forthedog | 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.

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"I can't."

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."

The reflex is to be reassuring, carefully so, like Dean is a wounded, panicked animal - because that's what he feels like now, more than anything. But then he remembers. Annie. And more than Annie; the unease that's been chewing at his edges for weeks now, long before the party, the way every time they've stepped into this room together has felt like a slow slide out of control, and all that shit at the party that he can't remember but also somehow can't disentangle from the image of Dean's eyes in the firelight.

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.

Dean twists his fingers in the chain, and between one breath and the next, his head fills with fire, black and roiling and rising like a wave that bears him downward. He can't hold on, and after a moment more, he doesn't try.

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."

Well.

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."

i flex dean's finger - oh hell, isn't it fair now to say it's mine? - my finger, and back to the wall mike goes, sore flesh pinned like a bug.

"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?"

He's bruised, he can feel it, and he grunts again when he's shoved back against the wall, watching as the chains come free... And no, he's still not frightened. Concerned might be more accurate. Very, very aware that he might be about to die. Which isn't really so awful in itself, but... Neil. The girls.

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?"

wax all rhapsodic.

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."

Okay, so apparently talking is happening now. Which means dying isn't, at least not immediately. This, he can work with. And he'd struggle, or at least try to make a show of struggling, but he's not sure there's a point. He's not going anywhere. Not yet.

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?"

"To talk," i say, borrowing some of dean's old brightness. poor bastard probably hasn't sounded like this since he was fifteen. "Haven't had a real, face to face conversation in ages, and no, our chat by the bonfire doesn't count, you were tripping balls. But I did enjoy what you were selling."

pick up the knife, twist it in the dim light. he loves doing that.

"Ever considered just." i shrug. "Doing that on the regular?"

"It was you." He almost laughs again, simply because it makes so much fucking sense. Not just that it happened but the way it happened, so much darkness rushing in so quickly. Maybe it had been regular acid or maybe somehow a demonic concoction, but either way he suspects intent has something to do with things in a place like this.

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."

It's arriving in a wave of violence, it's arriving with a loving embrace

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