels and then there’s a blinding light and Dean is spinning, spinning and spinning and tumbling and falling and then there’s a hard crash and everything stops moving.
He isn’t hurt as badly as he could have been.
Broken arm, a couple of bruises. The ER people mention something about a concussion, but it’s gotta be a laughably light one because except for the blurring around the edges of his vision where he can’t make out much other than light and dark, Dean doesn’t feel like he’s concussed at all.
They tell him he almost drove headfirst into a eighteen wheeler and the lady in the sedan took real nice care of him until the paramedics showed up (Dean thinks he remembers that. Flashes of long blonde hair and soft hands checking his neck and now he feels bad for calling her an asshole. Maybe she adopted the kid and couldn’t do anything about the stupid name.)
He listens to some nurse tell him about the cast and she’s nice too, so Dean works to not laugh in her face. Let a doctor take it off. Right. There are perfectly fine saws in his trunk…wherever they took his car.
“Hey, do y’know where they took my car?”
The nurse gets that funny look about her and backs out of the room.
Then the cops show up because of the DUI and Dean hightails it the fuck out of there after he’s given them a fake name and address.
He doesn’t get the car back. Loses his motel room too, because he had his fake ID’s in the car and now the police think they’re after the Unabomber with a ghost fetish and worst of all, his pills were in the room.
He calls Cassie.
They meet in a small café, filled with college kids and laptops, mismatched couches and mugs that he can fit both his hands around.
He doesn’t know what he expected. Some form of concern, maybe.
She starts out with that at least. “Oh my God, are you okay. What happened?” That kind of thing.
And Dean launches into this story. “I was in this race, you see. Kinda like NASCAR,” and she cuts him right off, tells him to shut up, says he shouldn’t say anything at all, if he can’t be honest with her and anyway, getting this banged up twice in one month? What the hell is he doing, getting beat up on street corners?
And that’s just…that’s just…Dean’s telling the truth and she won’t believe him and he can’t do anything about it and it’s just not fair, the way he’s been planning everything and now it’s all falling apart.
“Fine,” Dean says (yells, probably) and means ‘fuck off’ and Cassie says it right back before she storms out of the café.
Dean just stands there. His eyes hurt real bad and his arm is throbbing and fuck, his skin feels like it’s made of ants and he just wants to peel it off.
They make up that same night, which is good because Dean doesn’t have a place to crash and doesn’t want to cheat on Cassie just to get a bed to spend the night in.
“You’d tell me if you needed help, right?” she asks later when they’re still all tangled up in her pink sheets.
Dean ignores the quick jolt of shame when he thinks about the orange bottle that isn’t in his jacket anymore and kisses her so she shuts up.
Somewhere along the way he forgets that this was supposed to be just another one night stand. They can live together. Cassie will work for some big-time paper. The New York Times, maybe. Dean’s read some off her stuff and it’s definitely good enough to fit right in there. Dean can work as a mechanic. Start his own shop and rebuild classic cars. They’ll live just outside the city where they can still see the skyline but there’s enough countryside around them for a yard and a dog and maybe a kid or two.
They’d have awesome kids, him and Cassie. Little curly-haired babies with caramel skin and maybe the girl will have Mom’s green eyes and people will come up to him in the park and tell him what a beautiful little princess he has and he’ll laugh and buy her ice cream before going back to the swings.
He wonders what they’ll name her.
Mary, he thinks, remembers how much it sucks, having a parent who goes through bouts of not being able to look at you because you remind them of Mary Winchester and decides no, they won't call her that.
Not Mary. Maybe Cassie has some ideas. He’s going to ask her about that.
Uncle Sammy’s going to love her, whatever she'll be called. He’ll spoil her and her brother rotten, bring them fancy big city gifts when he visits with his lawyer girlfriend.
Maybe Dad will come by some days. He can retire too and work in Dean’s shop and in the evening they can throw a baseball around with his little boy.
Dean mentions them to Cassie one night, but she doesn’t really get it, just rolls over and mumbles something into her pillow without even opening her eyes. Leaves Dean with nothing to do but wonder how old a kid should be before they'll have fun visiting the Grand Canyon and stare at the back of Cassie's head.
Watching Cassie sleep makes him sick with envy. He watches her from his side of the bed with his stinging, dry eyes and curls his hands into fists so he doesn’t rip his skin off his face.
Dad calls again.
Dean isn’t feeling too hot. He’s been off the pills for half a week now, and it’s like riding a wave. For now, he’s still up and running, dancing around in circles on top, even more than before, really, but he can feel the pit opening up below him and sometimes, when he’s thinking clearly, he knows he’s in for a bad crash.
He snaps at Dad as soon as he mentions a new town with a new case. Dean’s not meeting up with him unless they go out to the steakhouse first. (He left his credit cards in the motel. Some part of him knows that he can’t keep spending money like that, not with fake checks and pool money, but he’s gotten real good at beating that stupid, annoying part of his brain into submission.)
“Dean.” Dean’s name. That’s all Dad ever has to say for warning. “Really, kid, are you on something?”
Dean swears he feels that pit open up in his stomach.
“Nah. Uh…coffee. Been drinkin’ a lot of coffee, you know, ‘cuz Cassie’s really into Starbucks and they have cake there, so we go a lot, but really, ‘s just coffee.”
He can tell from the silence that Dad doesn’t believe him.
Dad’s always been super clear about his feelings on Dean and Sam and drugs. Don’t do them and for fuck’s sake, don’t let me see it when you do. Sam got all huffy and indignant, Dean just got better at hiding his pot.
And if I ever catch you with a needle you’ll wish I hadn’t.
Prozac’s probably a whole ‘nother category.
Cassie wants to talk to him. She’s been doing that a lot, especially now, that Dean moved in (not officially. It’s not like he’s told her about the motel and the car and the police. Thank fucking God, they’re not concerned enough to be showing his picture on TV).
She wants to talk about why he’s not sleeping, why he keeps scratching his arms until he’s bleeding, why, why, why.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
(She calls him Baby all the time, not even flirting or during sex or anything and that makes Dean’s skin itch with weird all over.)
“Nothing.”
His hand is on her hip, pulling her closer until they’re pressed against each other. She swats at him and pushes him back with that what’s wrong with you? expression that she gets just before they’re about to start fighting.
“Dean, I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“U-huh.” Dean leans in, kisses her softly and hopes he can make her forget about ever being scared for him in the first place. “Why’re we talkin’ when there’s so much other stuff you can do with your mouth?”
She’s still sort of stiff in his arms, tense where he's tracing his short nails along her lower back, but slowly she melts into the kiss, like she’s not going to bring it up again tonight, and the panicky twisting feeling in Dean’s stomach calms back down.
“So, has the ship sailed on blowjobs tonight?”
Something’s not right with him.
The better he feels about himself, the more the pit in his stomach grows until he’s stretched thin over a threatening, gaping black hole.
This time, when they talk, Cassie didn’t even ask about anything. They’re curled up on her sofa, watching Letterman interview Hilary Clinton and Dean is bored out of his mind, he threw the last peanut flip at the TV two minutes ago and now he can’t even legitimately get up and eat it, five second rule and all that. And it makes him ache.
“Hey,” he croaks, has to say it again, louder so she can actually hear him.
“Hey, are you okay?” She turns down the volume, sits up so quickly, her blanket slides off and pools in her lap.
For no reason at all, Dean’s throat grows tight and he doesn’t quite remember how to breathe.
“What is it?”
He almost tells her. About the pills and the crazy mood swings and how he’s so fucked in the head he should be locked away.
Instead he tells her something else.
It feels like the right thing to do, all of a sudden. He tells her about Dad and the job and how Dean’s been saving lives since he was four years old. She thinks he’s joking at first, but then he tells her again, tells her everything and in that moment he knows it’s gonna work out.
Ten minutes later she’s crying and yelling and telling him to never call again and Dean just stands there, quietly watching as his house and dog and kids all burn to the ground.
He takes the bus to Wisconsin, calls Dad from a payphone and begs him to take him back.
This, he thinks. This is why he doesn’t tell people things.
| Hypomania|