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It's arriving in a wave of violence, it's arriving with a loving embrace
Everything is fine. Everything should be fine, so everything is fine. That's what he's been telling himself. But it gets a little harder on the nights he wakes up tasting wet copper. Gets even harder when he understands that they aren't bad dreams.
This has always been about letting a dark part of himself out to play, going somewhere he really can't, not with anyone else, not with anyone willing. In that much, he supposes, there's always been an element of tension relieved, of release in the most primal sense. But now he's finding a new level of reassurance in the steady, even blows that pound a deep flush into Dean's upper back, the rhythm of the crop, the way it soothes. They're close to blood, though he hasn't gone anywhere near as hard as that first night and doesn't plan to, and tonight he thinks it might soothe him even more if he saw some.
In fact, yes.
He lays the crop down and picks up the knife, fingering the blade. It looks like a tongue of flame in the dim light, and for just a moment he's back there, deep in it, the pure dark and ash and the bloody fire and the simplicity of killing, and he's dragged face to face with how appealing it all is.
God, you are so fucked up.
Well. Yeah.
This has always been about letting a dark part of himself out to play, going somewhere he really can't, not with anyone else, not with anyone willing. In that much, he supposes, there's always been an element of tension relieved, of release in the most primal sense. But now he's finding a new level of reassurance in the steady, even blows that pound a deep flush into Dean's upper back, the rhythm of the crop, the way it soothes. They're close to blood, though he hasn't gone anywhere near as hard as that first night and doesn't plan to, and tonight he thinks it might soothe him even more if he saw some.
In fact, yes.
He lays the crop down and picks up the knife, fingering the blade. It looks like a tongue of flame in the dim light, and for just a moment he's back there, deep in it, the pure dark and ash and the bloody fire and the simplicity of killing, and he's dragged face to face with how appealing it all is.
God, you are so fucked up.
Well. Yeah.
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it doesn't. i'm not letting it, not beyond the occasional crack and smack, each one forcing another adorable gasp from dean's lungs.
it's not enough for him.
he ran here ready to claw off his own skin, and if the crop won't do that for him, maybe that knife will.
"Yeah." Dean twists in his restraints, and maybe he should be afraid of that look in Mike's eyes, but mostly he's hungry. The crop's not doing it and he's hungry. "Make me feel something, please."
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You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that this is for you.
Shouldn't it be? Should he know? Hasn't he already settled this?
He presses down with the blade, just enough, slices, and blood trickles down the line of Dean's throat. Visible mark, okay, sure. So fucking what. He doesn't get the sense that either of them cares a whole lot about that anymore.
And he's running up against his own limits. Unless he adjusts them.
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and mike just might. i started something at that party, restarted something. found a tall, steep slope and pushed and now he's sliding, sliding.
he could kill you.
he wants to kill you.
i push the thought to the forefront of dean's mind.
"Thought we said no marks," he says, not moving but to breathe, but Mike is right. Dean doesn't care.
"What other rules you gonna break?"
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Usually it's joyful, albeit the darkest kind of joy. Now he's just... frustrated.
Because he's not getting what he wants either.
Point of the knife under Dean's chin now, and he can easily see it pushing up, through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and into his sinuses, flooding everything with blood until it pierces his brain. "You wanna stop, you just say the word."
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"What if I never said it? Would you just keep cutting?"
Dean grins, wet and wide, and doesn't understand the words even as he says them, watching as if from somewhere far away. "I know what you did in the forest."
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Those alarm bells again, screeching, but this time for different reasons. Because that's a problematic question. Because the answer should be very easy, they have hard limits and he's promised to stick to them, wants to stick to them, because this is a man he knows, has come to care for - more than he ever expected, maybe - and yet.
Would you just keep cutting?
He moves the blade up, settles its edge against Dean's cheek - the tip of it just under his left eye. Close enough to touch with the barest minimum of effort. This is so bad, this is everything he never wanted to go back to, because that was part of the deal, but here he is, asking questions. "The fuck're you talking about?"
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need you front and center for this, dean-o.
"All those sweet little woodland creatures," i say, and dean squirms hard, doesn't remember. i can feel the fear bloom down his spine like a cold winter storm. "Left in pieces. Would you eat me, too?"
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But the blood in his mouth. Not all of it his. And more flashes, some complete pictures, the dark, the ash, the conviction that any meal could be the last for days so when something came at you out of the dark and you killed it, well, you might as well not let it go to waste.
And Neil had said. And Neil has no reason to lie.
He should get away. Now. This is all wrong, has been all wrong from the beginning, and even if he's never afraid anymore maybe he should be now. He smiles faintly, and it's awful, and otherwise he doesn't move. Tilts his head, curious, as the cold black part of him disentangles itself from the whole and speaks. "I dunno. Do you want me to?"
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he's frightened, and from the depths i hear a thought too delicious not to give voice to, unstop his throat and let him speak.
"But if you had to," Dean says, panting, not sure how he'd ever caught his breath before this moment, "If it needed doing, you'd do it." He'd said he was fucked, but he was wrong, he was so wrong. This is more than fucked, this is more than depraved. "You'd kill me."
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Yes, he would.
And that's what makes him lower the knife and pull in a breath as all the jagged fragments of himself that have been rattling around loose since the night he can't remember pull back into a single cease-fire whole. What he wants to do more than anything else is apologize. For letting it get this far. Everything else can be dealt with later.
He takes a step back. "I'm stopping this. We're done."
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Dean's eyes are wide, and for a short, perfect moment, he feels entirely in control, but he can't believe that it will last. It never does, these days, and he'd thought that this would help but it isn't. Nothing's helping.
"Stop if you want, but don't undo the chains."
precious. as if they could stop me.
actually, i have a special request...
"Please just keep cutting me. I'll shut up."
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Christ, where does he even start. And what the fuck does it mean that this feels harder than the cutting would have been.
"You promised me. You said you'd tell me as soon as this stopped helping." Not accusatory, not angry. Quiet. He's found the center again. He steps close, reaches up to touch the thin cut he's made. "And it isn't helping you, Dean. Not anymore. You gotta know that."
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oh dean. you've lost all your comforts. no dog, no hope of happiness with the angel. none of your blessed pain. it's all my fault, and soon, everyone will know it. until then...
let's crawl.
"Nothing else does, you're the only one who'll do it." Dean hears the pleading in his voice and doesn't care. "You know that."
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And he's potentially losing his favorite toy. Forever. Can't pretend that doesn't hurt at least a little.
But he shakes his head again, reaches slowly up and frames Dean's face with his hands. "Not like this. Did you even hear yourself just now? The shit you were saying?"
What you almost made me do?
"Not like this."
He reaches up for the cuffs.
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Head tipped back, Dean watches Mike's hands, and the words slipping out of him feel like a warning and a promise. He can't. Can't hold on, can't hold this in, and though the yawning dark feels easier than anything that came before it, Dean digs in his heels.
Mike undoes the clasp, and Dean curls his fingers, determined to hang onto the chain. "Don't. You need to leave me here."
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He doesn't move back, but he also makes no move to undo the other cuff. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
Apparently he's not done with questions yet.
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he hardly puts up a fight at all, now. so sick and so tired.
there we go. enjoy your sleep.
i calm dean's breaths, roll his head forward
and cast mike to the furthest wall with a thought, body landing spreadeagled and hard enough to thunk.
"I believe he was talking about me."
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The truth is that this is also not surprising. Not really. So much strangeness, so much wrongness, and Dean's eyes black and slick as oil in the darkness.
You've got something in your eye. It looks like murder.
So he hits the wall hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs, letting out a grunt of pain as soon as there's pain to feel, dropping to one knee. And absurdly, when he lifts his head, he's smiling. Because at least now there's no more confusion. Everything out in the open.
"What the fuck are you? 'Cause you're not Dean." The smile turns into a grin, flash of teeth, tight and grim. "I mean. Obviously."
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"Of course I am. Or perhaps...you don't know where the demons of my world come from."
smiling, i yank the chain free of the wall, letting it trail behind me as i approach him. "Did you imagine we're born in a vat of little black ooze? Fashioned from the soil? Or are we made?"
my eyes flood black and cold. "What's left when a soul is left in hell to fester, stripped and flayed and tortured until all its humanity is burned away?"
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And God, Dean.
But. Demons. Of course. And when the blackness washes the green out of Dean's eyes, eats up the whites, what he feels is profound recognition, and it's not just the party. No. It's the face he stared into in the ash, in the internal Hell that Babydoll took him into, and it's not the same, he knows that, but maybe it's a distant cousin. Alike enough for him to know. Part of him so tormented and ravaged and ruined that all it wants is to make everything around him bleed.
So again, he's almost smiling. Whatever happens now, he's not going to crawl in front of this thing.
"He didn't invite you in, did he?" The knife is on the bed, and Dean - the demon - is now between him and it. And would he, anyway? If it needed doing, you'd do it.
Yes.
"So, what, there a point to this? Or are you just gonna wax all rhapsodic about your origin issue?"
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i shape the words with relish, watch the corner of mike's mouth.
"Could you blame me?" i ask. "A demon's formative years are among his most delightful."
the bed isn't soft, but i cast myself onto it in an easy sprawl, hand casually possessive over the hilt of the knife. "You're well into yours."
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Best case scenario, he lives and somehow he gets this thing to let Dean go. And he's enough of a realist to know how utterly miniscule the chances of that are.
"You're saying that like it should bug me." He sighs, tilts his head to one side, allows himself to affect mild boredom. "Look, what the fuck do you want?"
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pick up the knife, twist it in the dim light. he loves doing that.
"Ever considered just." i shrug. "Doing that on the regular?"
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But then he's watching the knife move. Because suddenly everything that's happened is beginning to take on elements of worrying coherence.
"I used to." His gaze flicks back to Dean's face again, and those eyes that aren't Dean's at all. "Wasn't great for my social life."